Software for young children

Due to the pervasive nature of computers in all areas of our society, it comes as no surprise that they are creeping into the world of preschoolers. The issue is no longer whether or not it is appropriate to use computers with very young children, but rather how they can be used effectively with them.Janet Fowle McLanahan is an Associate Professor and Chair of Early Childhood Education at North Shore Community College in Beverly, MA.     

Teachers’ Role in Students’ Learning at a Project-Based STEM High School: Implications for Teacher Education

International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education - This study explored how teachers engage and support students at a project-based STEM high school to identify key elements defining...     

Click data as implicit relevance feedback in web search

Search sessions consist of a person presenting a query to a search engine, followed by that person examining the search results, selecting some of those search results for further review, possibly following some series of hyperlinks, and perhaps backtracking to previously viewed pages in the session. The series of pages selected for viewing in a search session, sometimes called the click data, is intuitively a source of relevance feedback information to the search engine. We are interested in how that relevance feedback can be used to improve the search results quality for all users, not just the current user. For example, the search engine could learn which documents are frequently visited when certain search queries are given.     

It's a Holiday!!

This article studies various holiday distributions, the most interesting one being Easter. Gauss’ Easter algorithm and Microsoft Excel are used to determine that the Easter distribution can be closely approximated by the convolution of two well‐known uniform distributions.     

One Hundred Children: baseline assessment of literacy in the early years of education

One Hundred Children is an Australian study of literacy learning in the early years of education. The larger study (Hill, Comber, Louden, Reid and Rivalland, 1998) includes detailed case studies of children’s literacy learning in their homes, pre-schools, day-care centres and schools. This paper reports on the assessment framework developed during the study and provides a brief overview of children’s performance on items in that framework. The study demonstrates that most children made rapid and substantial progress in literacy learning and identifies the literacy domains in which children learned most during their first year at school. A number of advantages of the use of baseline measures for assessing young children’s progress in literacy are also highlighted.     

Using contrasting cases to improve self-assessment in physics learning

Self-assessment is essential to scientific literacy as stated by the National Research Council Committee on Conceptual Framework for the New K-12 Science Education Standards and has since been incorporated into the Next Generation Science Standards. However, little empirical evidence documents which instructional tools are beneficial in improving students’ self-assessment in science learning. As such, we conducted a classroom-based quasi-experiment to test whether contrasting case-based instructional supports improved 390 introductory high school physics students’ accuracy in self-assessment and academic performance when solving physics problems. We compared the effects of providing students with content knowledge and contrasting cases (contrasting good and poor solution) on students’ physics problem solving and their ability to self-assess, with the effects of either presenting them with content knowledge and good solutions or teaching only content knowledge. We found contrasting examples improved the accuracy of students’ self-assessments, promoted content learning, and enhanced the development of self-assessment strategies.     

Patterns of maternal behavior among neglectful families: implications for research and intervention

OBJECTIVE: The heterogeneity within neglecting caregivers has not been explored in an empirical fashion. The current study sought to address this limitation by utilizing archival data in order to explore variability of maternal behavior among neglectful families. METHOD: The current study utilized archival data containing caseworker and self-report information on 100 mothers for whom neglect had been substantiated and was the primary referral concern. Cluster analysis was used to describe patterns of maternal behavior. Subsequent analysis was used to determine differences between the clusters on degree of neglect, maternal depression, perceived social support, and other demographic characteristics (income, education). RESULTS: Five distinct patterns of maternal behavior emerged, each with different ratings of maternal confidence, relatedness, impulse control, and willingness to engage in verbal interactions. The clusters differed on ratings of neglect, life stressors, resource problems and adult problems. The clusters were similar in terms of maternal education, number of children in the home, and monthly income. Additionally, women in all clusters reported similar levels of depression, similar number of children, and a comparable amount of social support. CONCLUSIONS: The five clusters are described and implications for intervention approaches are discussed.