Special Education in American Charter Schools: State level policy,practices and tensions

The US charter school movement is based upon the supposition that granting individual public schools increased autonomy from state and district rules and regulations in exchange for more accountability will foster the creation of innovative, effective and efficient schools. However, while state charter school laws free these schools from various state and district rules and regulations, the schools must still operate within the civil rights parameters legislated by federal statutes. Of particular import are federal laws that guarantee that children with disabilities receive a free appropriate public education. Project SEARCH, a 3 year qualitative study of special education in US charter schools revealed that there is a fundamental philosophical gap between the individualised, autonomous nature of charter schools and the highly regulated nature of special education. The philosophical gap is complicated by some charter schools' inability to amass the fiscal and human capacity needed to meet the needs of individual children with disabilities.     

Each Medium Tells a Different Story: The Effect of Message Channel on Narrative Persuasion

Limited attention has been given to the medium of story presentation in this process of narrative persuasion. The present study (N = 243) fills this gap by directly comparing narrative involvement across print and audiovisual versions of the same cervical cancer-related story. The mediation analysis revealed that exposure to an audiovisual narrative was associated with higher levels of cognitive and emotional involvement than exposure to the exact same narrative in its printed form. Yet the higher levels of transportation in the audiovisual condition came at a price of enhancing psychological reactance, eliminating the relative advantage of the film narrative.     

In Transition: Experiences of Parents of Children with Special Needs at School Entry

Pre-school children with special needs face a complex transition to school, requiring additional administrative, social and educational support. In this study, parents of 40 children with special needs reported on the transition to school experience of their 4–6-year-old child. They completed a measure of impact of the child’s disability on their family and an assessment of the quality of services experienced. Individual, semi-structured interviews contextualized these evaluations. Twenty children (pre-transition) were in preschool; 20 had already started school (post). Post-transition parents reported less average disability impact on family, generally lower perception of quality of care than pre-transition ones, and long waiting periods for school-based support. Most parents, however, reported satisfactory linkages between prior-to-school services and school. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that, despite the current climate of support for early child development, barriers for satisfactory transition to school still exist, and are largely due to low effectiveness of existing policies.     

Using library programming to integrate self-directed learning into a community

Abstract

Shoreline Community College is near Seattle in Washington state, a growing community that has evolving needs. The library at the college planned and implemented events for National Poetry Month to get the students, faculty, and community engaged through activities such as White Board Poetry, Spoken Word Poetry, a Film Showing, and a Haiku Contest. Promotional planning and follow through focused on campus resources, student engagement, and social media.     

Evaluating the Prediction of Maximal Heart Rate in Children and Adolescents

In this study, we compared measured maximal heart rate (HRmax) to two different HRmax prediction equations [220 — age and 208 — 0.7(age)] in 52 children ages 7-17 years. We determined the relationship of chronological age, maturational age, and resting HR to measured HRmax and assessed seated resting HR and HRmax during a graded exercise test. Maturational age was calculated as the maturity offset in years from the estimated age at peak height velocity. Measured HRmax was 201 ± 10 bpm, whereas predicted HRmax ranged from 199 to 208 bpm. Measured HRmax and the predicted value from the 208 — 0.7(age) prediction were similar but lower (p < .05) than the 220 — age prediction. Absolute differences between measured and predicted HRmax were 8 ± 5 and 10 ± 8 bpm for the 208 — 0.7 (age) and 220 — age equations, respectively, and were greater than zero (p < .05). Regression equations using resting HR and maturity offset or chronological age significantly predicted HRmax, although the R2 < .30 and the standard error of estimation (8.2-8.5) limits the accuracy. The 208 — 0.7(age) equation can closely predict mean HRmax in children, but individual variation is still apparent.     

Google Forms and Sheets for library gate counts

Building usage statistics are vital for supporting causes of funding, space, and staffing, but they can be cumbersome and costly to track and cull for useful data. Institutions already using Google Drive and its apps can implement a free solution to greatly reduce the amount of time and labor involved in utilizing this metric. Google Forms and Google Sheets allow the Binghamton University Libraries to easily and accurately collect gate counts for four separate locations, using automatic calculations to maintain up-to-the-hour reporting ability. With the support of these data, the Libraries are able to support decisions regarding resources, staffing, and hours of operation.     

The effects of phonological transparency on reading derived words

The purpose of this study was to determine whether poor readers have more pronounced problems than average-reading peers reading derived words the base forms of which undergo a phonological shift when a suffix is added (i.e., shift relations as in “natural”), as compared to derived words whose forms are phonologically and orthographically transparent (i.e., stable relations, as in “cultural”). Two computer-based word recognition tasks (Naming and Lexical Decision) were administered to children with reading disability (RD), peers with average reading ability, and adults. Across tasks, there was an effect for transparency (i.e., better performance on stable than shift words) for both child groups and the adults. For the children, a significant interaction was found between group and word type. Specifically, on the naming task, there was an advantage for the stable words, and this was most noteworthy for the children with RD. On the lexical decision task, trade-offs of speed and accuracy were evident for the child reader groups. Performances on the nonwords showed the poor readers to be comparable to the average readers in distinguishing legal and illegal nonwords; further analyses suggested that poor readers carried out deeper processing of derived words than their average reading peers. Additional study is needed to explore the relation of orthographic and phonological processing on poor readers’ memory for and processing of derived words.