Play For All at Chicago Children's Museum: A History and Overview

In 2004, Chicago Children's Museum founded the Play For All initiative, which creates a community where play and learning connect for visitors of all abilities. The Play For All team discovered that families with children with disabilities were looking for an opportunity to explore and enjoy the museum without limitations and the fear of being judged. CCM also learned that being ADA compliant was not enough; being accessible and inclusive meant going above and beyond the ADA. Children's museums are a rare treat where almost everything should be interactive and ready to be played with. The Play For All team has made significant changes to the exhibits, staff training, and programming at Chicago Children's Museum by working with local families with disabilities and partner organizations. A culture shift has taken place within CCM. Play For All is now a top priority when decisions are being made.     

Internet in the Classroom: Effects on Reading Comprehension,Motivation and Metacognitive Awareness

This study examined the potential of entertainment-education (E-E) for promoting engagement with a science issue. It was assumed that certain entertaining features of a media experience increase viewers’ perceived knowledge about an issue. Drawing on different theoretical models of E-E and on persuasive effects of narrative media messages, three hypotheses and one research question were assessed in a survey among 103 participants, who were shown a movie about genetic engineering beforehand. Results suggested that the higher viewers’ transportation, identification, and enjoyment were, the more they actually felt informed. Viewers’ degree of transportation, though, revealed to be sufficient to explain their perceived knowledge.     

“We Need a Song”: Sustaining Critical Youth Organizing Literacies Through World Humanities

This article intervenes in the long-standing conversations around which youth activism, literacies, and civic engagement take place. In an effort to expand the boundaries of activism to include the work of youth critical literacies within the classroom, this article highlights the work of four female high school students of color as they bring attention to human sex trafficking. Findings show that students are introduced to and given the space to engage in “critical youth organizing literacies” through their class project. Therefore, through similar projects, classrooms become sites where young people learn to select and critique texts in order to mobilize peers and community members.     

Students’ perceptions about peer assessment for writing: their origin and impact on revision work

We investigate students’ negative perceptions about an online peer assessment system for undergraduate writing across the disciplines. Specifically, we consider the nature of students’ resistance to peer assessment; what factors influence that resistance; and how students’ perceptions impact their revision work. We do this work by first examining findings from an end-of-course survey administered to 250 students in ten courses across six universities using an online peer assessment system called SWoRD for their writing assignments. Those findings indicate that students have the most positive perceptions of SWoRD in those courses where an instructor graded their work in addition to peers (as opposed to peer-only grading). We then move to an in-depth examination of perceptions and revision work among 84 students using SWoRD and no instructor grading for assessment of writing in one university class. Findings from that study indicate that students sometimes regard peer assessment as unfair and often believe that peers are unqualified to review and assess students’ work. Furthermore, students’ perceptions about the fairness of peer assessment drop significantly following students’ experience in doing peer assessment. Students’ fairness perceptions—and drops in those perceptions—are most significantly associated with their perceptions about the extent to which peers’ feedback is useful and positive. However, students’ perceptions appear to be unrelated to the extent of their revision work. This research fills a considerable gap in the literature regarding the origin of students’ negative perceptions about peer assessment, as well as how perceptions influence performance.     

Evolution of the birth plan

Many birth professionals are discarding the birth plan as an outdated and ineffectual document. This column discusses the past limitations and present uses of the birth plan in an effort to enhance current teaching on how expectant parents can write and use this important document. Encouraging expectant parents to prepare two separate, but corresponding, birth plans-the "Discussion Birth Plan" and the "Hospital Birth Plan"-is proposed. Teaching suggestions and possible implications are explored in order to give childbirth educators practical information to share with their class members.     

Multiple victimization experiences of urban elementary school students: associations with psychosocial functioning and academic performance

OBJECTIVE: This study explored the victimization experiences of urban elementary school students to determine whether subsets of youth emerged with similar victimization profiles (e.g., no victimization, multiple types of victimization). It also evaluated whether multiple victimization was associated with greater psychological distress and lower academic performance. METHODS: Participants were 689 fifth grade students from an urban, ethnically diverse school district in the Northeast. Youth completed self-report measures in school about bullying victimization, victimization in the home and community, and psychosocial functioning. RESULTS: Cluster analysis suggested the existence of three distinct youth profiles: those with minimal victimization, those victimized primarily by their peers, and those with multiple types of victimizations. As hypothesized, youth with multiple victimizations experienced more psychological distress and earned lower grades than their peers. CONCLUSIONS: Findings highlight the heterogeneity of youth victimization experiences and their relations to functioning, and have implications for treatment planning among practitioners working with youth.     

Validity Evidence Supporting Use of Anchoring Vignettes to Measure Teaching Practice

High-quality measures of instructional practice are essential for research and evaluation of innovative instructional policies and programs. However, existing measures have generally proven inadequate because of cost and validity issues. This paper addresses two potential drawbacks of survey self-report measures: variation in teachers’ interpretation of response scales and their interpretation of survey questions. To address these drawbacks, researchers tested out use of “anchoring vignettes“ in teacher surveys to capture information about teaching practice, and they gathered validity evidence in regard to their use as a tool for adjusting teachers’ survey self-reports about their instructional practices for research purposes, or potentially to inform professional development. Data from 65 teachers in grades 4-9 responding to our survey suggested that vignette adjustments were reliable and valid for some instructional practices more than others. For some instructional practices, researchers found significant and high correlations between teachers’ adjusted survey self-rating, through use of anchoring vignettes, and previous observation ratings of teachers’ instruction, including ratings from several widely-used observation rubrics. These results suggest that anchoring vignettes may provide an efficient, cost-effective method for gathering data on teachers’ instruction.     

Example-Based Learning: Integrating Cognitive and Social-Cognitive Research Perspectives

Example-based learning has been studied from different perspectives. Cognitive research has mainly focused on worked examples, which typically provide students with a written worked-out didactical solution to a problem to study. Social-cognitive research has mostly focused on modeling examples, which provide students the opportunity to observe an adult or a peer model performing the task. The model can behave didactically or naturally, and the observation can take place face to face, on video, as a screen recording of the model's computer screen, or as an animation. This article reviews the contributions of the research on both types of example-based learning on questions such as why example-based learning is effective, for what kinds of tasks and learners it is effective, and how examples should be designed and delivered to students to optimize learning. This will show both the commonalities and the differences in research on example-based learning conducted from both perspectives and might inspire the identification of new research questions.