The Elusive Search for Teacher Collaboration

Collaboration is a well-used term in the field of education, identified as promising practice for student learning and teaching learning alike. However, collaboration comes in different shapes and sizes, leading to radically different ends. The authors examine teachers’ own understandings and practices of collaboration with teacher colleagues within their school contexts and within a professional development model designed to allow for collaborative conversation between teachers. Implications for teacher education are then considered.     

Danish majority children's reasoning about exclusion based on gender and ethnicity

This study investigated 282 eight- to twelve-year-old Danish majority children's judgments and justifications of exclusion based on gender and ethnicity (i.e., Danish majority children and ethnic-minority children of a Muslim background). Children's judgments and reasoning varied with the perpetrator of the exclusion and the social identity of the target. Children assessed exclusion based on ethnicity as less acceptable than exclusion based on gender and used more moral reasoning for the former than the latter. Children judged it less acceptable for a teacher than a child to exclude a child protagonist. Children were sensitive to status, judging it less acceptable to exclude a less powerful group member. The findings are discussed in relation to intergroup relations in Denmark.     

Diversity Competencies within Early Childhood Teacher Preparation: Innovative Practices and Future Directions

With classrooms becoming increasingly diverse due to children’s various cultural backgrounds and varying abilities, early childhood teacher education programs face the challenge of how best to prepare the workforce. Various initiatives have been implemented in teacher preparation programs to prepare early childhood educators to become competent in relating to all children and families. Infusing components of diversity into all courses and field experiences and engaging in community–university partnerships, as well as unifying early childhood education (ECE) and early childhood special education (ECSE) program components, are promising practices for the field. An examination and evaluation of these initiatives are discussed in this article, as well as future directions for research and practice.     

Mastering course content and learner satisfaction in early childhood education: A comparison of regular classroom instruction with three variations of internet delivery*

Abstract

In the spring semester 2000, a Penn State course, ECE 479 (The Young Child's Play as Educative Process), was taught by the same instructor in four delivery formats. One group consisted of a regular classroom, held on campus. A second group, also on campus, was taught in a computer lab via the Internet; and there were opportunities for interaction with peers and the instructor. A third group took the course on the Internet as part of a local distance education group; hence, there were some limited opportunities for face‐to‐face interaction with peers and the instructor. The fourth group took the course on the Internet, as part of a statewide distance education group, where there were no opportunities for face‐to‐face interaction. Twenty students who enrolled in the course (5 per group) completed questionnaires and phone interviews. Information was gathered on professional backgrounds, computer experience, and initial level of content knowledge on the topic of the ECE Internet course. Sixteen students who completed the course were interviewed again to evaluate satisfaction with the course and to estimate learning outcomes. Across the four conditions general satisfaction was expressed with the content, activities, and course requirements and with the teacher. However, students in the three computer groups expressed dissatisfaction over technical problems (all four who did not complete the course came from these computer groups). Significant gains in content knowledge occurred for the classroom group, while the learning in the three Internet‐based instruction groups did not show the same gains. Concern was expressed related to the lack of face‐to‐face interaction, making the learning environment less desirable. Although Internet technology provides a great deal of promise, these results suggest that improvements are needed to make this delivery modality more effective for in‐service distance learning. © 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

     

Synopsis of ACES Executive Council Meeting Minutes

ACES and Regional Officers in attendance: Stephen Feit, ACES President; Donna Henderson, ACES President‐Elect and ACA Governing Council Representative; Harriet Glosoff, ACES Secretary; David Zimpfer, Treasurer; Kimberly Vess, NCACES President; Judith Durham, NARACES President‐Elect; Victoria Foster, SACES President‐Elect; Patricia Kerstner, WACES President‐Elect     

Using machine learning to classify reviewer comments in research article drafts to enable students to focus on global revision

Reviewer comments in research articles such as journal papers or dissertations guide students during the revision process to improve the quality of their articles. Our goal is to make the comments more meaningful to the students’ revision process. Revision involves implicit cognitive processes and ICT has the potential to make such processes explicit. Previous research into the cognitive processes involved in revision has shown that novices focus on local, sentence level revision while expert writers focus on global revision of ideas or restructuring of arguments. For better quality writing, students should focus more on global revision. The reviewer comments can either trigger more meaningful global revision (content-related comments) or local revision (non content-related comments). In this paper, a machine learning algorithm was applied to classify the comments in academic drafts in our laboratory as either content-related or not. Reviewer comments in academic article drafts are usually short. Therefore, this research applied a Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm for the classification, which is one of the most common machine learning algorithms for short texts. Performance evaluation was based on the measures of accuracy, precision and recall for the non content-related comments. Using cross validation, highest scores of 86%, 89% and 89% were achieved for accuracy, recall, and precision, respectively. The results demonstrate the success of the automatic classification, which can be applied to filter out non content-related comments so that the students focus first on revising the content-related comments. In this way, the students can increase their awareness of the importance of global revision.     

Reported contact with child protection services among those reporting child physical and sexual abuse: results from a community survey

OBJECTIVE: This study uses results from a large community survey to examine the relationship between a history of child maltreatment and self-reports of contact with Child Protection Services (CPS). METHODS: The Ontario Health Supplement was a province-wide, probability-based survey of household dwellings in the province of Ontario, Canada. A random sample of residents aged 15 and older participated in the Ontario Health Supplement (N=9953). A face-to-face interview included a question about contact with Child Protection Services (CPS), and the Child Maltreatment History Self-Report, a self-administered questionnaire, was used to assess history of child physical and sexual abuse. RESULTS: Only a very small percentage of respondents with a history of child abuse reported contact with CPS; 5.1% of those with a history of physical abuse, and 8.7% of those with a history of sexual abuse. Contact with CPS was associated with younger age of respondent for both types of abuse and female gender for physical abuse. In the case of sexual abuse, younger respondents whose parental employment classification was in the lower socioeconomic group were more likely to have contact with CPS. CONCLUSIONS: Interventions that target only those who come in contact with CPS will not reach most persons exposed to child abuse.     

美国的特殊教育与作为学校管理者的教师

学校的管理者是一个特殊的教师群体。要成为优秀的教育管理者,教师必须接受适当的培训以遵守特殊教育领域的法律和法规。教育管理培训方案必须包括特殊管理教育方面的要求。对教育管理者自我效能感的调查结果表明,教育管理者的自我评价与实际能力之间存在差异。研究结果显示,培训方案需要改进以便更严格地培养教师成为教育管理者,最终他们才能做到“不让一个孩子掉队”。     

Does Inattention and Hyperactivity Moderate the Relation Between Speed of Processing and Language Skills?

The causal role of speed of processing (SOP) in developmental language disorder (DLD) is unclear given that SOP has been implicated in other neurodevelopmental disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. This study investigated associations between SOP, language, and inattention/hyperactivity in a U.K. epidemiological cohort (N = 528). Monolingual children from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds were assessed longitudinally; at ages 5–6 (2012/2013) and 7–8 years (2014/2015). Persistent weaknesses in SOP characterized children with DLD but did not predict language longitudinally. Ratings of inattention/hyperactivity moderated the association between SOP and language, indicating that SOP deficits are particularly detrimental for language when coupled with poor attention/hyperactivity. SOP may be a shared risk factor for DLD and inattention/hyperactivity or a general marker of neurodevelopmental disorder.