Evidence of efficacy of the Integrated Literacy Study Group professional learning program to enhance reading instruction for students with emotional and behavioral disorders

This article reports on a pilot study of the Integrated Literacy Study Group, a digitally delivered professional learning intervention to prepare elementary school teachers to provide evidence-based reading instruction and behavioral strategies to students with or are at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders. Using broadcast methods, we recruited 72 teachers across five states in the western United States to participate in the randomized controlled trial. Intervention teachers, relative to controls, made significant gains in self-efficacy and use of the reading and behavioral strategies learned in the professional learning program. Students with or at risk of emotional and behavioral disorders served by participating teachers made significant improvements in academic competence and engagement. Teacher professional learning can improve teacher knowledge of evidence-based reading and behavioral strategies for students with (or at risk for) emotional and behavioral disorders, teacher self-efficacy, and teacher practice, with positive impacts on student early literacy and academic competence.     

Re-Entering the Sporting World: China's Sponsorship of the 1963 Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO)

Prior to the 2008 Olympics, China's most sustained support of an international multi-sport event came in 1963 when it contributed significantly to the financing of and then dominated the medals table at the inaugural Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), held in Jakarta. GANEFO is a singular moment through which to understand politics and sport in the 1960s. This article is a consideration of China's role in GANEFO, and the West's response to China's involvement. It explores the ways in which China used the event to navigate issues of international and regional geopolitics, and considers the diplomatic and sporting corridors within which GANEFO resonated. GANEFO was a platform through which geopolitical tensions were revealed, and China engaged in propaganda campaigns directed at the West and positioned itself to win allies among the decolonising countries of Asia and Africa – astride the artificial boundary that separated the Second and Third Worlds. China's interest in and the West's response to GANEFO reflected the ways in which anti-communist Cold War politics were conflated with racialised, post-colonial discourses and tension between Second World powers.