Building strong foundations for educational achievement: Language assessments in early childhood education for deaf and hard of hearing children

It is widely accepted that assessment plays a role in monitoring the development of young children with special needs in early intervention/early childhood settings. The process of assessing young children's language skills often looks for delays within a solid language foundation. However, many children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) may not have a solid language foundation to assess, leading to inaccurate assessment. When we reframe how we assess language skills in children who are DHH, we ensure the assessment provides a comprehensive picture of the child's language development. It is important to modify language assessment tools where necessary while ensuring the assessment stays reliable and valid. It is critical to use multiple assessment tools to monitor the child's progress, including standardized assessments and assessment tools normed for DHH populations. Finally, it is crucial to monitor the child's skills in each language that they are using, regardless of which language is used most often. We explain why each of these factors needs to be considered in the assessment of young children who are DHH, will discuss the challenges of assessing this population, and will provide solutions to some of the challenges of assessing language skills in of young children who are DHH.     

Multiple perceptions of children's aggression: Differences across neighborhood,age, gender,and perceiver

We investigated how overtly aggressive behavior was differentially perceived by two types of perceivers, teachers and peers, as a function of student neighborhood, gender, and grade level. Participants (N= 765) were predominantly African American students in grades 3‐5 recruited from two urban public schools in southern California. The neighborhoods surrounding the two schools differed in levels of identified violent crime and economic levels. Teachers in the community experiencing more violence perceived student behavior to be relatively less aggressive and more similar across genders than did teachers in the less violent community. Peers in the community experiencing more violent crime perceived both boys and girls to be somewhat aggressive, whereas in the less violent community, boys were perceived as aggressive more so than were girls. In general, agreement between teacher and peer perceptions was stronger for boys than for girls. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Lost and Found: Personal Reflections on Educational Earnestness and the Power of Love

In this essay, Polly Graham addresses a current instantiation of what might be called self‐loss within education in the United States. Graham observes that, in her experience, many students and educators, whether decidedly or without reflection, conform to superficial schooling practices that circumscribe the possibility of receiving affirmations for the sense of self we implicitly know to be authentic. Through narrative, she puts forward the possibility of “educational love” as a counter to the fundamental insecurity associated with habits of acting in conformance with superficial, alienated, school‐determined identity criteria. The question of “repetition” in a Kierkegaardian sense invites the reader to resist the logic of standardization — which assumes and valorizes comparability and reliability from an outsider perspective — in favor of a consideration of generalizability as embedded within the intimacy of a particular relation. As such, educational love is resonance rather than dictation.     

Handwriting instruction: a commentary on five studies

Handwriting is still a prominent mode for composing for both children and adults As a result, it is important that developing writers acquire fluent and legible handwriting. This article examines the five investigations that were presented in this special issue on handwriting instruction, providing a summary of their collective contributions as well as the limitations of each paper.     

Sports vision training: A review of the state-of-the-art in digital training techniques

Athletes need excellent vision to perform well in their sports, and many athletes have turned to vision training programs as a way to augment their traditional training regimen. The growing practice of ‘sports vision training’ relies on the notion that practice with demanding visual perceptual, cognitive, or oculomotor tasks can improve the ability to process and respond to what is seen, thereby improving sport performance. This enterprise is not necessarily new, but has been advanced greatly in the past few years by new digital technology that can be deployed during natural training activities, by perceptual-learning-inspired training programs, and by virtual reality simulations that can recreate and augment sporting contexts to promote certain sports-specific visual and cognitive abilities. These improved abilities may, in turn, instill a competitive advantage on the playing field, underscoring the potential value of these approaches. This article reviews emerging approaches, technologies and trends in sports vision training. Where available, critical review of supporting research is provided.     

The weight of expectation: Cathy Freeman,Legacy, Reconciliation and the Sydney Olympics – A Canadian Perspective

This paper compares French- and English-language Canadian television coverage of Australian Aboriginal athlete Cathy Freeman during the 2000 Olympics using a narrative framework. The specific focus of the analysis is the representation of Freeman's political identity as an agent and symbol of Aboriginal reconciliation – the struggle for apology, reparatio, and social justice in the light of the history and legacy of colonial oppression and exclusion. Freeman has used her sporting success to signify visibly and with some controversy her identification with political Aboriginality and reconciliation, and she went into the 2000 games bearing an unusual weight of expectation, intensified by being chosen to light the Olympic cauldron, that a victory in the 400 metres would mark symbolically reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. The analysis generally conforms the hypothesis that the normative dimension of these expectations would be accentuated more in the French- than English-language coverage, and this resulted in a more consistently affirmative portrayal of Freeman and her performance. The English-language coverage emphasized the ambivalent nature of her role. The corollary of this was that the English-language coverage paid greater attention to the substance of Aboriginal grievances and struggle. Nonetheless, neither network saw Freeman's identity in openly critical terms: in Freeman's Olympic narrative sport and politics were allowed to mix in a relatively unproblematic way.     

Out in the cold: sliding sports and the Amateur Sports Act of 1978

For decades American athletes in less-popular – or ‘minor’– sports suffered from a lack of institutional and practical support from their sports' governing bodies. The AAU, in particular, failed to provide the funds necessary for athletes in the sliding sports of luge and bobsled to obtain proper training and opportunities to compete. By the early 1970s, the American Olympic effort was in chaos as athletes from the Eastern Bloc, taking advantage of their nations' determination to field the best possible teams, began to excel at both the summer and winter Olympic Games. In response, Congress authorized a presidential commission to study the situation and make recommendations about how best to improve amateur sports in the United States. The result of the commission's work, the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, reorganized governance of amateur sports to the benefit, particularly, of athletes in sports such as luge and bobsled.