Can You Be a PESCaterian Among the Fort Worth Stockyards?

Yes you can, but you don’t have to eat only fish! All you have to do is follow the progress of the Protocol for Exchanging Serial Content (PESC) Working Group. The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) charged this group with delivering a recommended practice that will improve the interactions among libraries, archives, indexing services, content aggregators, publishers, and content creators, all needing to exchange serial data and work with digital files of serials. It will help them process a wide range of files that may be text based, image based, text with images, or some other combination, coded in a variety of file formats such as XML, EPUB, HTML, PDF, or ONIX. Laurie Kaplan discussed the PESC Working Group’s approach to this challenge.     

Reducing Violence in Non-controlling Ways: A Change Program Based on Self Determination Theory

This paper presents and examines the first school change program focusing on violence and caring based on self-determination theory (Deci &; Ryan, 2012 Deci, E. L., &; Ryan, R. M. (2012). Overview of self-determination theory. In The Oxford handbook of human motivation (pp. 85–107). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]). The program aimed at promoting teachers' capacity to cope with violence and enhance caring without becoming more controlling. Comparisons of the effects of a 22-month-long program in three intervention schools and three control schools indicated that the program (a) reduced violent student behavior and controlling teacher behavior and (b) enhanced caring student behavior and active teacher response to violence. The results suggest that exposure to self-determination theory (SDT) concepts may promote a firm, yet non-controlling, teacher response to violence. More generally, the results highlight the potential for incorporating SDT ideas in violence reduction programs.     

Stability and patterns of classroom quality in German early childhood education and care

Many education systems worldwide have dedicated a significant amount of resources to improve quality levels in early childhood education and care. Research can contribute to this goal by providing information about conditions of high-quality education and care and reasons for changes in the quality provided to children. This study therefore analyzes the stability of educational quality and patterns of dependency of process quality on possibly determining context factors over a period of 3 consecutive school years to detect mechanisms of change and patterns of quality. Longitudinal data of a field study with annual assessments in 97 German classrooms were analyzed via growth curve analyses using Bayesian estimation. The analyses revealed an increase in process quality provided in the classrooms. Classroom composition characteristics showed strongest relations to status and change of process quality; allocated resources and characteristics of the professional staff were less strongly related.     

International Programs in Schools: Considerations of Form and Function

(Intergenerational Programs in Schools: Considerations of Form and Function) – In recent years there has been a groundswell of intergenerational program activity occurring on an international scale. At an unprecedented level, new initiatives are emerging which aim to bring young people and older adults together in various settings – to interact, stimulate, educate, support, and provide care for one another. The focus of this paper is on intergenerational programs implemented in schools. Discussion centers primarily on how such initiatives enhance and reinforce the educational curriculum, contribute to student learning and personal growth, enrich the lives of senior adult participants, and have a positive impact on the surrounding communities. The paper concludes with a review of some key issues that need to be taken into account when developing and evaluating intergenerational programs.     

To Read,Responsibly

This article is a critique of the National Endowment for the Arts report, To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence (2007). Author Nancy Kaplan originally published an analysis of this report on a blog, IF: Book at http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2007/11/reading_responsibly_nancy_kaplan.html. She edited and rewrote that original presentation for publication in PLQ. Much of Kaplan's method involves a rigorous analysis of the same data that the NEA report writers used. However, she demonstrates, contrary to the organizational researchers' conclusions, that voluntary reading rates among teenagers and young adults did not decline between the early 1970s and 2004. Neither, Kaplan finds, is there any reliable data to support the NEA's editorial claims about the declining proficiency in adult readers. She concludes that the NEA authors truncated the time dimension of the available data and otherwise manipulated or misinterpreted data to obtain their results. Kaplan concludes that library professionals should discount the highly publicized NEA findings and focus on the clear statistical realities reported on the source documents and summarized here instead.