Should great lakes city build a new power plant? How youth navigate socioscientific issues

There is a growing consensus that simply learning enough science to decipher public debates on socioscientific issues will not make citizens better equipped to handle the complex and ill‐structured problems these controversial issues present. This study highlights the interaction and complex interplay between youth authored and appropriated frames for making sense of socioscientific issues. To do so, we analyze how two middle‐school aged youth, in an after‐school program focused on green energy technologies, made sense of and took a stance on whether their city should build a new hybrid power plant over the course of a 13‐week unit. Using critical sociocultural perspectives on learning and qualitative case study, we examined how the two youth navigated the issue and the resources, scientific and otherwise, they leveraged in defining the problem spaces involved in whether their city should build a new power plant. Our findings indicate that the scientific knowledge youth brought with them and acquired over the course of the investigation influenced how they made sense of the issue, but their knowledge was deeply connected to a range of personal and public discourses that influenced how they defined the issue and why it mattered to them. In particular, it was through how they framed their range of knowledge and experiences that they were able to recognize the multi‐dimensional nature of the problem and propose complex solutions resonant with the science they understood. Our study offers conceptual tools for teaching and learning socioscientific issues. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 541–567, 2012     

Components and context: exploring sources of reading difficulties for language minority learners and native english speakers in urban schools

Drawing on the cognitive and ecological domains within the componential model of reading, this longitudinal study explores heterogeneity in the sources of reading difficulties for language minority learners and native English speakers in urban schools. Students (N = 150) were followed from first through third grade and assessed annually on standardized English language and reading measures. Structural equation modeling was used to investigate the relative contributions of code-related and linguistic comprehension skills in first and second grade to third grade reading comprehension. Linguistic comprehension and the interaction between linguistic comprehension and code-related skills each explained substantial variation in reading comprehension. Among students with low reading comprehension, more than 80% demonstrated weaknesses in linguistic comprehension alone, whereas approximately 15% demonstrated weaknesses in both linguistic comprehension and code-related skills. Results were remarkably similar for the language minority learners and native English speakers, suggesting the importance of their shared socioeconomic backgrounds and schooling contexts.     

What Counts? Sources of Knowledge in Children’s Acquisition of the Successor Function

Although many U.S. children can count sets by 4 years, it is not until 5½–6 years that they understand how counting relates to number—that is, that adding 1 to a set necessitates counting up one number. This study examined two knowledge sources that 3½- to 6-year-olds (N = 136) may leverage to acquire this “successor function”: (a) mastery of productive rules governing count list generation; and (b) training with “+1” math facts. Both productive counting and “+1” math facts were related to understanding that adding 1 to sets entails counting up one number in the count list; however, even children with robust successor knowledge struggled with its arithmetic expression, suggesting they do not generalize the successor function from “+1” math facts.     

The Implications of COVID-19 for Early Childhood Education in Ethiopia: Perspectives from Parents and Caregivers

Early Childhood Education Journal - Recent research on the effects of COVID-19 on school closures has mainly focused on primary and secondary education, with extremely limited attention to early...     

The day care and early education curriculum planning guide for May,June, and July

With custodial care the nemesis of parents, educators, and funding sources, a prime concern of child-care and early education people, and that includes teachers and family day care providers as well as other caregivers and administrators, is finding ways to provide the high-quality developmental care that all of us want for our children. This is the second in a series of four month-by-month curriculum planning guides to daily activities for preschoolers designed to keep you and your children busy for quite a while. And though it might not be obvious, virtually every activity has readiness of some kind built right in. So go ahead—enjoy! They're good for you, and the children too.Our thanks to Macmillan, Inc., publishers of Teacher magazine, for permission to adapt for this series some of the material by Ms. Blue that appeared in their Early Education Guide between September 1975 and May/June 1976.Rose Blue is an early childhood educator, an editor, and the author of over ten books for children and young adults. Correspondence can be addressed to her at 1320 51st Street, Brooklyn, New York 11219.     

The Long-Term Consequences of Infant Day-Care and Mother-Infant Attachment

The aim of this study was to explore the within-group effects of mother-infant attachment and day-care on children's social and emotional adaptation at 42 months and in the early school years. For this high-risk sample, the effects of day-care depended on the quality of mother-infant attachment. Day-care appeared to have a negative effect for secure children but had a positive influence for insecure children. For the secure group, children in day-care were more negative and avoidant at 42 months, and they were more externalizing and aggressive in kindergarten compared to the home-reared group. In contrast, day-care children who were insecurely attached were less withdrawn and more agentic. Overall, day-care children were rated higher on externalizing behavior in kindergarten than home-reared children, but no differences were found in the later school years. The sequelae of attachment indicated that security of attachment during infancy differentially predicted later adaptation for day-care and home-reared children. Attachment was related to later adaptation for home-reared children but did not predict later adaptation for day-care children.     

Federal student financial aid awards as subsidies for higher education: What kinds of institutions are we supporting?

This paper attempts to shed light on the following question: What kinds of four-year institutions of higher learning benefit the most from federal student financial aid programs? We address this question by investigating how institutional quality, institutional mission, and the student's average net cost of attendance covary with average Pell grant, SEOG grant, GSL loan, and college work-study financial aid awards. Our sample is comprised of 254 nonproprietary four-year public institutions of higher learning and 499 nonproprietary four-year private institutions of higher learning.     

Memory and Speed: Their Role in the Relation of Infant Information Processing to Later IQ

This study examined the extent to which memory and processing speed accounted for relations we had found earlier between infant information processing and childhood IQ. The measures of speed and memory were obtained when the children were 11 years of age using paper-and-pencil tasks and an extensive battery of computer-administered tasks. The relations of 7 month visual recognition memory and 1 years cross-modal transfer to 11 years IQ were both substantially reduced with statistical control of factors dericed from these measures. These results suggest that speed and memory underlie some of the infant-childhood continuities in cognition. Path and stuctural equation modeling indicated that the significant pathways from 7 month visual recognition memory to 11 year IQ were nboth directr and indirect, the indirect paths going through memory and speed.     

Ontogeny of long-term,nonassociative memory in the rat

The primary purpose of the present study was to assess the ontogeny of nonassociative learning and memory in 16-, 30-, and 75-day-old rats. In each of three experiments, habituation of the orienting response to a novel auditory stimulus was measured. The orienting response is an unconditioned reaction elicited by innocuous environmental stimulation that habituates with repeated stimulus presentations. Both an autonomic component (heart-rate deceleration) and a behavioral index (head jerk) of the orienting response were recorded in this study. Although no age differences in rate of habituation (i.e., rate of nonassociative learning) were found (see Experiment 1), a marked effect of age on retention of habituation was observed. Preweanling rats retained habituation of the orienting response to an auditory stimulus for less than 4 h (Experiment 2), whereas adult animals exhibited no forgetting even after a 1-week interval (Experiment 3). These results are discussed in terms of (1) demonstrations of age-related differences in associative memory, (2) the persistence of nonassociative memories in adults, and (3) the significance of the orienting response as a measure of retention of nonassociative learning.