Examining Different Forms of Implementation and in Early Childhood Curriculum Research

The purpose of this study was to examine different approaches to assessing implementation in an early childhood curriculum research study. Early childhood teachers in 51 preschool classes located at nationally dispersed sites implemented the Children's School Success curriculum for a school year. Structural (proportion of curriculum delivered) and process (quality of delivery of curriculum) measures of implementation were collected for the literacy, math, and social components of the curriculum. Also, a multiplicative composite score incorporating information from the structural and process measures was calculated. Site differences occurred for the process measure, but not the structural and composite measures. Analysis of the process implementation measures collected across time revealed primarily stable trends across sites. Significant associations were found between measures of implementation and some of the child outcome variables, with the different forms of implementation associated with different outcome variables.     

Doubling Down: President Barack Obama’s Doubled Persona after the Zimmerman Verdict

This article analyzes President Barack Obama’s remarks following the acquittal of George Zimmerman on the charge of murdering Trayvon Martin. Speaking directly to, for, or about African Americans would lead some to accuse him of speaking primarily as a black man, while ignoring the idea of race would lead some to accuse him of failing to acknowledge its omnipresence in American life. To manage these constraints, the president employed what we have termed a doubled persona; that is, he enacted two different speaking personae and envisioned a distinct audience persona for each speaking persona: He spoke both as a black president and as a president who is black.     

Internet Resources for Middle School Science: Golden Opportunity or “Silicon Snake Oil”?

This study examines the experiences of six teachers at three schools in learning about and beginning to implement or enhance project-based learning in their middle school science classrooms using a variety of resources available through the Internet. Data were gathered over a one-year period ending in March, 1996. As a result of their experience, teachers became aware of the possibilities and the problems created by both the nearly unlimited quantity of information available on the Internet and the limited quality and relevance of much of that information. Positive and negative experiences described by teachers and the variety of issues and concerns which they reflect are compared and contrasted, including: unreliability of network connections; potential availability to students of inappropriate resources; consistency of classroom organization structures necessary to facilitate Internet access with normally preferred teaching methods; the dependence of the efficiency and motivational value of project-based units on students' appreciation of the nature and power of the technology; conflict between curriculum space devoted to teaching about technology and that devoted to substantively using the technology to teach about science and related subjects; the on call convenience of the Internet; the up-to-date nature of much of the scientific information available on the Internet; Internet-based information (versus textbook information) as authoritative yet not impersonal.     

“Social Work Is a Profession,Not an Ideology”: A Qualitative Analysis of Student Perceptions of Social Justice Discussions in the Classroom

The purpose of this article is to describe student perceptions of their experiences around social justice discussions in the social work classroom through a qualitative, grounded theory framework. Student responses from a qualitative section of a survey were analyzed and sorted into three categories: perceived discrimination, heightened self-awareness/self-assessment, and future social work practice. Each of these categories was derived from comparable multiple themes stemming from the student responses. A conceptual model resulting from the analysis suggests that students who shared experiences of perceived discrimination during classroom discussions could develop an enhanced self-awareness, which would result in an added empathy for clients in their future social work practice. Suggestions for teaching strategies and directions for future research are also discussed.     

Computer microworlds and reading: An analysis for their systematic application

Learning can be seen as a consequence of problem solving in particular cases. It occurs when one achieves a solution which is able to be used later. Anchoring with variation is a common and important process, providing a framework through which one can discuss coping with something imperfectly understood in terms of what is already well known. Our purpose in the following discussion is to explore some possible implications of this process for reading education as a worked example of how educational technology presents us with an opportunity for reconceptualizing instruction.English has the phonological potential for more than 60 thousand monosyllables. Our analysis asks how many monosyllabic words exist in fact and what organization can be imposed on them to make the phonological code more accessible. We've chosen to represent these monosyllables as an initial phonemic cluster plus residue. The most common 550 residues cover 73 percent of the existing 7000 monosyllables. If children can learn 550 different correspondences between sounds and spelling patterns, their knowledge of these words, coupled with the ability to modify interpretations of letter strings by anchoring with variation, will cover a major portion of the phonetic-orthographic correspondences of the English language. We believe this extensive, concrete foundation of word and sound knowledge will permit children to read well enough that instruction will become primarily a refining and perfection of such knowledge.The primary design conclusion is that, if we create computer-based microworlds using words with the most common residues as the names for their entities and their actions, we will be providing a set of systematically generated monosyllabic anchors which promises to be highly effective for children's interpretation of many words they will encounter in reading English. The potential revolutionary impact of such a prereading curriculum is worth exploring.     

Multiple-transfer students in a public urban university: Background characteristics and interinstitutional movements

Little research has been conducted on multiple-transfer students, those students who transfer more than once during their collegiate careers. In this study, background characteristics and previous interinstitutional movements of a sample of multiple transfers enrolled at a large, urban, public university were examined. These students moved along four different transfer paths before enrolling at the university, where they comprised one-fifth of new undergraduate enrollments. Their paths differed significantly on a number of demographic, institutional, and interaction variables. Overall, these students were academic achievers with high socioeconomic status backgrounds, who focused on academic quality and programs in choosing four-year colleges. Their tendency to transfer among large, inexpensive, public institutions has negative implications for the private sector of higher education.     

Time to Listen

This article is a reflection on two aspects of the exhibition development process that are important but elusive. One is a habit of listening, and the other is the importance of allowing time for listening—to advisers, visitors, and other members of the exhibition team. The team that developed the touring exhibition Invention at Play used visitor research throughout the process of exhibition development to explore the links between the work of inventors and familiar human activities such as exploration, imagination, and play. The exhibition won an award of excellence at the AAM convention in Portland, Oregon in 2003. It was used as a case study on integrating accessibility into exhibition planning and design at an international conference, ADA Coordinators and Accessibility Managers in the Cultural Arts, sponsored by the Kennedy Center in 2002.