‘Reading’ the nursery classroom: A Foucauldian perspective

This paper examines ways in which styles of language usage mediate attempts at describing classroom practice. The authors' particular focus centres on discursive power and they seek to illustrate some of the effects and consequences of applying certain Foucauldian concepts and analytical procedures within depictions of interactions between children and with the teacher in a nursery classroom. The paper begins by introducing an example of children's play. To this are applied analyses which stem from readings of Foucault. In so doing, it is shown how power both permeates and defines subjective positionings and where, as a consequence, individuals experience themselves as both powerful and powerless. A second example is offered in which a teacher talks to a child. The authors' analyses of this can, they believe, be perceived as a reflexive act, where the teacher's own beliefs, including her feminism, are critiqued and redefined.     

Functional Assessment to Predict Capacity for Work in a Population of School‐leavers with Disabilities

This study reports on an assessment system for school‐leavers with disabilities to identify their capacity for work and the type of transition‐to‐work programme best suited to each person. Participants were 1,556 high school students in four cohorts who left school between 1999 and 2002. Each school‐leaver was assessed by rehabilitation counsellors for functional ability and capacity for work. In a supplementary study, the 2002 cohort was assessed by special transition teachers using a short screening tool. The results demonstrate that there is a predictable hierarchy of functional acquisition among school‐leavers with disabilities and that the single best predictor of future capacity for work and need for transition‐to‐work programmes among this group of young people is the capacity to manage activities of daily living. The results also demonstrate that a short screen used by teachers, together with a behavioural assessment, is sufficient to stream school‐leavers with a disability into a range of transition‐to‐work programmes.     

“Go,little book ...”: Getting a book to readers

An author, editor, agent, marketing director, and bookseller describe in turn how one book—Facing the Music: Short Stories by Larry Brown—made the journey from a writer's brain to readers' brains. Larry Brown is the author of two novels,Dirty Work andJoe, and two short-story collections,Facing the Music andBig Bad Love. His next book,On Fire, is a nonfiction account of his experiences in the Oxford, Mississippi, Fire Department. Liz Darhansoff is a literary agent with Darhansoff and Verrill Literary Agency, New York. Richard Howorth is an Oxford bookseller who serves on theParis Review's Booksellers' Advisory Board, the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Association. He chairs the ABA's Publisher Relations Committee and in 1986 was awarded the Charles S. Haslam Award for excellence in bookselling. Shannon Ravenel is editorial director of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and the editor of its annualNew Stories from, the South. From 1977 to 1990 she was series editor forBest American Short Stories, and she editedThe Best American Short Stories of the Eighties. Ina Stern is marketing director of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.     

Ann Browne,Developing Language and Literacy 3–8

Reading and Writing -     

Acupuncture for treating polycystic ovary syndrome: guidance for future randomized controlled trials

Objective

To provide guidance for future randomized controlled trials (RCTs) based on a review concerning acupuncture for treating polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

Methods

A comprehensive literature search was conducted in October 2015 using MEDLINE, EMBASE, SCISEARCH, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, the Cochrane Menstrual Disorders and Subfertility Group trials register, Allied and Complementary Medicine (AMED), China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), and the Wanfang databases. RCTs comparing either acupuncture with no/sham/pharmacological intervention or a combination of acupuncture and conventional therapy with conventional therapy in the treatment of PCOS were included in this review. A quality evaluation was performed for each of the included studies.

Results

Thirty-one RCTs were included in the review and were divided into four categories according to the type of intervention used in the comparator or control group. Menstrual frequency, hormones, anthropometrics, insulin sensitivity, blood lipids, and fertility were used as the main measurements to assess the effects of acupuncture on the patients with PCOS. Thirty trials, except for one, showed an improvement in at least one of the indicators of PCOS after acupuncture treatment. However, normalizing the methodological and reporting format remains an issue.

Conclusions

Based upon this review of current clinical trials concerning acupuncture for treating PCOS, we provide guidelines for better clinical trial design in the future.

     

Establishing a STEM Pipeline: Trends in Male and Female Enrollment and Performance in Higher Level Secondary STEM Courses

The purpose of this study was to understand enrollment and performance differences between male and females in higher level secondary STEM courses. This study analyzes performance and enrollment of 355,688 secondary students in higher level STEM courses. This research also enabled an exploration of country level differences. The enrollment research questions are evaluated using chi-square tests, frequency tables, and histograms. Performance research questions are analyzed with hierarchical linear regression and ANOVA with post hocs and Cohen’s d effect size measures. Results suggest that females enroll much less frequently in higher level secondary STEM courses. Females and males perform equally well.     

In‐school Experience Designed to Meet Individual Needs

Current policies at both the state and national levels emphasise the need for increased attention to teaching children with special needs and more extensive school‐based experience in teacher education courses. This paper reports an in‐school experience which was an integral part of an on‐campus subject that focused upon teaching children with special needs. It also addressed a range of issues currently of concern in pre‐service teacher education, including the nature of the in‐school experience, managing the needs of children with learning difficulties in an integrated classroom, overcoming the socialising effect of block practice teaching, reinforcing the relevance of campus‐based subjects, maintaining a balance between the formal teaching expectations and the nurturing roles of teachers, providing teacher educators with recent and relevant in‐school experience, and producing reflective teachers with an understanding and appreciation of the ‘art’ and the ‘science’ of teaching.     

Preschool Children's Symbolic Representation of Objects through Gestures

To investigate the symbolic quality of preschoolers' gestural representations in the absence of real objects, 48 children (16 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) performed 2 tasks. In the first task, they were asked to pretend to use 8 common objects (e.g., "pretend to brush your teeth with a toothbrush"). There was an age-related progression in the symbolic quality of gestural representations. 3- and 4-year-olds used mostly body part gestures (e.g., using an extended finger as the toothbrush), whereas 5-year-olds used imaginary object gestures (e.g., pretending to hold an imaginary toothbrush). To determine if children's symbolic skill is sufficiently flexible to allow them to use gestures other than those spontaneously produced in the first task, in the second task children were asked to imitate, for each object, a gesture modeled by an experimenter. The modeled gesture was different from the one the child performed on the first task (e.g., if the child used a body part gesture to represent a particular object, the experimenter modeled an imaginary object gesture for that object). Ability to imitate modeled gestures was positively related to age but was also influenced by the symbolic mode of gesture. 3-year-olds could not imitate imaginary object gestures as well as body part gestures, suggesting that young preschoolers have difficulty performing symbolic acts that exceed their symbolic level even when the acts are modeled. Results from both tasks provide strong evidence for a developmental progression from concrete body part to more abstract imaginary object gestural representations during the preschool years.     

Transnational comparisons of teacher expectation of mathematical functional ability in early years and Key Stage 1 pupils – a study undertaken in Hong Kong and England

The dominance of Asian communities in international league tables such as those produced by The Program for International Student Assessment, which monitors competence in literacy and numeracy, has resulted in a policy discourse from the English government of failing schools, deficit curricular and ineffective teachers. This in turn has led to a re-defining of the National Curriculum framework for pupils educated in England with greater focus given in the Early Years curriculum to Mathematical functions particularly those associated with skills in counting; understanding and using number; calculating simple addition and subtraction problems and the understanding of shape, space and measure. Drawing on research carried out in Hong Kong and England this article offers a cross-cultural comparison of the expectations of Early Years Teachers in terms of the capabilities of early learners in achieving elements of number competency. The study of teachers’ expectation is a neglected field in research when applied to compare intercultural achievement. In identifying divergent national expectations, the current panic over what constitutes an appropriate maths curriculum is critiqued and recommendations made for further exploration into teachers’ expectations as to the age and stage at which elements of the maths curriculum are introduced in English schools.