Expanding Study Support Nationally: Implications from an evaluation of the East Middlesborough Education Action Zone's programme

Study support will be expanded across the UK during the early years of the new century. It has become a central feature of the drive to increase pupil attainment and develop confident and socially able young people. This paper reports the rise of study support from an optional extra to key government strategy for school improvement. It then briefly outlines the findings from an evaluation of a recently developed study support programme funded by East Middlesbrough Education Action Zone and lists implications for the expansion of study support nationally which can be gleaned from the developments in Middlesbrough. In particular, despite the existence of a national framework for study support, it points to concerns resulting from its management being located at the school level. Most notably, a lack of monitoring and evaluation. The paper refers to the purpose of study support and highlights the pitfalls of moves to align it more closely with schools' quantifiable targets. The paper also alludes to wider concerns about the conceptualisation of educational disadvantage and suggests that the expansion of study support may not 'extend opportunity' and be as inclusive as advocates hope.     

When the Gated Misbehave

This study analyzes online reader comments on top US newspapers’ stories related to former congressman, Anthony Weiner’s, August 2016 sexting scandal. Audience gatekeeping was seen through such discussion themes as gender bias and sexism, political scandals, and sex addiction. The analysis revealed that the majority of reader comments significantly diverged from the news topic, and many comments about US politicians were uncivil. Furthermore, online discussions “drowned out” newspapers’ intended message about Weiner’s inclusion of his toddler son into a sexually explicit selfie. This study argues that online commentary should not be perceived as a dichotomy—a negative or positive development, a contributor or preventer of public discourse—but rather as a continuum of citizen engagement.     

Automatic and conscious context effects in average and advanced readers

Average and advanced readers from the fourth and sixth grades read visually presented words as rapidly as possible. Target words were preceded by a related prime word, an unrelated word, or a neutral warning stimulus. Related trials constituted 75% of the word prime trials for half of the subjects in each group, and only 25% for the other half. All groups were sensitive to this proportion manipulation, showing only faster naming times for related targets in the 25% condition. In the 75% condition, subjects showed inhibition for unrelated targets, as well as facilitation for related targets. The results indicate that the ability to use context deliberately to facilitate word recognition reaches asymptote for the average reader by the sixth grade at the latest, and perhaps by the fourth. This ability does not appear to be one that shows further improvements at higher levels of reading skill. Some possible reasons for the discrepancies between this research and that using incomplete sentence contexts are considered.     

Engaging Families in Public Libraries

Public libraries today are undergoing significant transformations as well as interacting with patrons in new and different ways (Knight Foundation 2017). Part of this transformation is the way libraries are engaging entire families. Libraries are playing a stronger role than ever before in supporting families to promote children’s early literacy and reading skills (Celano and Neuman 2015; Nagle et al. 2016; Neuman and Celano 2010), stimulating adult learning (Boden and Tashijan 2015), creating initiatives to improve family health (Morgan et al. 2016), providing services to families with extreme challenges such as those experiencing poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, and incarceration (Holt and Holt 2010; Terille 2016), as well as becoming spaces for families, especially those who are recent immigrants, to build new relationships and social networks (Khoir et al. 2017; Vårheim 2014). Despite these efforts, few studies have specifically sought to understand the organizational dimensions that support family engagement within a library system and the potential that these efforts have in promoting children’s learning not only in the early years, but also into and throughout middle childhood and adolescence. Based on a yearlong study investigating the power of family engagement in public libraries, this article considers how libraries can begin to adopt a systemic approach to family engagement to further innovate the library space.     

State-of-the-art in biomedical literature retrieval for clinical cases: a survey of the TREC 2014 CDS track

Providing access to relevant biomedical literature in a clinical setting has the potential to bridge a critical gap in evidence-based medicine. Here, our goal is specifically to provide relevant articles to clinicians to improve their decision-making in diagnosing, treating, and testing patients. To this end, the TREC 2014 Clinical Decision Support Track evaluated a system’s ability to retrieve relevant articles in one of three categories (Diagnosis, Treatment, Test) using an idealized form of a patient medical record. Over 100 submissions from over 25 participants were evaluated on 30 topics, resulting in over 37k relevance judgments. In this article, we provide an overview of the task, a survey of the information retrieval methods employed by the participants, an analysis of the results, and a discussion on the future directions for this challenging yet important task.     

Assessing giftedness with the WISC‐III and the SB‐IV

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Third Edition (WISC‐III) and the Stanford‐Binet Intelligence Scale–Fourth Edition (SB‐IV), were administered to 20 gifted children and 20 non‐gifted children to examine the extent of the difference in IQ scores obtained on the two tests and whether order effects were present. Results show that the SB‐IV Composite Score was significantly higher than the WISC‐III Full Scale IQ for both groups. However, for the gifted group, unlike the non‐gifted group, this difference achieved significance only when the SB‐IV was administered first. When either IQ test was administered to the gifted students for the first time, without the confound of a learning influence, there was no significant difference in mean scores. However, when both tests were administered, it was found that the SB‐IV influenced the WISC‐III Full Scale IQ in a downward direction whereas the WISC‐III influenced the SB‐IV Composite Score in an upward direction. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Coloured filters improve exclusion of perceptual noise in visually symptomatic dyslexics

Previous studies of visually symptomatic dyslexics have found that their contrast thresholds for pattern discrimination are the same as non‐dyslexics. However, when noise is added to the stimuli, contrast thresholds rise markedly in dyslexics compared with non‐dyslexics. This result could be due to impaired noise exclusion in dyslexics. Some dyslexics report a reduction in discomfort experienced while reading and show increased reading speed when using coloured lenses. We hypothesised that coloured lenses work by aiding noise exclusion. Thus the coloured lenses should help performance best under conditions of high visual noise. We measured contrast thresholds for discriminating symbols in the absence and presence of visual noise. The results showed that visually symptomatic dyslexics, who otherwise had elevated contrast thresholds for discriminating symbols in visual noise, had thresholds similar to non‐dyslexics when wearing coloured filters. These findings provide evidence that in visually symptomatic dyslexics coloured filters can improve noise exclusion to normal levels.     

SELF-PERCEIVED GAINS IN CRITICAL THINKING AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS: ARE THERE DISCIPLINARY DIFFERENCES?

The influence of disciplinary differences onself-perceived gains in critical thinking andcommunication skills were examined in terms of studentbackground characteristics, experiences in the major,and college experience variables. Academicdisciplines were categorized according to Biglan's(1973a) classification of single- and multiple-paradigmdisciplines. Although multigroup structural equationmodeling showed no differences between self-perceivedgains for single- and multiple-paradigm disciplines, theproposed theoretical model accounted for 13.5% and 25.3%of the variance in self-perceived gains in critical thinking and communication skills,respectively. The variable most highly associated withself-perceived gains was the quality of lower-divisioncourses in the major.