The Case for Early,Targeted Interventions to Prevent Academic Failure

The persistent achievement gaps among children of different race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status in the United States represent an issue that has commanded public, policy, and research attention on and off for about 100 years now, and it is once again in the forefront of policy-making agendas. Debates nevertheless abound on the most promising and cost-effective strategies to address the problem. We examine critically the available evidence on the benefits and costs of early childhood education and conclude that early, vigorous interventions targeted at disadvantaged children offer the best chance to substantially reduce gaps in school readiness and increase the productivity of our educational systems. The available evidence fails to provide a complete road map for future investments, however. Hence, we propose a program of challenge grants to states and their subunits, coupled with waivers from regulation, to spur innovation and experimentation within this important research area. We provide examples of the types of experiments that could be funded and discuss important considerations in the development and implementation of such a research grants program.     

Making training more cognitively effective: Making videos interactive

The cost of health and safety (H&S) failures to the UK industry is currently estimated at up to £6.5 billion per annum, with the construction sector suffering unacceptably high levels of work-related incidents. Better H&S education across all skill levels in the industry is seen as an integral part of any solution. Traditional lecture-based courses often fail to recreate the dynamic realities of managing H&S on site and therefore do not sufficiently create deeper cognitive learning (which results in remembering and using what was learned). The use of videos is a move forward, but passively observing a video is not cognitively engaging and challenging, and therefore learning is not as effective as it can be. This paper describes the development of an interactive video in which learners take an active role. While observing the video, they are required to engage, participate, respond and be actively involved. The potential for this approach to be used in conjunction with more traditional approaches to H&S was explored using a group of 2nd-year undergraduate civil engineering students. The formative results suggested that the learning experience could be enhanced using interactive videos. Nevertheless, most of the learners believed that a blended approach would be most effective.     

Taking on Bourdieu’s ‘destiny effect’: theorising the development and sustainability of a socially just second-chance schooling initiative using a Bourdieusian framework

This article aims to theorise a storyline account of a collaborative three-year action research project into schooling re-engagement using a Bourdieusian framework. In the article we discuss how we (two teachers and a social worker) developed an alternative senior secondary school that re-engaged a sizable minority of marginalised young people back into formalised learning and consider how this school became a significant and sustainable educational alternative. Our work during this developmental period drew us into community-based activism enacting socially just curricular and pedagogical experiments. Through networked political action for schooling justice in concert with critical friends (our university partners), the marginalised young people we worked with and supportive regional youth stakeholders, we reconstructed our professional habitus as professionals into a more enabling rendering and strived to proffer through our relational, pedagogical and curricular work with students more of a transformative habitus. Our curricular and activist work inside the community extended the field of schooling relations into a more socially just orientation. This more enabling community field merged with our schooling field and enabled us to source political capital engendering secure, recurrent school funding and a purpose-built schooling facility. We claim that the market logics of schooling significantly influenced our beginning enrolment growth trajectory, and discuss how these logics compromised our ability to break through Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘destiny effect’. Since its inception in 2003, the Second Chance Community College has offered a comprehensive senior secondary schooling programme for more than 1000 young people. Throughout its 12-year history, the majority of students have gone on to secure work, apprenticeships and tertiary study but only 10% of students have successfully completed their final year of schooling.     

Analysis of named entity recognition and linking for tweets

Applying natural language processing for mining and intelligent information access to tweets (a form of microblog) is a challenging, emerging research area. Unlike carefully authored news text and other longer content, tweets pose a number of new challenges, due to their short, noisy, context-dependent, and dynamic nature. Information extraction from tweets is typically performed in a pipeline, comprising consecutive stages of language identification, tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and entity disambiguation (e.g. with respect to DBpedia). In this work, we describe a new Twitter entity disambiguation dataset, and conduct an empirical analysis of named entity recognition and disambiguation, investigating how robust a number of state-of-the-art systems are on such noisy texts, what the main sources of error are, and which problems should be further investigated to improve the state of the art.     

Seasonal Variation in Physical Activity Among Preschool Children in a Northern Canadian City

Little research has examined seasonal differences in physical activity (PA) levels among children. Proxy reports of PA were completed by 1,715 parents on their children in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Total PA (TPA) minutes were calculated, and each participant was classified as active, somewhat active, or inactive. Logistic regression models were conducted to examine associations between PA status and seasons. Significant seasonal differences were observed for TPA, weekday PA, weekend PA, and active play. Children were significantly more likely to be physically active in the summer and spring and somewhat physically active in the summer and fall, relative to winter. Children living in cold climates are less likely to be physically active in the winter     

Coping Strategies of Caribbean “Problem Students”

Abstract   The coping strategies of middle adolescents (14–16 years) generate interest amongst educators, parents, school psychologists and school counsellors. This study, using a phenomenological approach, examined the coping strategies of ‘problem’ adolescents in the Caribbean in regard to their interactions with peers and teachers. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of twenty middle adolescents in Barbados. The adolescents’ efforts to manage problems in the school environment suggested that they actively sought to prevent problems from progressing to a maladaptive level. An apparent sequence of coping behaviours emerged from the qualitative data analysis. The sequence involves a dynamic process of seven cognitive decision-making and behavioural steps that the adolescents engaged in, in their quest to manage and effectively cope with daily problems. Based on the findings, recommendations are presented for working with adolescents who demonstrate problem behaviours within the school environment.     

Developing Teachers' Classroom Interactions: A Description of a Video Review Process for Early Childhood Education Students

This article describes a video review process for providing feedback to students and documents students' teaching practices using the CLASS in a practicum course and student teaching. Students videotaped themselves in their field-based settings and then met with the course instructors and classmates in small groups to review strengths and challenges of their teaching using the CLASS framework of teacher–child interactions. These videos were also coded by trained CLASS observers across 10 dimensions in the areas of emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support. Results from preservice teachers' CLASS ratings indicate a pattern similar to national data sets using the CLASS, higher scores in the emotional support and classroom organization domains than in the domain of instructional support. Also, findings from the current study revealed that CLASS scores declined from students' practicum placement to the end of student teaching in the domain of emotional support and specifically in the dimensions of regard for student perspectives and behavior management. The process of using videos for providing feedback in field-based experiences is discussed as well as implications for teacher development in light of students' CLASS scores and changes in CLASS scores.     

The impact of individual efficacy beliefs on group goal selection and group goal commitment

Collective efficacy research has begun to progress from simply trying to verify the relationship between collective efficacy and performance to examining the mechanisms through which collective efficacy impacts on performance. To test hypotheses concerning the impact of collective efficacy on group goal selection and commitment, 24 participants were assigned to triads (consisting of the participant and two confederates) and performed two time-trials on cycle ergometers. Before each trial, the participants were asked to select both a finishing time and position goal for their group and to indicate their commitment towards these goals. After trial 1, the participants were assigned to either a high or low collective efficacy condition and received appropriate bogus performance feedback. Analysis of variance and post-hoc tests revealed that participants in the low collective efficacy group significantly reduced both finishing time and group position goals from trial 1 to trial 2, whereas participants in the high collective efficacy group maintained their goals. These results provide support for Bandura's suggestions concerning the mechanisms through which collective efficacy impacts upon performance.