Home–School Literacy Bags for Twenty-first Century Preschoolers

Combining home–school literacy bags with preschool family literature circles provided a strong foundation for family involvement at home and school during this year-long Reading Partners project, and helped parents become essential partners in their children’s literacy development. Using home–school literacy bags, children and parents learned how to combine expressive arts and emergent literacy strategies including alphabet recognition, phonemic and phonological awareness, and oral language fluency. State-of-the-art activities designed for each of the multiple intelligences met the needs of diverse students with many different learning styles and interests. As families participated in fall and spring school-based Festivals in which they shared the literacy bags in small group family literature circles, they demonstrated children’s emerging literacy skills in a relaxed, yet highly engaging atmosphere.     

Experimental Evaluation of the Value Added by Raising a Reader and Supplemental Parent Training in Shared Reading

Research Findings: In an effort toward developing a comprehensive, effective, scalable, and sustainable early childhood education program for at-risk populations, we conducted an experimental evaluation of the value added by 2 family involvement programs to the Texas Early Education Model (TEEM). A total of 91 preschool classrooms that served minority populations of low socioeconomic status were randomly assigned to TEEM, TEEM plus Raising a Reader (RAR), or TEEM plus RAR augmented by Family Nights. Assessments of oral language and print knowledge were completed by more than 500 children at the beginning and end of the school year. Multilevel analyses of covariance controlled for classroom nesting and individual differences in age, ethnicity, and pretest scores. Although RAR alone demonstrated no added value, augmentation of RAR with Family Nights demonstrated significant impacts on measures of oral language (ts = 1.81–2.51, .05 < ps < .01) and print knowledge (t = 2.39, p < .01). Practice or Policy: Thus, parent training in shared reading practices appears to be necessary for children to benefit from programs that enrich the home literacy environment. That the combined program particularly benefited children who started preschool lagging behind in school readiness (ts = 1.64–2.49, ps < .05) suggests that this comprehensive model offers hope for closing the achievement gap.     

Conditioned avoidance responses survive contingency degradation in the garden slug,Lehmannia valentiana

Joint presentations of a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned stimulus (US) strengthen the contingency between them, whereas presentations of one stimulus without the other degrade this contingency. For example, the CS can be presented without the US either before conditioning (CS–no US and then CS–US; latent inhibition) or after conditioning (CS–US and then CS–no US; extinction). In vertebrate subjects and several invertebrate species, a time lapse usually results in a return of the conditioned response, or spontaneous recovery. However, in land mollusks, spontaneous recovery from extinction has only recently been reported, and response recovery after latent inhibition has not been reported. In two experiments, using conditioned aversion to a food odor as a measure of learning and memory retention, we observed contingency degradation via latent inhibition (Experiment 1) and extinction (Experiment 2) in the common garden slug, Lehmannia valentiana. In both situations, the contingency degradation procedure successfully attenuated conditioned responding, and delaying testing by several days resulted in recovery of the conditioned response. This suggests that the CS–US association survived the degradation manipulation and was retained over an interval of several days.     

Lessons learned from single service point implementations

Interest in consolidating service points within health sciences libraries continues. This article proposes a definition of a library single service point and mentions some notable examples in academic health sciences libraries. The experiences of two of these libraries are summarized and compared, and the advice culled from those experiences is shared. The advice is in the form of sharing lessons learned, answering six frequently asked questions about combining services and staff under a single service umbrella. The article offers insights for other library staff considering this type of service reorganization.     

Successful Community College Transfer Students Speak Out

The community college as the entranceway into the baccalaureate degree is becoming a prevalent choice for students. This study was a qualitative approach to understanding attitudes, behaviors, and knowledge acquisition by successful community college transfer students. University students who transferred from a community college and were making successful progress toward completing the baccalaureate degree participated in focus groups to answer questions about the transfer process. Successful transfer students are highly motivated, persistent, engaged, believe they were well prepared by the community colleges for university junior level studies, and have recommendations for community colleges and universities in improving the transfer process.