Children's Preliteracy Skills: Influence of Mothers' Education and Beliefs About Shared-Reading Interactions

Research Findings: This research investigated the associations among children's preliteracy skills, mothers' education, and mothers' beliefs about shared-reading interactions for 45 Appalachian families. These variables were studied for lower income, primarily European American, families residing in a geographically isolated, small, rural community in the Appalachian Mountains. Children's performance on standardized measures of preliteracy skills pertaining to print concepts and alphabet knowledge was substantially lower than normative references, but their performance on tasks assessing their understanding of environmental print was similar to normative references. The preliteracy skills of children with more educated mothers were significantly better than those of children with less educated mothers. More educated mothers had higher ratings on a measure of parental beliefs about shared reading than less educated mothers had; however, maternal reports of the frequency of home literacy practices were similar for both groups. Mediation analyses indicated that mothers' beliefs about shared-reading interactions served as a mediator for the association between maternal education and children's understanding of reading conventions. Practice or Policy: Future directions for research and implications for practice are discussed.     

Casting the assessment net wide: Capturing all student learning

North Georgia College and State University has joined a national effort to move away from the isolated approach to measuring student learning. Educators from three divisions offer their perspectives.     

A Visual Culture Art Education Curriculum for Early Childhood Teacher Education: Re‐Constructing the Family Album

This article reflects on the reading and writing of an art education curriculum for teacher education centred on the biographical and social reconstruction of childhood. The foundations of this curriculum interconnect ideas from different fields like postmodern childhood studies, visual studies, and the performance of subjectivity and memory. This is an interpretative curriculum centred in narrating aesthetic encounters for imagining and producing alternative views of childhood. It stresses the relevance of biographic work in the formation of teaching identities, and constructs dialogues and connections between the private and public discourses of childhood. In this context the family album becomes a powerful resource for visual analysis, cultural critique, and subjective re‐construction.     

有话，好好说

明明很爱孩子,可是孩子却总是不领情,这让做母亲的心里很不是滋味。和朋友聊天之后才恍然大悟,原来是在说话方式上出了小问题,还好,及时的改正换来了孩子的感恩。     

Is Canada really an education superpower? The impact of non-participation on results from PISA 2015

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability - The purpose of large-scale international assessments is to compare educational achievement across countries. For such cross-national...     

The Sensitivity of Value-Added Teacher Effect Estimates to Different Mathematics Achievement Measures

Using longitudinal data from a cohort of middle school students from a large school district, we estimate separate "value-added" teacher effects for two subscales of a mathematics assessment under a variety of statistical models varying in form and degree of control for student background characteristics. We find that the variation in estimated effects resulting from the different mathematics achievement measures is large relative to variation resulting from choices about model specification, and that the variation within teachers across achievement measures is larger than the variation across teachers. These results suggest that conclusions about individual teachers' performance based on value-added models can be sensitive to the ways in which student achievement is measured.     

Does adviser mentoring add value? A longitudinal study of mentoring and doctoral student outcomes

This study of the impact of doctoral adviser mentoring on student outcomes was undertaken in response to earlier research that found (a) students with greater incoming potential received more adviser mentoring, and (b) adviser mentoring did not significantly contribute to important student outcomes, including research productivity [Green, S. G., and Bauer, T. N. (1995). Personnel Psychology 48(3): 537–561]. In this longitudinal study spanning 5 1/2 years, the effect of mentorship on the research productivity, career commitment, and self-efficacy of Ph.D. students in the ‘hard’ sciences was assessed, while controlling for indicators of ability and attitudes at program entry. Positive benefits of mentoring were found for subsequent productivity and self-efficacy. Mentoring was not significantly associated with commitment to a research career.     

‘I’ll take care of the flowers!’ Researching agency through initiatives across different learning environments

ABSTRACT

This case study examined how the agency of a fifth-grade pupil appeared across different learning environments in the primary school context. In this study, agency is defined as the initiatives taken by an individual in interactive situations. The research question is: how does a pupil’s agency manifest and vary through taking initiatives across different learning environments within curriculum-based education? The empirical data consist of 50 video episodes including learning activities in a classroom, in a vegetable garden and on a nearby farm. The findings show that the pupil’s agency varied across learning environments, manifesting itself through complementing, supportive, constructive and challenging initiatives. When developing pedagogy that supports learning across formal and informal learning environments, it is essential to enable pupils to take different kinds of initiatives and to exercise their agency in versatile contexts.