Maximizing your effectiveness

It is of no surprise to readers ofDay Care and Early Education that child care is an issue in today's political arena (Rieken, 1989; Willer, 1990). Many opinion polls, surveys, and interviews have been and are being conducted to gather public opinion regarding child care (Zinsser, 1989). Data are often collected and results presented in scholarly publications, and data are not fully utilized or are not presented in useful format to lay audiences.Sandra S. Osborne is Assistant Professor and Billie Warford is Adjunct Instructor and Director of the Early Childhood Project, Department of Health and Human Development, College of Education, Health and Human Development, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT.     

Phoneme awareness in language-delayed children: comparative studies and intervention

Our initial study compared 15 normally- developing and 13 language- delayed four- and- five- year- olds on a range of phoneme awareness tasks differing in the degree of explicit linguistic analysis required. The language- delayed group performed more poorly than the normally- developing children, and there were significant group differences on several tasks. A significant interaction effect reflected the particular difficulty the language- delayed group had with the more explicit tasks. Follow- up testing suggests that group differences are maintained over time and that the language- delayed children perform more poorly than the normally- developing children on tests of decoding and spelling at the end of first grade. An intervention study, training phoneme awareness skills in language-delayed kindergarten children, was undertaken with a new group of subjects. Fourteen language- delayed children participated in 16 training sessions over eight weeks. Fourteen normal and 14 language- delayed children served as controls. Only the language- delayed training group made significant gains from pre- to posttraining measures. Following training, the language-delayed training group performed similarly to normal controls and significantly better than language- delayed controls whom they had matched before intervention. One year later, the language-delayed children who received training maintained their gains on phoneme analysis tasks and performed significantly better than the language-delayed controls on reading measures. Educational implications are discussed.     

Brain Processes in Mothers and Nulliparous Women in Response to Cry in Different Situational Contexts: A Default Mode Network Study

SYNOPSIS

Objective: In everyday life, parents must respond to and interact with children while in different situational contexts. How situational contexts influence parents’ responses has not been systematically studied. Here we investigated mothers’ versus nonmothers’ neural responses to infant vocalizations in different situations with different task demands. Design: Using fMRI in 21 women (10 mothers), we explored the effects of being distracted by self-oriented (self-referential decisions about personality adjectives) versus goal-oriented (syllabic counting of personality adjectives) tasks while listening to infant cry in comparison with other emotional sounds (infant laughing, adult crying) on the activity of two medial nodes of the Default Mode Network (DMN): the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Results: In the self-oriented task while listening to infant cry, both mothers and nulliparas showed (weak) activation of the DMN; this response likely reflects a shift of attention from the task to the cry. In the goal-oriented task, mothers, not nulliparas, showed (weak) activation of the DMN; this result is compatible with interference of emotional sounds while attending to a goal-oriented task, an activity that deactivates the DMN. Conclusions: Mothers are prone to process infant cry and emotional sounds and are less distracted from doing so by situational contexts, demonstrating their greater sensitivity to emotional sounds such as cry. By contrast, situational context influenced brain responses to infant sounds in nulliparas.     

Cooperative Learning with Gifted and High-achieving Students: A review and meta-analyses of 12 studies

Should gifted and high-achieving students cooperate in homogeneous groups or do they learn better individually? Or should they learn together with less gifted peers in heterogeneous groups? Current empirical research is reviewed in this article and meta-analyses of available results in 12 published studies are performed. Results show that few methodologically sound studies can be found at present. In addition, researchers only considered a restricted spectrum of participants, focused on learning of relatively simple materials, measured only a restricted range of possible outcomes, and neglected processes and activities of the learners, which might determine outcomes of cooperative learning. Results therefore remain controversial even for fundamental issues like learning in homogeneous versus heterogeneous, mixed-ability groups. In spite of these limitations, analyses nevertheless show that cooperative learning offers strong potentials for further improving the quality of instruction with gifted and high-achieving students. Further empirical research is required to obtain more differentiated information on the various aspects of cooperative learning.     

A Probability Matching Approach to Further Education/Higher Education Transition in Scotland

As part of the impetus to increase and widen participation in the UK, and in Scotland in particular, there has been considerable effort put into creating links between Further Education Colleges (FECs) and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). However, because no unique identifier is used to track students between the two sectors, little is known in quantitative terms of the nature of this progression. In this article using substantial datasets, and an approach known as Probability Matching, we are able to provide novel data on the proportions of Scottish domiciled former FEC students within Scottish HEIs, and are able to compare the characteristics of this subset of all students with the whole cohort within HE in a given year, 1999–2000.     

Self-Cognition and Parental Brain

SYNOPSIS

A key feature of parenting is that it is observable starting from behaviors that are performed daily by adult caregivers during repeated interactions with the child. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research on parental brain should integrate settings that resemble ecologies of situations in which parents typically care for children. However, as our commentators point out, ecological settings in fMRI research are challenging and require a multiperspective approach that systematically considers psychological and behavioral complexities of “mommy brain” to better understand how contingent mental states of mothers articulate with specific multi-tasking situations.     

Nonverbal Executive Function is Mediated by Language: A Study of Deaf and Hearing Children

Studies have suggested that language and executive function (EF) are strongly associated. Indeed, the two are difficult to separate, and it is particularly difficult to determine whether one skill is more dependent on the other. Deafness provides a unique opportunity to disentangle these skills because in this case, language difficulties have a sensory not cognitive basis. In this study, deaf (n = 108) and hearing (n = 125) children (age 8 years) were assessed on language and a wide range of nonverbal EF tasks. Deaf children performed significantly less well on EF tasks, even controlling for nonverbal intelligence and speed of processing. Language mediated EF skill, but the reverse pattern was not evident. Findings suggest that language is key to EF performance rather than vice versa.     

Arguing to learn and learning to argue: Case studies of how students' argumentation relates to their scientific knowledge

In this study we investigated junior high school students' processes of argumentation and cognitive development in science and socioscientific lessons. Detailed studies of the relationship between argumentation and the development of scientific knowledge are rare. Using video and audio documents of small group and classroom discussions, the quality and frequency of students' argumentation was analyzed using a schema based on the work of Toulmin ( 1958 ). In parallel, students' development and use of scientific knowledge was also investigated, drawing on a schema for determining the content and level of abstraction of students' meaning‐making. These two complementary analyses enabled an exploration of their impact on each other. The microanalysis of student discourse showed that: (a) when engaging in argumentation students draw on their prior experiences and knowledge; (b) such activity enables students to consolidate their existing knowledge and elaborate their science understanding at relatively high levels of abstraction. The results also suggest that students can acquire a higher quality of argumentation that consists of well‐grounded knowledge with a relatively low level of abstraction. The findings further suggest that the main indicator of whether or not a high quality of argument is likely to be attained is students' familiarity and understanding of the content of the task. The major implication of this work for developing argumentation in the classroom is the need to consider the nature and extent of students' content‐specific experiences and knowledge prior to asking them to engage in argumentation. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 101–131, 2008