Character,Social–Emotional,and Academic Outcomes Among Underachieving Elementary School Students

Students with persistent disruptive behavior problems lose valuable time in academic lessons, are a distraction for classmates, and cause stress for teachers. Recent meta-analyses indicate that 87% to 92% of published studies on school-based interventions targeting student problem behaviors report results from demonstration projects (involving highly trained staff under ideal circumstances) rather than routine practice programs. This study investigates the routine use of a schoolwide classroom management program and its relationship to elementary students’ social and academic outcomes. Three years after training in the classroom management program, 56 second-, third-, and fourth-grade teachers in an urban school district were assessed for fidelity to the program. Program fidelity was determined via direct observation in the classroom and validated by teacher self-ratings of fidelity and administrator ratings of teacher fidelity. Dependent variables included student engagement during academic lessons, out-of-school suspension rates, and report card grades. Results indicated that high program fidelity was significantly related to greater academic engagement and fewer suspensions, but not higher report card grades. This study adds to the scant literature on implementation fidelity of routine programs with high-risk populations.     

Enhancing Anatomical Instruction: Impact of a Virtual Canine Anatomy Program on Student Outcomes

Innovative reforms in medical education will require instructional tools to support these changes and to give students more flexibility in where and how they learn. At Colorado State University, the software program Virtual Canine Anatomy (VCA) was developed to assist student learning both inside and outside the anatomical laboratory. The program includes interactive anatomical photographs of dissected canine cadavers, dissection instructions with accompanying videos and diagrams, radiographs, and three-dimensional models. There is a need to evaluate the effectiveness of instructional tools like VCA so that decisions on pedagogical delivery can be evidence-based. To measure the impact of VCA on student outcomes in a dissection laboratory, this study compared student attitudes, quiz scores, dissection quality and accuracy, and instructor reliance between students with and without access to VCA. Students with VCA needed less time with teaching assistants (P < 0.01), asked teaching assistants fewer questions (P = 0.04), felt that the dissection was easier (P = 0.02), and were in stronger agreement that they had access to adequate resources (P = 0.02). No differences were found in the dissection quality or accuracy, quiz scores, or attitudes regarding overall enjoyment of the activity between the two groups. This study shows that VCA increases student independence and can be used to enhance anatomical instruction.     

Piercing the veil: Examining demographic and political variables in state FOI Law administration

State and local governments play an important, and growing, role in everyday lives. The exploratory study positions FOI laws as a central mechanism in providing transparency to these more proximate governments. It is premised on a FOI audit, or field experiment, of 1002 requests across 9 U.S. state laws and 334 jurisdictions. The sample represents a broad cross-section of geographic, demographic and political variables, and the study analyzes these variables predictive and correlative value in determining outcomes, timeliness and communication in FOI requests. The results suggest significance in race and political variables in FOI outcomes and processes. The study's strongest finding was the influence of geographic location, namely the central South of the United States, and its considerable effect on FOI compliance.     

Athletics

The purposes of this study were to investigate (1) the relationships between official distance and selected ground reaction measures during discus throwing; and (2) the relationships between selected ground reactions and selected lower extremity joint kinetics. Three high‐speed video cameras and three force plates were used to collect three‐dimensional videographic and force plate data in this study. An inverse dynamic model was used to determine the lower extremity kinetics. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine relationships of the selected kinematic and kinetic measures with the official distance. Official distance was significantly correlated with ground reaction forces on the left foot during the first single‐support phase, on the right foot during the second single‐support phase and delivery phase, and on the left foot during the delivery phase. Also, the right‐hip extension and internal rotation moments and left‐knee extension moment during the delivery phase were significantly correlated with official distance. These results suggest that discus throwers should drive vigorously forward during the first single‐support phase and increase the landing impact force on the right foot after flight. Also they should increase forward and rightward ground reaction force on the right foot and backward and vertical force on the left foot by powerful right‐hip extension and internal rotation and left‐knee extension during the delivery phase. These results provide critical information regarding the training of discus‐throwing techniques, and the direction of future biomechanical studies on this event.     

Rhythmic Isometric Fatigue Patterns of the Elbow Flexors and Knee Extensors

Abstract

Twenty-seven male subjects performed two 5-min bouts of rhythmic, isometric elbow flexion and two similar bouts of knee extension at a rate of 30 maximal contractions per min. Exponential analyses revealed that the pattern of fatigue for each limb followed a single component curve of the form: Y_t = a₀e ^?Kot + c. An analysis of variance comparing the results from the two limbs revealed that (a) the strength scores for the leg were significantly (p < .05) higher than those for the arm throughout the exercise bouts; (b) both limbs experienced a significant strength decrement; and (c) there was significant interaction between trials and limbs. It appeared that the greater loss of strength by the knee extensors was reponsible for this interaction. It was concluded that during a rhythmic, all-out task, the rates of fatigue experienced by the two muscle groups tend to differ, with the elbow flexors fatiguing more rapidly initially but reaching a plateau at a relatively higher level than the knee extensors.     

Problematic students of NASP‐approved programs: An exploratory study of graduate student views

This study reports the findings of an electronic exploratory survey of National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) Student Representatives. The purpose of the survey was to gather information about the perspective of graduate students concerning problematic peers and their experiences with them in school psychology training programs. Findings suggest that (a) students are unsure whether or not their training programs have an official procedure in place for dealing with problematic students; (b) the problems they observe most commonly involve poor interpersonal skills; (c) consistent with other mental health programs, school psychology graduate students most often talk with their peers or avoid contact with the problematic peer when they have concerns rather than go to faculty; (d) the majority (49.4%) of the respondents feel that faculty or training directors have the most responsibility for the identification of problematic peers but that students have an ethical duty to provide information to the teaching staff if they feel they have a reason to believe there is a problem of which the faculty is unaware. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Observed characteristics and teacher quality: Impacts of sample selection on a value added model

We measure the impact of observed teacher characteristics on student math and reading proficiency using a rich dataset from Florida. We expand upon prior work by accounting directly for nonrandom attrition of teachers from the classroom in a sample selection framework. We find evidence that sample selection is present in the estimation of the influence of teacher characteristics, but that failure to account for it does not appear to substantially bias estimation. Further, our procedure produces some evidence that more effective teachers are more likely to exit the classroom.     

Modeling and Visualizing the Codevelopment of Word and Nonword Reading in Children From First Through Fourth Grade: Informing Developmental Trajectories of Children With Dyslexia

Developmental studies examining relations between word reading (WR) and decoding in typical and dyslexic populations routinely cut the reading distribution to form distinct groups. However, dichotomizing continuous variables to study development is problematic for multiple reasons. Instead, we modeled and visualized the parallel growth of WR and nonword reading (NWR) factor scores longitudinally in a Grade 1–4 developmental sample (N = 588). The results indicate that while WR and NWR growth factors are highly related (r = .71), the relation between WR and NWR trajectories change as a function of initial WR. Results are interpreted within computational models of dyslexia in which children with dyslexia overfit orthography → phonology relations at the level of the word, limiting the development of sublexical representations needed to read nonwords.     

Looking for inhibition of return in pigeons

We conducted four experiments in order to investigate whether pigeons' responses to a recently attended (i.e., recently pecked) location are inhibited. In Experiments 1 and 2, stimulus displays were similar to those used in studies of inhibition of return (IOR) with humans; responses to cued targets tended to be facilitated rather than inhibited. In Experiments 3 and 4, birds were presented with stimulus displays that mimicked clusters of small grains and were relatively localized, which should have been more appropriate for detecting IOR in pigeons. The results from these experiments again provided evidence for facilitation of responding to cued targets, rather than for IOR.     

A fading procedure facilitates the maintenance of observing responses when the more valued stimulus is not produced

Pigeons served in two experiments in which responding on an observing key converted a two-component mixed schedule to the corresponding multiple schedule of reinforcement. Presentation of the stimulus correlated with the more valued component was faded out (probabilistically) over sessions, so that ultimately an observing response produced only the stimulus correlated with the less valued component. Observing was well maintained after a fading procedure when a stimulus was produced by a single response, regardless of whether the less valued stimulus was associated with food or with extinction (Experiment 1). However, observing was not well maintained after a fading procedure when a stimulus was produced according to an intermittent schedule (Experiment 2). Taken together, the results of the two experiments suggest that the absence of an exteroceptive stimulus change after a single response may become discriminative in its own right for the more valued component, and that the fading procedure is an effective means of promoting this discrimination. However, if observing responses produce a stimulus change according to an intermittent schedule, then the absence of a stimulus change after a response is correlated with both components. Under these conditions, the absence of stimulus change is not discriminative for either component, even with fading, and observing is not maintained.