Complementary and alternative therapies

Complementary and alternative therapies are increasingly used by many pregnant women in the United States; however, limited research is available on many therapies. The number of studies should increase with the establishment of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine by the National Institutes of Health. This column reviews recent studies of both herbal medicines and alternative therapies used in pregnancy.     

父亲的眼睛

儿子酷爱橄榄球运动,父亲则长期做儿子的铁杆支持者。正是来自父亲源源不断的支持和鼓励,使儿子终于抓住机会证明了自己。     

Critical factors that influence a young person’s journey toward sustainable employment

International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance - This article examines the employment trajectories of 50 young job seekers to gain insight into the critical factors that influence a...     

Object-naming deficits in developmental dyslexia

This paper reports two experiments which focus on the object naming deficits of dyslexic readers. In Experiment 1, dyslexic and normal readers were asked to name objects depicted by pictures or following their spoken definition. Ten-year-old dyslexics named fewer objects correctly than other children of a similar age, performing only as well as a younger group of 8-year-old normal readers. This was true irrespective of the modality through which they were tested. In terms of naming latency, however, they were similar to comparison groups. In Experiment 2, nine-year-old dyslexic and normal readers performed as well as each other in a receptive vocabulary test in which pictures had to be matched to spoken words. However, once again, on a picture naming test, the dyslexics did less well than controls. We argue that dyslexic children are subject to verbal naming difficulties which cannot be accounted for by generally low levels of vocabulary knowledge. Their problems are attributable not to difficulties in semantic representation but to difficulties with the lexical-phonological representation of spoken words they know. We propose that, in turn, these difficulties are related to their memory and reading problems.     

In the dark II: spatial choice when access to extrinsic spatial cues is eliminated

Rats were tested in a specially constructed radial-arm maze that eliminated access to extramaze visual cues and allowed any effects of intramaze cues to be controlled. Despite this, choice accuracy was controlled by the spatial location of previously visited arms. Part of this control was attributed to vestibular or kinesthetic cues. This conclusion was corroborated by the finding that when explicit visual cues were moved from their standard (trained) spatial locations to novel locations, control of spatial choices was completely disrupted. The latter finding indicates that cues intrinsic to the rat (kinesthetic or vestibular information) and cues extrinsic to the rat (visual stimuli) operate in an integrated fashion.     

Cesarean birth from three research perspectives

Issues surrounding cesarean birth are of interest to researchers from varied disciplines and nations. In this column, three studies that examine aspects of cesarean birth are reviewed. One study presented a review of 11 studies and found differences in the perceptions of white and minority mothers toward labor, vaginal birth, and cesarean birth. In a second study on infant outcomes, Japanese researchers found differences in transient tachypnea in infants born in the first half of the 37th week gestation and those born in the second half of the 37th week and the 38th week of gestation. In a third study conducted in Norway, researchers found more complications when cesarean birth occurred at advanced dilation. The three studies' implications for childbirth educators are discussed.     

Boxing clever: using shoeboxes to support home–school knowledge exchange

A key tenet of the Home–School Knowledge Exchange Project is that children's learning will be enhanced if the knowledge and experience that are to be found both at home and in school can be brought together. In this paper we explore ways of connecting home and school to support literacy learning at Key Stage 1, focusing on the home‐to‐school direction. We discuss how shoeboxes, filled with children's artefacts, can support a range of literacy‐related activities in school. It is suggested that the extensive diversity of knowledge and interests reflected in the chosen objects presents teachers with an invaluable opportunity to personalise children's literacy learning.