Inclusion and Classroom Membership in Early Childhood

Using qualitative methods, this study examined classroom membership in an early childhood setting which included a young boy with multiple disabilities. Participant observation and interview data were gathered over a 6 month period. Themes emerged and were arranged according to three primary categories: (a) Shared and Meaningful Experiences, (b) Quality of Interpersonal Interactions with Peers, and (c) Practices that Contribute to Building Community. Findings revealed that there were deliberate and ongoing efforts to create a strong sense of community within the classroom.     

Experience and Explanation: Using Videogames to Prepare Students for Formal Instruction in Statistics

Well-designed digital games can deliver powerful experiences that are difficult to provide through traditional instruction, while traditional instruction can deliver formal explanations that are not a natural fit for gameplay. Combined, they can accomplish more than either can alone. An experiment tested this claim using the topic of statistics, where people’s everyday experiences often conflict with normative statistical theories and a videogame might provide an alternate set of experiences for students to draw upon. The research used a game called Stats Invaders!, a variant of the classic videogame Space Invaders. In Stats Invaders!, the locations of descending alien invaders follow probability distributions, and players need to infer the shape of the distributions to play well. The experiment tested whether the game developed participants’ intuitions about the structure of random events and thereby prepared them for future learning from a subsequent written passage on probability distributions. Community-college students who played the game and then read the passage learned more than participants who only read the passage.     

A pictorial view of the physical activity socialization of young adolescents outside of school

Childhood obesity prevention has fallen short of anticipated impact. Therefore, intervention programs need to be redirected to other potential settings to increase youth physical activity. This qualitative study, using autodriven interview techniques, was conducted to identify out-of-school settings that youth perceive as important for physical activity. Sixty-six children took photographs involving their physical activity involvement. A subsample completed follow-up focus groups. Salient themes included types of physical activities related to free play, fitness, organized sports, and chores. Most photographs included multiple children of similar age and were taken outdoors. Data suggest children associate chores with physical activity and engage in fitness-related activities. In addition, friends and family, the outdoors, and importantly, the home emerged as natural intervention components that may prove useful towards decreasing the physical inactivity and obesity of youth.     

Parental distress: the initial phase of hearing aid and cochlear implant fitting

The results of previous cross-section studies suggest that childhood hearing impairment may lead to parental psychosocial stress. The present study investigated whether modifications in parental psychic state can be ascertained in connection with the child's treatment events and the child's hearing and speech status, in a prospective study design. Data were available on 116 fathers and mothers regarding the pre-cochlear implant examination or hearing aid fitting of their child. In the course of the child's treatment, parental quality of life improved from a low to a normal level. Among children who were at the stage of pre-examination for a cochlear implant, better hearing and speech capacity was linked to more severe impairment of the parental state. It is emphasized that the parents whose children showed comparatively good language development at the time of pre-examination for a cochlear implant were especially subjected to stress.     

Session Limits and the Probability of the Next Visit

Among the approaches that have been used to balance the demand for services with the agency’s service resources is to limit the number of visits available to clients. Such limits have been introduced, however, without any empirical basis for estimating the impact of a limit on the overall demand for services or the proportion of clients. The probability of a next visit is a statistic that addresses these shortcomings. Analyses indicate that there is a fairly stable pattern to students use of counseling services, that this pattern is affected by the imposition of a limit, and that reducing the probabilities of a next visit for the first, second, and third visits has a greater impact on reducing total service demand than imposing a limit at the 12th visit, the most commonly reported point     

Multi-candidate reduction: Sentence compression as a tool for document summarization tasks

This article examines the application of two single-document sentence compression techniques to the problem of multi-document summarization—a “parse-and-trim” approach and a statistical noisy-channel approach. We introduce the multi-candidate reduction (MCR) framework for multi-document summarization, in which many compressed candidates are generated for each source sentence. These candidates are then selected for inclusion in the final summary based on a combination of static and dynamic features. Evaluations demonstrate that sentence compression is a valuable component of a larger multi-document summarization framework.     

Factors affecting placement decisions of children following short-term emergency care

Case files of 424 residents at an emergency treatment center for abused and neglected children were used to generate a beginning set of variables which, in combination, predicted whether or not children from the center would be discharged to their natural family environment. Variables with descending order of predictive significance were place from which the child was admitted, the length of time spent in treatment, the age and the race of the child, Other variables--the number of siblings, the child's sex and the presence of physical/sexual abuse--did not approach significance.