Meeting the needs of children with specific speech and language difficulties

Clinical and diagnostic approaches to special educational needs do not translate easily into educational models. In some cases, these approaches can serve to limit understanding of children's wider needs. Children with specific speech and language difficulties (SSLD) are a case in point. Clear criteria exist for identification, but identification mechanisms may not relate to the child's wider educational needs. This paper addresses the ways that children with SSLD present in mainstream educational settings. The study aimed to identify all Year 3 children with SSLD in two English local education authorities. One hundred and thirty-three children (95 boys and 37 girls were identified). Sixty-five per cent of the children were in mainstream schools, 14.3 per cent in mainstream schools with designated units and the remainder in special schools. Half were at stage 5 of the Code of Practice, with most of the remaining participants at stage 3. Children experienced a wide range of difficulties, in addition to their primary speech and language problems. Patterns of difficulties varied across children, and associations existed between particular forms of language problems and learning and relationship problems. Professionals (teachers, educational psychologists and speech and language therapists) varied in their understanding of the children's needs. The data highlight the range and diversity of the needs of children with specific speech and language difficulties and the need for a multi-professional approach to these children. It is argued that ‘best practice’ for these children must consider the impact of speech and language problems on children's access to the curriculum and their social and behavioural needs. Narrow diagnostic models do not provide the appropriate information to inform educational practice and support inclusive policies.     

Saving the Bathwater

This article presents an account of the development and use of the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS) over the past 15 years. It deals with both the formal and informal ways in which administering the NBAS has increased our understanding of the forces for development in the newborn, of states of consciousness in the infant, of the potential for predicting from one point in development to the next, and of a clinician's opportunities to share information with parents and to participate in the enterprise of parenting. It draws attention to the value of the qualitative insights that are gained by investigators, alongside the more quantitative fruits of a research endeavor.     

Do more hours in center-based care cause more externalizing problems? A cross-national replication study

Whether high quantities of center-based care cause behavior problems is a controversial question. Studies using covariate adjustment for selection factors have detected relations between center care and behavior problems, but studies with stronger internal validity less often find such evidence. We examined whether within-child changes in hours in center-based care predicted changes in externalizing problems in toddlers and preschoolers (N = 10,105; 49% female; data collection 1993–2012) in seven studies, including from Germany, Netherlands, Norway, two from Canada and two from the U.S. Race/ethnicity data were only collected in the United States (57% and 80% White; 42% and 13% African-American; 1.2% and 5% Latinx). Meta-analyses showed no association (r = .00, p = .88) between hours in center-based care and externalizing problems.     

Book reviews

There are signs that teams are becoming more popular in ethnographic research. New technology and, in the UK, the Research Assessment Exercise have facilitated the establishment and continuance of teams. In this paper, the authors discuss their experiences in one particular research team in recent years. Securing adequate funding has been the essential structural prerequisite. The authors distinguish among project, federated, and whole teams, depending on function and level of analysis. They consider team structure, approach, business, and processes, and the relationship between individual and team. Teamwork has enabled a wider and deeper coverage of work, a broader comparative base, and multiple researcher triangulation. The team provides a forum for the discussion of ethical issues, an immediate supportive reference group. It has opened up horizons, and promoted individual change and development. It has aided analysis and writing, and promoted clearer and more robust arguments. The article concludes with some caveats.     

Don’t we care?: the ethics and emotional labour of early years professionalism

This paper argues that early childhood education and care (ECEC) has a legitimate aspiration to be a ‘caring profession’ like others such as nursing or social work, defined by a moral purpose. For example, practitioners often draw on an ethic of care as evidence of their professionalism. However, the discourse of professionalism in England completely excludes the ethical vocabulary of care. Nevertheless, it necessarily depends on gendered dispositions towards emotional labour, often promoted by training programmes as ‘professional’ demeanours. Taking control of the professionalisation agenda therefore requires practitioners to demonstrate a critical understanding of their practice as ‘emotion work’. At the same time, reconceptualising practice within a political ethic of care may allow the workforce, and new trainees in particular, to champion ‘caring’ as a sustainable element of professional work, expressed not only in maternal, dyadic key‐working but in advocacy for care as a social principle.     

Do increased resources increase educational attainment during a period of rising expenditure? Evidence from English secondary schools using a dynamic panel analysis

This article estimates the effects of school expenditure on school performance at Key Stage 4 in England, over the period 2003–07 during which real per pupil expenditure increased rapidly. It adds to previous investigations by using dynamic panel analysis to: exploit time series data on individual schools that only recently has become available; adjust for the potential endogeneity not only of expenditure but also of other determinants of performance; and differentiate the short‐run and the (higher) long‐run attainment effects of spending changes. Consistent with other recent work, the article reports a generally significant but small effect of expenditure on school performance, but it also finds that the effect varies between specialist and non‐specialist schools, with the effect on the latter being larger. Further, the article identifies significant dynamics in the school improvement process, quantifies the long‐run effect of expenditure changes, suggests that spending effects increase with socio‐economic disadvantage, and quantifies absence effects.     

Attentional bias for exercise-related images

This research examined attentional bias toward exercise-related images using a visual probe task. It was hypothesized that more-active participants would display attentional bias toward the exercise-related images. The results showed that men displayed attentional bias for the exercise images. There was a significant interaction of activity level by gender, and simple slopes analysis showed that active women displayed attentional bias toward the exercise-related images and inactive women displayed attentional bias toward the control images. A similar analysis with explicit attention to the pictures as the outcome variable was not significant. These findings confirm that attention for exercise-related images can be captured automatically regardless of whether people report they are attending to them.