Assessing effectiveness and efficiency of academic interventions in school psychology journals: 1995–2005

This article reviews research in the four major school psychology journals: Journal of School Psychology, Psychology in the Schools, School Psychology Quarterly, and School Psychology Review. The function of the review was to provide school psychologists with a summary of academic interventions published through years 1995–2005, synthesize the commonalities of empirically based interventions, and report on the extent to which each article provides the reader the opportunity to understand the effects of the intervention with regard to the amount of instructional time required to implement it. Results of the review suggest that reading is most heavily investigated followed by math and, to a much lesser degree, written expression. Moreover, studies use a variety of designs including single subject and group designs. Finally, it is clear that a limited number of studies evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention with regard to the amount of instructional time needed to implement the intervention. In light of these findings and in addition to the two major functions of the review, recommendations for practice and future research are presented. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The developmental influence of sex composition in preschool classrooms: Boys fare worse in preschool classrooms with more boys

A multilevel modeling approach was employed to investigate the relation between sex composition and developmental change in 70 urban preschool classrooms. The research represents a unique contribution as (1) few studies have examined the influence of sex composition during the preschool years, (2) it represents the first research to use a continuous (i.e., sex ratio) as opposed to binary (i.e., mixed- versus single-sex) indicator for classroom sex composition, and (3) the sample represents an important and often neglected group (i.e., low-income children from urban schools). A series of HLM models were run, addressing the nested nature of the data (children within classrooms), and relating classroom sex composition to developmental change using the cognitive, motor, and social subscales from the Child Observation Record (COR). Overall, there were no main effects at the classroom-level for sex composition. However, a cross-level interaction indicated that, while girls’ development was not influenced by classroom sex composition, boys in classrooms with proportionally more boys fared significantly worse in terms of development as assessed by combined score on the COR. More specifically, this interaction was significant when predicting the COR cognitive subscale, but nonsignificant when predicting the COR social and motor subscales. This was true when controlling for the number of students at the classroom-level, as well as child's age and baseline ability (i.e., Time 1 COR) at the child-level. Implications for early childhood education policy are discussed.     

Changing a discipline in universities and a subject in schools: British geography in the 1950s–1970s

Geography emerged as an academic discipline in British universities in response to demands for trained teachers of the subject in the country’s burgeoning secondary schools and their curricula formed a seamless transition from one to the other. In the 1960s a major shift in the nature of the academic discipline – often termed the ‘quantitative and theoretical revolutions’ – created a breach between the two, but there were demands from within the university sector for changes to the school subject so that a new seamless transition could be instated. This essay charts the nature of those changes and how they were brought about by the key actors, both individual and institutional. Having created that apparent unity, subsequent changes saw the two educational sectors drift apart, although recent developments have sought to reinstate stronger links.