Impacts of a Comprehensive School Readiness Curriculum for Preschool Children at Risk for Educational Difficulties

This article reports findings from a cluster‐randomized study of an integrated literacy‐ and math‐focused preschool curriculum, comparing versions with and without an explicit socioemotional lesson component to a business‐as‐usual condition. Participants included 110 classroom teachers from randomized classrooms and approximately eight students from each classroom (N = 760) who averaged 4.48 (SD = 0.44) years of age at the start of the school year. There were positive impacts of the two versions of the curriculum on language, phonological awareness, math, and socioemotional outcomes, but there were no added benefits to academic or socioemotional outcomes for the children receiving explicit socioemotional instruction. Results are discussed with relevance to early childhood theory, policy, and goals of closing the school readiness gap.     

Stay Behind the Yellow Line: Young Children Constructing Knowledge from an Art Exhibition

Studies exploring very young children visiting museums and art galleries are few. The majority of research about museum and gallery visitors explores family group interactions. This paper examines the findings of a study involving three‐ and four‐year‐old children visiting an art exhibition in a national museum on more than one occasion. The children's construction of knowledge about being a museum visitor and exhibitor indicates their ability to develop an appreciation of art and an understanding of the purposes of museums and art galleries.     

Leveraging Change to Integrate Library and Informatics Competencies into a New CTSC Curriculum: A Program Evaluation

This program evaluation reports on the curricular development and integration of library, biomedical informatics, and scholarly communications (LBS) skills into a required informatics course for a new graduate degree program in the University of New Mexico's Clinical and Translational Sciences Center (CTSC). The course built on the opportunity presented by the new degree program to integrate LBS competencies rarely included in most traditional clinical research training programs. This report tracks the experiences and evaluations of two cohorts of graduate students who have completed the course. This article presents lessons learned on curricular integration and offers thoughts for future work.     

Selected List of GLBT Academic Publications

An annotated list is presented describing twenty-one peer-reviewed journals that cover significant aspects of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) community, in whole or in part, in a scholarly manner. The titles included are a selective and representative sampling. The entry for each periodical includes the following information: periodical title, publisher/editor and address, basic information, publication data, content, Internet information, book review information, and an abstract.     

Preservice teachers respond to And Tango Makes Three: deconstructing disciplinary power and the heteronormative in teacher education

This study employs Foucualdian concepts to analyse macro and micro contexts of publicly spoken and silent discourses describing ‘homosexuality,’ ‘education’ and ‘teacher’ in order to identify teacher subject positions available to preservice teachers. The macro context is analysed by tracing heteronormative discourses found in newspaper stories involving teachers and public schools that address conflicting views of homosexuality. The macro context analysis indicates two binary teacher subject positions: martyred (unemployed) teacher/silent (employed) teacher and sophisticated teacher/unsophisticated teacher. The micro context analysis is of preservice teachers' responses to And Tango Makes Three, a picture book by Richardson and Parnell. This analysis demonstrates how preservice teachers take up and negotiate teacher subject positions found in the macro analysis. Combined, the analyses allow the researchers to consider how preservice teachers' performances of teacher subjectivity open up possibilities for re-imagining new teacher subject positions and what this might mean for the practice of teacher educators.     

Have We Passed Peak Book? The Uncoupling of Book Sales from Economic Growth

This paper uses time series data on UK book sales to establish what correlation exists between the national income of a country and its sales of books. This is tested by comparing series data in real terms for GDP per capita and for various data series for the UK market, including sales invoiced by publishers and point of sale data on consumer purchasing. The first period, from 1985 to 1999, shows a strong relationship between total sales and GDP per capita. In the second period, from 2001 to 2015, the link appears to disappear when we examine invoiced sales from publishers, even before the impact of the 2008 crisis. This is also including the growth of digital sales towards the end of the period. The direct consumer data shows sales tracking GDP until the onset of the financial crisis; thereafter the only trade sector to have kept pace with GDP is children’s, and this contrasts with the areas of adult fiction and non-fiction. Have we therefore seen a structural shift in the book market? If we have passed peak book, what has brought about this uncoupling of book sales from economic growth? Factors are considered including changes in retail, competition from other media, and a prioritization of experience over the accumulation of stuff.     

The effects of practice and orienting activities on learning from interactive video

The purpose of this study was to examine the combined effects of orienting activities and levels of practice on learning from interactive video. Participants were 72 college students. Each participant was randomly assigned to an orienting activity group and to one of three practice groups: No Practice, Limited Practice, or Elaborate Practice. The lesson, which focused on characteristics of various artists and art periods, included practice for one half of the facts and applications cued initially via the orienting activity. The posttest included both new and repeated items for both facts and applications taught during the lesson. Results indicated significant main effect differences related to item familiarity and practice. In addition, interactions were detected between type of learning and practice, and item familiarity and practice.