Creating Inclusive,Literacy-Embedded Play Centers in a Children's Museum: Connecting Theory to Practice

Preservice teachers enrolled in an early literacy or developmental preschool course collaborated in order to create inclusive, literacy-embedded play centers at a local children's museum. Using a grounded theory approach, theoretical questions were generated after analyzing multiple data sources. The focus of this paper is how preservice teachers connected theory to practice in an authentic setting. The importance of connecting theory to practice, the place of play in assessment, and the viability of children's museums as alternative field placements are discussed. Implications for preservice teacher education are presented.     

Staff Development in Problem-based Learning

It is argued here that for problem-based learning (PBL) to succeed, a sound programme of staff development is required. This paper highlights, from both the literature and from experience, that there is limited research into the process and management of PBL staff development. The current shift towards PBL within higher education suggests that staff development needs to be a key component in any PBL implementation strategy. This paper focuses on the experience of introducing PBL into Nursing and Midwifery curricula at the University of Dundee. It is argued that the staff development described played a key role in the effectiveness of the subsequent implementation of PBL. The key components of such a programme are described with evaluatory evidence to support its efficacy. Recommendations are made for those considering implementing PBL into the curriculum.     

The Choice of Response Probability in Bookmark Standard Setting: An Experimental Study

Evidence of the internal consistency of standard-setting judgments is a critical part of the validity argument for tests used to make classification decisions. The bookmark standard-setting procedure is a popular approach to establishing performance standards, but there is relatively little research that reflects on the internal consistency of the resulting judgments. This article presents the results of an experiment in which content experts were randomly assigned to one of two response probability conditions: .67 and .80. If the standard-setting judgments collected with the bookmark procedure are internally consistent, both conditions should produce highly similar cut scores. The results showed substantially different cut scores for the two conditions; this calls into question whether content experts can produce the type of internally consistent judgments that are required using the bookmark procedure.     

Improving the reading skills of young people with Duchenne muscular dystrophy in preparation for adulthood

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a progressive genetic condition that affects both muscle and brain. Children with DMD are at risk of psycho‐social difficulties such as poor academic achievement and behavioural and socio‐emotional problems. This article by Janet Hoskin and Angela Fawcett, both from the University of Swansea, describes how 34 participants with DMD took part in a 36‐week online literacy intervention which was delivered in partnership between home and school. The key objective was to improve reading skill. Participants were re‐tested at 36 weeks for single word and text level reading, comprehension, fluency, processing and timed single word reading. Pre and post results indicated that children who followed the intervention for 36 weeks made significant improvement in their single word reading (p = <0.0001), timed single word reading (p = <0.0001) and text level reading (p = <0.004). They also made significant improvement in their fluency and comprehension scores. The results showed that children with DMD and related literacy difficulties benefit from a regular, structured and systematic synthetic phonics programme. With young people with DMD increasingly living into adulthood, early literacy intervention is particularly important to ensure optimum career and training opportunities.     

Depression and Anxiety in the Postnatal Period: An Examination of Infants’ Home Language Environment,Vocalizations, and Expressive Language Abilities

This longitudinal study investigated the effects of maternal emotional health concerns, on infants’ home language environment, vocalization quantity, and expressive language skills. Mothers and their infants (at 6 and 12 months; 21 mothers with depression and or anxiety and 21 controls) provided day-long home-language recordings. Compared with controls, risk group recordings contained fewer mother–infant conversational turns and infant vocalizations, but daily number of adult word counts showed no group difference. Furthermore, conversational turns and infant vocalizations were stronger predictors of infants’ 18-month vocabulary size than depression and anxiety measures. However, anxiety levels moderated the effect of conversational turns on vocabulary size. These results suggest that variability in mothers’ emotional health influences infants’ language environment and later language ability.     

Family Reading Behavior and Early Literacy Skills in Preschool Children From Low-Income Backgrounds

This study investigated the family reading behavior of 233 preschool children from low-income backgrounds who were attending Head Start. Parents completed a survey of their family reading behavior, including Child Reading, Parent Reading Interest, and Parent-Child Reading Interaction, and provided demographic data on their educational level, parent and child age, and family size. Children's receptive vocabulary, story and print concepts, letter knowledge, and general emergent literacy skills were assessed in the fall of their preschool year. Analyses focused on the variation in family reading behavior, the relationship between different dimensions of family reading behavior, and the contribution of family reading behavior to early literacy skills. Results indicated that Parent-Child Reading Interaction and Child Reading Interest were significantly related to children's early literacy skills. In addition, multiple regression analyses indicated that Parent-Child Reading Interaction was a small yet significant predictor of children's receptive vocabulary, story and print concepts, and general emergent literacy skills, above and beyond the influence of demographic variables. Child Reading Interest was a significant, albeit small, predictor of letter knowledge above and beyond these demographic controls. Implications of these results for the early literacy education of children of low-income families are discussed.     

Using Natural Language Processing to Predict Item Response Times and Improve Test Construction

In this article, it is shown how item text can be represented by (a) 113 features quantifying the text's linguistic characteristics, (b) 16 measures of the extent to which an information‐retrieval‐based automatic question‐answering system finds an item challenging, and (c) through dense word representations (word embeddings). Using a random forests algorithm, these data then are used to train a prediction model for item response times and predicted response times then are used to assemble test forms. Using empirical data from the United States Medical Licensing Examination, we show that timing demands are more consistent across these specially assembled forms than across forms comprising randomly‐selected items. Because an exam's timing conditions affect examinee performance, this result has implications for exam fairness whenever examinees are compared with each other or against a common standard.     

How students conceptualize grade‐based acceleration in inclusive settings

Despite extensive research supporting educational acceleration for students with high academic ability, some psychologists, counselors, and educators express concerns about accelerative interventions. Such concerns often hinge on uncertainty about social acceptance, even in inclusive education settings. Research on acceleration has consistently shown benefits for students with high ability; however, there is a lack of research about grade‐based acceleration in inclusive schools. This study engaged two groups of students in group concept mapping processes to examine how they conceptualized beliefs about grade‐based acceleration in inclusive schools. First, 26 students in inclusive classes generated beliefs about grade‐based acceleration. Then they, and a group of 14 students with high ability, structured the data by sorting and rating a synthesized list of the generated beliefs. We analyzed the sorted data using multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis. The resultant cluster maps revealed some differences and some similarities in the ways that the two groups of students conceptualized beliefs about educational acceleration. Practical implications are discussed.