Collaborative Cataloging within a Centralized Network: The Case of the University of the West Indies,Mona Campus

Efforts at networking and cooperation have flourished for some time at the University of the West Indies (UWI), a regional institution in the English-speaking Caribbean. Due to their common mission and shared goals, libraries within the system have collaborated on projects to enhance the services provided to their clients. In its attempt at collaboration, the Mona Campus established the UWI Mona Information Network, the primary goal of which is the creation of a campus-wide online catalog with member libraries having access to a larger pool of resources. Most of the departmental libraries within the system have struggled with their inability to adequately acquire and provide access to their collections. To this end some of these libraries have collaborated with the UWI Library to have their holdings added to the online public access catalog (OPAC). This article presents an overview of the collaborative efforts of the UWI Mona Libraries.     

THE STEALTH GERONTOLOGYTM PROGRAM: TRAINING TEACHERS TO INFUSE AGING AND AGE-RELATED CONTENT INTO PUBLIC SCHOOL CLASSROOMS

Preparing youngsters for an aging society requires teachers who keep pace with health science research. The Stealth Gerontology^TM program educates teachers regarding aging-related issues. The design and assessment of the program are reported in this paper. Teachers attended sessions including direct instruction and hands-on participation (e.g., laboratories). Sound educational methods were modeled through interactions with university researchers and lessons from the Positively Aging^® curriculum, while highlighting aging topics matched to educational standards. Participants showed significant improvement (p ≤ 0.05) in eight of nine topics in multiple-choice pre- and posttests. Evaluations indicate a high degree of success.     

The unique role of lexical accessibility in predicting kindergarten emergent literacy

The goal of this longitudinal study was to examine how lexical quality predicts the emergence of literacy abilities in 169 Dutch kindergarten children before formal reading instruction has started. At the beginning of the school year, a battery of precursor measures associated with lexical quality was related to the emergence of letter knowledge and word decoding. Confirmatory factor analysis evidenced five domains related to lexical quality, i.e., vocabulary, phonological coding, phonological awareness, lexical retrieval and phonological working memory. Structural equation modeling showed that the development of letter knowledge during the year could be predicted from children’s phonological awareness and lexical retrieval, and the emergence of word decoding from their phonological awareness and letter knowledge. It is concluded that it is primarily the accessibility of phonological representations in the mental lexicon that predicts the emergence of literacy in kindergarten.     

Playful maths! The influence of play-based learning on academic performance of Palestinian primary school children

Educational Research for Policy and Practice - This study explores the relationship between play-based learning and achievement in mathematics in Palestinian elementary school children. Forty...     

Classroom Interpreting and Visual Information Processing in Mainstream Education for Deaf Students: Live or Memorex?

This study examined visual information processing and learning in classrooms including both deaf and hearing students. Of particular interest were the effects on deaf students' learning of live (three-dimensional) versus video-recorded (two-dimensional) sign language interpreting and the visual attention strategies of more and less experienced deaf signers exposed to simultaneous, multiple sources of visual information. Results from three experiments consistently indicated no differences in learning between three-dimensional and two-dimensional presentations among hearing or deaf students. Analyses of students' allocation of visual attention and the influence of various demographic and experimental variables suggested considerable flexibility in deaf students' receptive communication skills. Nevertheless, the findings also revealed a robust advantage in learning in favor of hearing students.