Direct Behavioral Consultation in Head Start to Increase Teacher Use of Praise and Effective Instruction Delivery

Chronic disruptive behaviors during early childhood are associated with many poor developmental outcomes including, but not limited to, school dropout and conduct disorder during adolescence. Much is known regarding effective intervention procedures for disruptive classroom behaviors by preschool children. Unfortunately, evidence-based intervention procedures may not be implemented with integrity in applied settings. Direct behavioral consultation may increase teacher intervention integrity because of direct training procedures used with teachers and students during routine classroom activities. This study evaluated a nondisruptive direct training method for increasing Head Start teachers' use of praise and effective instruction delivery. Results indicated that the direct training procedure implemented during routine instructional activities resulted in increased use of praise and effective instruction delivery that maintained following training. Additionally, increased use of praise and effective instruction delivery resulted in reductions in children's disruptive classroom behavior.     

Treatment Fidelity Challenges in a Five-State Consultation Study

Consultation is a promising approach to creating change in early childhood programs, from innovations in instructional strategies to the enhancement of global program quality. Studies of consultation effectiveness have been hampered by limited reports of implementation fidelity related to consultation procedures. This article describes the challenges of supporting and measuring implementation fidelity in a 5-state study in which community consultants followed a collaborative consultation model to enhance global quality in childcare programs. The authors consider the limitations of using a randomized experimental design to study the effectiveness of consultation and share lessons learned in their efforts to enhance treatment fidelity without compromising the basic tenets of the model or the rigorous design.     

What They Said (She Said) I Said: Attribution and Expertise in Digital Circulation

Theorists of discourse have long recognised the complexities of attributing reported speech in textual circulation. Yet rarely does one follow words from an original speech event through their many re-entextualisations, and it has proved particularly difficult to capture such circulations between oral events, print, and online media. This article captures such movements by following the mediatised – and politicised – afterlife of a speech event that would normally be classified, in academia, as ‘a talk’. It begins with a talk on Russia, given by the author-anthropologist of this paper, that was (mis)reported in Russian by a Voice of America (VOA) journalist, then traces the resulting text's subsequent movement from the VOA website into the Russian fieldsite that the oral talk described. It explores how the tone and substance of debates over politics and representation were enabled, constrained, and otherwise shaped by the particular textual circulations made possible in digital media. As the text traversed online newspapers, comments forums, blogs, social media networks, and private-turned-public personal emails, it produced a body of commentary that was both directly and indirectly a struggle over representation. While substantive debates unfolded over ethnic and national politics, much of the online commentary concerned the expertise of the commenters weighing in and the expertise and identity of the anthropologist who had been cited. This essay argues that Russian commenters and posters were productively using the intertextual gaps offered by digital circulation, while minimising those gaps' increasing breadth and depth by attributing ‘original’ authorship to a discrete, stable person.     

Diversity,Performance, and Satisfaction in Student Group Projects: An Empirical Study

This paper focuses on the effect that diversity has on the performance and satisfaction of student groups in a computer simulation project. Using structural equation modeling, we find evidence to support the contention of previous research that diversity negatively affects group satisfaction. This finding was strongest for undergraduate groups. While the relationship between diversity and performance is inconclusive, groups that are dominated by one person tend to have below average performance.     

Science achievement of english language learners in urban elementary schools: Results of a first‐year professional development intervention

This study is part of a 5‐year professional development intervention aimed at improving science and literacy achievement of English language learners (or ELL students) in urban elementary schools within an environment increasingly driven by high‐stakes testing and accountability. Specifically, the study examined science achievement at the end of the first‐year implementation of the professional development intervention that consisted of curriculum units and teacher workshops. The study involved 1,134 third‐grade students at seven treatment schools and 966 third‐grade students at eight comparison schools. The results led to three main findings. First, treatment students displayed a statistically significant increase in science achievement. Second, there was no statistically significant difference in achievement gains between students at English to Speakers of Other Language (ESOL) levels 1 to 4 and students who had exited from ESOL or never been in ESOL. Similarly, there was no significant difference in achievement gains between students who had been retained on the basis of statewide reading test scores and students who had never been retained. Third, treatment students showed a higher score on a statewide mathematics test, particularly on the measurement strand emphasized in the intervention, than comparison students. The results indicate that through our professional development intervention, ELL students and others in the intervention learned to think and reason scientifically while also performing well on high‐stakes testing. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 31–52, 2008     

Enhancing curriculum and delivery: linking assessment to learning objectives

Typical university‐wide course evaluations do not provide instructors with sufficient information on the effectiveness of their courses. This article describes a course assessment and enhancement model where student feedback can be used to improve courses and/or programs. The model employs an assessment tool that measures student perceptions of importance and their current competence in course‐specific learning objectives both pre‐ and post‐course. Information gained from this assessment enables course improvement over time and also allows for modification in delivery and/or content of the current course. This model is intended to augment traditional course evaluation mechanisms based on specific and actionable feedback on learning objectives.     

Beacons of light,rays, or sun catchers? A case study of the positioning of literacy teachers and their knowledge in neoliberal times

This paper reports on a case study of a “lead literacy teacher” initiative in one Canadian province. This initiative is related to a “minority world” trend in teacher in-service that seeks to develop “experts” in a field with the intent that such experts can help other teachers to raise student achievement for the betterment of the economy. Using a post-colonial theoretical framework that advocates for professional development premised on teacher knowledge production, the study finds that the initiative instead forwards a “train-the-trainer” model of information transmission that negates teachers' prior knowledge, experience, and practices. The study argues that for teachers to become critically reflective in their practice, they need material supports (e.g., time) to share with one another and knowledge must be allowed to flow in all directions within the educational hierarchy.