Child and Parenting Outcomes After 1 Year of Educare

Educare is a birth to age 5 early education program designed to reduce the achievement gap between children from low‐income families and their more economically advantaged peers through high‐quality center‐based programming and strong school–family partnerships. This study randomly assigned 239 children (< 19 months) from low‐income families to Educare or a business‐as‐usual control group. Assessments tracked children 1 year after randomization. Results revealed significant differences favoring treatment group children on auditory and expressive language skills, parent‐reported problem behaviors, and positive parent–child interactions. Effect sizes were in the modest to medium range. No effects were evident for observer‐rated child behaviors or parent‐rated social competence. The overall results add to the evidence that intervening early can set low‐income children on more positive developmental courses.     

Integrating Student Assessment Practices: the significance of collaborative partnerships for curriculum and professional development in a university department

The purposes and practices of student assessment in all sectors of education are contested. So when the members of a university department decide to collaborate in order to integrate their assessment requirements, what they enter into is a program of personal and collective review that begins to unmask the moral and political dynamics of curriculum and professional development. This article describes such a collaborative project, its processes and its products, as well as the dynamics of collective review as they relate to facilitation, organisational change, and comfortable versus critical collaboration.     

Participatory visual methods: exploring young people’s identities,hopes and feelings

Using visual ethnography as a participatory method that places children’s and young people’s everyday experiences at the centre of research is discussed in this paper. The strengths and challenges of using participatory visual methods as a way of eliciting the thoughts, feelings and identities of young people within various education and training contexts in England are presented through the reflection of two ethnographies’ that encouraged the use of participatory visual techniques to facilitate the gathering of data. Participatory visual approaches capture meaningful child-centred and child-generated perspectives of their everyday lives in situ [Oh, Su-Ann. 2012. ‘Photofriend: Creating Visual Ethnography with Refugee Children.’ Area. 44(3): 382–288. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01111]. The participatory visual method is a powerful instrument within the plethora of methods available to the ethnographer. By offering reflexive accounts of doing ethnography in an unobtrusive and child respectful way the power of ethnography is revealed via its versatility.     

Quality indicators for effective early intervention in literacy and numeracy

Recent research suggests that multi‐strand and interlinked interventions meet the requirements of early primary school intervention programmes more fully than single programmes. A set of quality indicators, which education authorities and schools can utilize to review and evaluate processes and outcomes of such interventions, is derived from the outcome of an evaluation of the implementation of an early intervention programme (EIP) in literacy and numeracy, involving 274 pupils, in three North Ayrshire primary schools. The implications for primary prevention of difficulties in literacy and numeracy are discussed.     

The effect of phonological analysis training on naming performance

Children who are poor readers have difficulty naming pictured objects. Previous research has shown that while poor readers have the same amount of tacit phonological knowledge about words they cannot retrieve as good readers, they cannot use this initial phoneme and rhyme information to produce these words. In this study, thirdgrade good and poor readers participated in a training session to explicitly teach them how to manipulate the phonological structure of words as a means of facilitating naming ability. Both groups benefited from training, even though the good readers performed consistently better than poor readers. It is suggested that with more extensive training, poor readers may learn to use their tacit phonological knowledge of words they have difficulty retrieving spontaneously, by generating and using their own phonemic and rhyme cues independently.