Using Qualitative Evaluation Methods to Identify Exemplary Practices in Early Childhood Education

The proliferation of early childhood programs for children with and without disabilities has occurred without clear indicators or standards of program quality. Evaluations of these programs often consist of compliance monitoring or outcome assessment. Little attention is given to program context or the quality of individual components of the program. In this paper, an alternative evaluation model, a connoisseurship or professional review model using on-site observations, interviews, and document review, was used to identify exemplary practices in early childhood education in one large midwestern state. The results indicated that with proper training and support, early childhood professionals without experience in qualitative methods can become proficient in interviewing techniques, observation, and document review. The resulting case study reports were useful for identifying and describing exemplary practices across the state, demonstrating the potential for this alternative approach to evaluation in early childhood education.     

The 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science presented to Aravind Joshi

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science to Aravind Joshi for his fundamental contributions to natural language processing technology and to cognitive science, including particularly the development of the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) family of formalisms and tractable polynomial time algorithms that analyze the complex, varied surface word orders of human languages while simultaneously recovering local elementary syntactic domains corresponding to meaning. In addition, Joshi has been a major collaborator on a new theory of discourse coherence that has influenced all subsequent work on anaphora resolution, and is currently applying TAG to address modeling problems in the life sciences.     

Sustainability and distance learning: a diverse European experience?

Higher Education (HE) is experiencing disruption from technologies, demographics, the globalising world and longer life expectancy. Historically Higher Education has had a legacy of being seen as the requirement for an educated ‘elite’, there has been a policy ambition set in various countries (including the UK) for it to become the expectation for much wider segments of the population as a whole. As students become ‘everyone’ and learning becomes ‘all the time’ Distance Teaching and Research Institutions have a tremendous opportunity but there are also many disruptions and barriers to overcome. Higher Education institutions have an important role within Education for Sustainable Development and sustainable lifestyles; one of the important goals and targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development goals for 2030. Higher Education can contribute to sustainability in many ways – social, technical and environmental; globally and locally. In particular distance-learning universities due to the flexibility in the learning process, use of technologies, and inter-disciplinary approach to teaching and learning, constitute key factors in education for sustainable development. But what will this contribution look like? In this paper, the responses from senior leaders in four major European distance-learning universities are presented, compared and discussed. The tentative conclusions draw out some strategic imperatives for sustainable higher education in the twenty first century.     

Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project

Native Americans create, preserve, and organize knowledge within the context of community, thereby ensuring the inclusion of Native American philosophies. Historically, mainstream cataloging and classification systems have not adequately represented this knowledge. The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology was designed to incorporate an Indigenous perspective into mainstream controlled vocabularies. Using story as pedagogy, this article examines the conceptual foundations, theoretical framework, and application of the Thesaurus to a museum setting.     

Reading Words In and Out of Connected Text: The Impact of Context on Semantic and Orthographic Processing

The majority of naturalistic reading occurs within passages. Therefore, it is important to understand how reading in context affects the division of labor between semantic and orthographic processing. However, it is difficult to compare the cognitive processes elicited by reading in context and lists because of the perceptual differences that define them. In 2 experiments, undergraduate students read 72 different words divided across three conditions (context, semantic-list, and orthographic-list). Participants then completed a memory task that was used to estimate either the semantic processing (surprise recall; Experiment 1) or orthographic processing (word stem completion; Experiment 2) elicited during reading. In both experiments, memory performance for words read in context more closely resembled words read in the semantic-list condition and differed greatly from those read in the orthographic-list condition. We interpret these results as showing that contextual reading biases the division of labor toward semantic processing and away from orthographic processing.     

The impact of polytechnic institutes on the local economy

Tertiary Education and Management - Higher education institutions and, particularly, polytechnic institutes in Portugal are, generally speaking, recognized as the key stakeholders in regional...     

Losing the whole child? A national survey of primary education training provision for spiritual,moral, social and cultural development

International concerns about the performativity agenda in schools gives rise to concerns about the neglect of a holistic approach to teaching and learning. Whilst schools in England and Wales are legally obliged to promote the spiritual, moral, social and cultural (SMSC) development of children, little is known about how initial teacher training providers prepare trainees to do so. This project aims to address this gap in the literature. This paper details the findings of phase one of a National Survey which investigates trainers’ approaches to delivery and their views on the place of SMSC in primary schools. Findings suggest that trainers value SMSC, but time devoted to it is relatively low and policy changes are perceived to threaten SMSC’s security. The paper argues that it is vital that trainers empower trainees to understand the importance of holistic themes of their respective curricula, informed by critical engagement with theory, in order to avoid them being overshadowed by the performativity discourse.     

Technology-Mediated Writing Instruction in the Early Literacy Program: Perils,Procedures, and Possibilities

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine one kindergarten teacher's use of digital and multimodal technologies to mediate early writing instruction and explore the students' appropriation of that instruction to support their independent writing. Data sources included observations of writing instruction, as well as students' participation during independent writing time, student writing samples, and interviews with case study participants. Data were analyzed inductively using a semantic relationship analysis (Hatch, 2002). Results of the study revealed that the teacher used a range of technologies to demonstrate what it means to compose narrative texts and how young children could go about it. Students were attentive and motivated to participate in writing instruction and related activities, given their fascination with the technology and multimodal texts their teacher created. Students appropriated important concepts and strategies from their teacher's technology-mediated instruction, which they used to compose narrative texts during independent writing time.