Exploring Interactive Writing as an Effective Practice for Increasing Head Start Students’ Alphabet Knowledge Skills

The current study used a pretest–posttest randomized control group design with 73 Head Start students, ages 3–5 years. The researcher served as the interactive writing teacher for the treatment group, rotating to five different classrooms in one Head Start center 3–4 days a week for 13 weeks. Children in the treatment group received a 10–15 min interactive writing lesson each day in small groups within their own classroom settings. Children in the control group received standard literacy instruction in small groups with their own classroom teachers. Child outcome data on upper case, lower case, and letter sound identification were collected before and after the intervention for both groups. Based on the large frequency of zeros on outcomes, zero-inflated Poisson regression analyses were performed. The results of the study showed that children receiving interactive writing identified more lower case and upper case letters at the end of the study relative to children in the control, but no differences were observed on letter sounds. While continued evaluation of the interactive writing strategy is needed in the preschool setting, the evidence from the current study shows encouraging trends in alphabet knowledge skill development as a result of this strategy.     

Measures used in assessing outcomes of school‐wide positive behaviour support

School‐Wide Positive Behaviour Support (SWPBS) is increasingly becoming a popular approach to managing challenging behaviour in schools. However, several issues still have to be addressed facilitate successful implementation of this approach in schools. One of these issues pertains to the appropriateness of the different measures used to determine the efficacy of the approach. Because many schools are using indirect measures to assess the effects of SWPBS implementation, determining which measures more accurately reflect the effectiveness of the SWPBS components may increase the effectiveness of school measurement systems. The purpose of this study was to examine the measures used in evaluating the efficacy of positive behaviour support. The paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of outcome measures regarding problem behaviour, prosocial behaviour, and implementation fidelity.     

Contrasting the Effectiveness of Fluency Interventions for Students with or At Risk for Learning Disabilities: A Multilevel Random Coefficient Modeling Meta‐Analysis

This study had two purposes. First, we sought to compare the overall effectiveness of different types of fluency interventions for students with learning disabilities (LD). Second, we attempted to identify how individual‐ and class‐level characteristics moderated each intervention's effectiveness. We used multilevel random coefficient modeling to analyze results from 30 single‐subject studies involving 107 students with or at risk for LD. Doing so allowed us to assess the intervention's impact in terms of both intercept‐ (i.e., mean difference between study phases) and slope‐level (i.e., rate of growth) changes. Results indicated that two motivation‐focused interventions were significantly more effective than other types of interventions across gender, age, and placement. The least effective intervention was word recognition training; this finding was consistent across all levels of analyzed variables.     

A Comparative Demographic Study of Student Teachers from the North and South of Ireland

90.4% of the 1977 entrants to concurrent general Teacher Education courses in Ireland North and South responded to a demographic questionnaire. The results are analysed and the two regions contrasted with respect to personal, professional and geographical variables. These indicate that some interesting differences exist but that there are many overall similarities.     

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: ETV IN AN AUSTRALIAN COLLEGE

This paper is a case‐study of the development of educational television in a college of advanced education in Australia. It describes the key decisions in that development, and explores the significant variables which affected them, including both pragmatic factors, such as the availability of equipment and finance, and the skills and preferences of the people involved, and theoretical factors, such as the way in which certain attributes of the media interact with the individual differences of learners to effect particular types of learning

Implicit in the discussion is a number of philosophical questions, to do with the relationship between science and technology, with the notion of science and research, and with the nature and power of the human mind