Children's Early Decontextualized Talk Predicts Academic Language Proficiency in Midadolescence

This study examines whether children's decontextualized talk—talk about nonpresent events, explanations, or pretend—at 30 months predicts seventh-grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language (AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL proficiency has been identified as an important predictor of adolescent text comprehension. Yet research on precursors to AL proficiency is scarce. Child decontextualized talk is known to be a predictor of early discourse development, but its relation to later language outcomes remains unclear. Forty-two children and their caregivers participated in this study. The proportion of child talk that was decontextualized emerged as a significant predictor of seventh-grade AL proficiency, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, parent decontextualized talk, child total words, child vocabulary, and child syntactic comprehension.     

Finding Common Ground: A Synthesis of Science and Mathematics Teacher Educators’ Experiences with Professional Growth

The seven articles that comprise this Special Issue examine the professional growth of mathematics and science teacher educators across different contexts and different foci of who is the teacher educator being studied. Despite these differences, a common thread running throughout these seven articles is the need for learning to be situated in collaboration with others. In this final article, we examine the contribution of these articles through two perspectives: that of the collaborative contexts supporting the professional growth of mathematics and science teacher educators, and the role of disciplinary knowledge as part of the purpose for teacher educators’ professional growth. We notice that collaboration can take on very different structures in supporting teacher educators’ professional learning due to the different purposes and roles of the teacher educators in the studies. We also notice that while collaboration figures as an important component in all of the studies, the disciplinary specific aspects of collaboration, i.e., how collaboration might be negotiated differently by teacher educators in mathematics and science, is still not well understood. Overall, these articles provide important insights that help to shed new light on the complex and multifaceted nature of teacher educators’ learning and growth and provide productive avenues for future research.

     

The Vestiges of Childhood Interparental Conflict: Adolescent Sensitization to Recent Interparental Conflict

This study examined whether childhood interparental conflict moderated the mediational pathway involving adolescent exposure to interparental conflict, their negative emotional reactivity to family conflict, and their psychological problems in a sample of 235 children (M_age = 6 years). Significant moderated-mediation findings indicated that the mediational path among Wave 4 interparental conflict during adolescence, change in youth negative reactivity (Waves 4–5), and their psychological problems (Waves 4–6) was significant for teens who experienced low, rather than high, levels of childhood interparental conflict (Waves 1–3). Supporting the stress sensitization model, analyses showed that adolescents exposed to high interparental conflict during childhood evidenced greater increases in negative reactivity than their peers when recent parental conflicts were mild.     

Interventions for reading difficulties: a comparison of response to intervention by ELL and EFL struggling readers

This article explores whether struggling readers from different primary language backgrounds differ in response to phonologically based remediation. Following random assignment to one of three reading interventions or to a special education reading control program, reading and reading-related outcomes of 166 struggling readers were assessed before, during, and following 105 intervention hours. Struggling readers met criteria for reading disability, were below average in oral language and verbal skills, and varied in English as a first language (EFL) versus English-language learner (ELL) status. The research-based interventions proved superior to the special education control on both reading outcomes and rate of growth. No differences were revealed for children of EFL or ELL status in intervention outcomes or growth during intervention. Oral language abilities at entry were highly predictive of final outcomes and of reading growth during intervention, with greater language impairment being associated with greater growth.     

Auditing for Score Inflation Using Self-Monitoring Assessments: Findings From Three Pilot Studies

Test-based accountability often produces score inflation. Most studies have evaluated inflation by comparing trends on a high-stakes test and a lower stakes audit test. However, Koretz and Beguin (2010) noted weaknesses of audit tests and suggested self-monitoring assessments (SMAs), which incorporate audit items into high-stakes tests. This article reports the first three trials of SMAs, evaluating whether SMAs can detect inflation that had already been documented. The studies were conducted with mathematics tests in three grades. Despite severe conservative biases, the audit component functioned as expected in many of the trials. The difference in performance between nonaudit and audit items was associated with factors that earlier research showed to be related to test preparation and score inflation, such as scoring just below the Proficient cut in the previous year and school poverty. However, a number of null findings underscore the need for additional research into the design of audit items.     

Understanding and Controlling Learning Operations in Special Education

Developments arising from recent theory‐directed attempts to understand learning are exposing weaknesses in the monopoly position attained by the operant model in special education. These new developments attest to the importance, the primacy and the functional significance of learning to use and to relate events (stimuli) in the environment. They also highlight the way in which the operant model excludes important learning details from consideration, not because they are intrinsically unmeasurable, but because measurable manifestations of them are not available at the time learning is taking place. Instructional technology, when updated to take into account these new developments, should be able to provide more reliable and more successful acquision, more precision in task analyses and, especially, more success in complex, longitudinal learning domains. Developing new technologies to supplement the successful operant ones should enable us to set higher expectations for success with, for example, intellectually disabled people in those domains in which they traditionally fail.     

The Impact of Science Fiction Film on Student Understanding of Science

Researchers who have investigated the public understanding of science have argued that fictional cinema and television has proven to be particularly effective at blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. The rationale for this study lies in the notion that to teach science effectively, educators need to understand how popular culture influences their students’ perception and understanding of science. Using naturalistic research methods in a diverse middle school we found that students who watched a popular science fiction film, The Core, had a number of misunderstandings of earth science concepts when compared to students who did not watch the movie. We found that a single viewing of a science fiction film can negatively impact student ideas regarding scientific phenomena. Specifically, we found that the film leveraged the scientific authority of the main character, coupled with scientifically correct explanations of some basic earth science, to create a series of plausible, albeit unscientific, ideas that made sense to students.     

The Severity of State Truancy Policies and Chronic Absenteeism

ABSTRACT

Since the Common School era, states have maintained truancy laws to ensure that students attend school. However, we know little about the severity of these laws and their relationship to student outcomes, particularly absenteeism. In this study, we survey state education statutes to document the severity of truancy policies. We estimate the relationship between these truancy policies and rates of chronic absenteeism via multilevel models using data on all U.S. public schools from the Office of Civil Rights. We find that most students live in states where they may be referred to legal authorities for levels of absenteeism below federal standards. We find little evidence that states with truancy policies have lower chronic absenteeism after adjusting for demographic and other characteristics. However, while non-White high-school students are overrepresented among chronic absences overall, they have rates of chronic absenteeism comparable to their White peers in states with less severe truancy policies.     

Impact of sustained professional development in STEM on outcome measures in a diverse urban district

Sustained professional development can support STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) reform. The authors describe a 3-year study of sustained professional development for 3 diverse urban schools across the salient factors of fidelity of implementation of project-based learning, development of professional learning communities, and student achievement. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected. The students who experienced the greatest fidelity of implementation exhibited the greatest gains (d = 1.41–2.03) on standardized test scores, while those with the lowest fidelity of implementation exhibited negative gains (d = –0.16 to –0.08). Qualitative data indicated teachers perceived there were multiple benefits from the implementation of project-based learning.