Sleep,Classroom Behavior,and Achievement Among Children of Color in Historically Disinvested Neighborhoods

Children of color are more likely to have poor sleep health than White children, placing them at risk for behavioral problems in the classroom and lower academic performance. Few studies, however, have utilized standardized measures of both classroom behavior and achievement. This study examined whether children’s sleep (parent and teacher report) in first grade concurrently related to independent observations of classroom behavior and longitudinally predicted achievement test scores in second grade in a sample of primarily Black (86%) children (n = 572; age = 6.8) living in historically disinvested neighborhoods. Higher teacher-reported child sleepiness was associated with lower adaptive behaviors and higher problem behaviors in the classroom, and predicted lower achievement. Parent-reported bedtime resistance and disordered breathing also predicted lower achievement.     

government policies for technological innovation: criteria for an experimental approach

The United States Government has had only limited success in conducting complex experiments on incentives to promote technological innovation in the public and private sectors. Political pressure for early success has distorted programme objectives and encouraged policy demonstrations under conditions favouring ‘successful’ outcomes, rather than true policy experiments.A wide range of conceptual and practical problems must be confronted before undertaking a major programme of experimentation in national policy related to technological innovation. Experiments to test the effect of specific governmental policies on the rate of and direction of technological innovation should be rigorously selected and designed so as to provide valid results that are useful to decision-makers. The problem of selecting experiments can be dealt with by applying selection criteria that relate to the importance of the problem or barrier in the innovation process to be overcome, to the implications of implementing the policy that will over-come the problem, and to the technical design and feasibility of conducting the experiment. Suggested criteria include: (1) value of the information generated; (2) leverage of the solution; (3) importance of the target population; (4) political acceptability of the policy; (5) legal aspects of the policy; (6) target population support; (7) cost acceptability; (8) policy effectiveness and range; (9) policy equity; (10) understanding of the policy; (11) administrative feasibility; (12) ease of policy monitoring; (13) organizational structure for implementation; (14) sound experimental hypothesis; (15) careful experimental design; (16) experimental feasibility; (17) time scale of the experiment; (18) experimental cost, and (19) relative cost-effectiveness.The proposed selection criteria are demonstrated using a current experiment of the US National Science Foundation.     

Housing Interventions and the Chronic and Acute Risks of Family Homelessness: Experimental Evidence for Education

This study considers risk associated with family homelessness for school functioning and experimental evidence on the effects of different housing interventions over time. Students in homeless families (N = 172; M_age = 7.31; SD = 4.15) were randomized to housing interventions that focus on acute risks (community-based rapid rehousing), chronic risks (permanent subsidy), or usual care (UC). A matched group of low-income, housed students served as an additional reference for effects on attendance, school mobility, and reading and math achievement across 4 years. Findings partially support the chronic-risk hypothesis that family homelessness interferes with achievement through its relation to deep poverty. Children randomly assigned to UC perform as well or better than children assigned to housing interventions in this municipality.     

A longitudinal comparison of learning outcomes in full-day and half-day kindergarten

In 2010, the province of Ontario introduced a new universal two-year play-based full-day kindergarten program. The authors exploited the phasing-in of this program over five years, allowing a natural experiment in which children from full-day kindergarten could be compared with those from half-day kindergarten in matched neighborhoods. Children (N?=?592) were followed from kindergarten to Grade 2 with direct learning and self-regulation measures. Grade 3 wide-scale achievement test scores were available for 269 of the children. Results showed lasting benefits of full-day kindergarten on children’s self-regulation, reading, writing, and number knowledge to the end of Grade 2, including some benefits for vocabulary. Full-day kindergarten children were significantly more likely to meet provincial expectations for reading in Grade 3. The study points to the benefits of a play-based full-day kindergarten program and brings evidence to bear on the mixed findings in the research literature about the fade-out effects of full-day kindergarten.     

Teaching Strategies through Microteaching

Approaches in microteaching traditionally have been focused upon the teaching of specific skills in small‐group situations. This article describes the application of a form of microteaching to the acquisition of teaching strategies, which has a much broader focus, based largely on the work of Joyce & Weil (1986).     

Promising effects of an intervention: Young children’s literacy gains and changes in their home literacy activities from a bilingual family literacy program in Canada

The goal of this paper was to examine promising effects of a bilingual family literacy program: to track the changes of families’ literacy activities through a bilingual family literacy intervention, and to examine the children literacy gains in both Chinese and English across socioeconomic sub-groups. The intervention was an eight-week, two hours per week, literacy program in three Chinese communities in Toronto. Parents, with their children, participated in the program. The extremely high attendance rate provided evidence that families enjoyed the family literacy intervention and felt that the sessions were worthwhile. For their families’ literacy activities, the three sites followed the same trend: reaching the peak of activity at week four, slightly dropping down at weeks five and six, and then increasing to a second peak at week seven or week eight. Results also showed that across the three groups, children of mothers with lower education levels made fewer gains in their English expressive vocabularies and their Chinese expressive vocabularies, than children whose mothers had a higher level of education.