Cultural sensitivity: How important is it for effective home visits?

The implementation of home visits as a technique for involving parents has recently resurfaced. This educational trend has received additional emphasis as the nation attempts to meet the national education goals — particularly the first goal, which states, By the year 2000, all children will enter school ready to learn.Sally A. LaPoint is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort. She also administers the At Risk Early Childhood Family Initiative, located at the historic Penn Center on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Gloria S. Boutte is an Assistant Professor, Kevin J. Swick is a Professor, and Mac H. Brown is an Associate Professor, Early Childhood Education, at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C.     

Portage Guide to Early Education: a review of research

Abstract Portage Guide to Early Education is a home‐based early intervention service for developmentally delayed preschool children. It consists of the triadic model of service delivery, a set of reading materials and a method of training parents to teach their own children. Each of these components are critically evaluated and recommendation made for the future development of Portage. Outcome studies are reviewed and evidence is found of developmental acceleration for mildly delayed children.

A wider range of dependent variables is needed to assess more fully the impact of Portage on both the child and the family. As yet no data are available on long‐term effects of Portage. The case is made for viewing Portage as one amongst several service options available for developmentally delayed preschool children and their families.     

Textbook treatments and students' understanding of acceleration

A single science textbook often provides the syllabus for courses at upper secondary and tertiary levels, and may be used as a principal source of information or explanation. The research reported in this article challenges such practices. The ways in which the concept, acceleration, is treated in physics textbooks is compared with understandings of the concept demonstrated by final-year secondary (Year 12) and first-year university students. Some students' understandings are shown to be incomplete in ways that parallel misleading or inaccurate textbook treatments of the concept. In addition to misleading or inaccurate statements, the limitations of some textbook treatments of acceleration were found to include: lack of attempts to make explicit relationships with other concepts, failure to point out when it is appropriate to use particular definitions or that an alternative definition might be more appropriate in specific situations, inclusion of operational definitions without conceptual explanations, and a focus on quantitative treatments while overlooking the development of qualitative understanding. Two principal aspects that distinguished the ways in which the students understood acceleration were identified: (a) the relation between acceleration and velocity; and (b) the relation between acceleration and force(s). The results of the study have implications for teaching and, in particular, for the use of textbooks in teaching. These implications are discussed in the article.     

Consulting Parents to Improve a Child Guidance Service

This paper describes a study undertaken with a group of parents whose children had been referred to the Knowsley Child Guidance Service. A qualitative methodology was used to analyse in-depth interviews with parents. The results led to practical recommendations for the improvement of service delivery. These recommendations had implications for schools and other services involved with parents/carers and children. The survey also provided a base from which to develop a questionnaire for the continuing evaluation of good practice within the child guidance service.     

Inaccuracy as a privacy-enhancing tool

The accuracy principle is one of the key standards of informational privacy. It epitomises the obligation for those processing personal data to keep their records accurate and up-to-date, with the aim of protecting individuals from unfair decisions. Currently, however, different practices being put in place in order to enhance the protection of individuals appear to deliberately rely on the use of ‘inaccurate’ personal information. This article explores such practices and tries to assess their potential for privacy protection, giving particular attention to their legal implications and to related ethical issues. Ultimately, it suggests that the use of ‘inaccurate’ data can potentially play a useful role to preserve the informational autonomy of the individual, and that any understandings of privacy or personal data protection that would tend to unduly limit such potential should be critically questioned.     

Female farmers and the social construction of access to agricultural information

This article examines the ways in which the transfer of information about farming practice is gendered, and how the gendering of access to agricultural information affects the social realities of farming women. The research focuses on a sample of Ontario female farmers who were interviewed extensively about their farming practices, including the ways in which they sought and found information to help them further their farming knowledge. It was found that female farmers utilized both formal and informal channels of information, but that these channels were not readily nor easily accessible to female farmers. Attempts to extract needed information resulted in the manifestation of issues regarding social and professional legitimacy. Female farmers must, therefore, devise alternate strategies and networks for information gathering. The study demonstrates that information acquisition in farming is a socially mediated process which reflects the socially constructed gender relations of agriculture itself.     

Reading development in an orthographically regular language: effects of length, frequency, lexicality and global processing ability

The acquisition of reading skill was studied in 503 Italian children in first to eighth grade using a task that required reading of lists of words and non-words. Analysis of the metric characteristics of the measures indicated that reading speed but not accuracy was normally distributed across all ages considered. The role of specific effects (length, word frequency, and lexicality) versus global factors in reading speed was examined using the Rate–Amount Model (RAM). A global processing factor accounted for a large portion of the variance. Specific influences of length, frequency, and lexicality were detected in different periods of development over and above the global processing factor. Length modulated performance at early stages of learning and progressively less later on; in the case of non-words, the effect of length was large but did not change as a function of grade. The lexicality effect, present at all ages for high frequency words and by third grade for low frequency words increased with reading practice indicating a progressive differentiation in the ability to read words and non-words. Finally, the effect of word frequency was highest in third grade and then decreased. These findings are discussed in terms of their relevance for reading acquisition in a language with transparent orthography and their implications for evaluating developmental reading deficits. Overall, it is proposed that RAM is a useful tool for disentangling the role of specific versus global factors in reading development.