Changing roles in sustaining successful charter school leadership in high poverty schools: Voices from the field

Effective educational leadership is essential for the success of schools and ultimately student achievement. The impact of school leadership may be even more pronounced in charter schools. Due to current and unprecedented growth, unique design, and complexities of political, financial, and governance issues they face, there is a need for more highly qualified charter school leaders and perhaps even “differently” prepared leaders. In this qualitative study, the authors documented the characteristics and skills of two successful, sustained charter school leaders who retrospectively described their evolved and evolving roles over twenty five years. Each transformed high-poverty, low-performing schools with at-risk populations and led with vision, passion, and a relentless desire to positively influence their organizations and ultimately improve student success in their communities. Although many of their skills and characteristics fall within existing theories, such as situational leadership, transformational leadership, and distributive leadership, they embodied a level of dedication and commitment to the original communities in which they founded charters lasting over a quarter of a century. The findings suggest that founding a charter school and seeing it through to success over time may more closely resemble missionary work than traditional school leadership.     

Let's Talk About Maths: The Role of Observed “Maths‐Talk” and Maths Provisions in Preschoolers' Numeracy

Developmental cognitive neuroscience highlights the importance of interactions between children and their environment. As young children spend increasing time in childcare, it is key to investigate the impact of “maths‐talk” and maths provisions in preschools. Qualitative insights from early educators indicate a greater bias toward counting activities than would be expected given the Early Years curriculum. In addition, we quantified the observed breadth of preschool practitioners' maths language (e.g., place‐value language), setting‐based maths provisions (e.g., quality of maths‐related activities), and their relation with children's early numeracy skills. In settings with greater practitioners' breadth of maths language, children display greater cardinality skills although our data call for the further investigation of parental socioeconomic status and education. We conclude with a discussion on the need to operationalize children's maths learning environments as diversely as possible. Enriching practitioners' skill sets may be an effective and needed way of improving early maths outcomes.     

How gender is constructed and experienced in the social world of the nursery school

This case study attempts to capture the way gender is constructed and experienced in the social world of the nursery school. It presents findings from a staff survey, structured and unstructured observations of one male’s and one female’s professional practice and one-to-one interviews with children aged three to four years. Despite practitioners’ reported intentions to challenge traditional notions of gender, construction of traditional gender distinctions was not problematised by staff and was upheld by comments of children. Children appeared to construct themselves in terms of gender stereotypes and were offered only limited alternative gender positions by the male and female practitioners.     

Bridging Research and Practice: How Sales Training Can Contribute to New Product Launch Success

This study demonstrates how academicians and practitioners can work together on an important topic that matters to organizational performance: the pivotal role played by salespeople during new product launches. In particular, the authors present three potential interventions that training and sales managers may use to sell a new product to salespeople. The results legitimatize the critical contribution of sales training to new product sales performance and highlight the value of the partnership between training professionals and sales managers.     

Normative data and reliability estimates for eight dimensions of reading attitude,part IV—private school learning disabled students

The Survey of Reading Attitudes was administered to 167 intermediate and high school students who were enrolled in three private schools for LD children in the Southeast. Statistical analysis consisted of computing means, standard deviations, standard errors of measurement, and coefficient alpha reliability estimates for the eight dimensions of reading attitude included in the Survey. The reliability estimates for the respective dimensions were as follows: Expressed Reading Difficulty, alpha = .82; Reading as Direct Reinforcement, alpha = .72; Reading as Enjoyment, alpha = .87; Alternative Learning Modes, alpha = .72; Reading Group, alpha = .74; Reading Anxiety, alpha = .71; Silent vs. Oral Reading, alpha = .78; and Comics, alpha = .75. The current results viewed in conjunction with the results of the three previous normative studies seem to support the psychometric soundness of The Survey of Reading Attitudes across differing samples.     

Useful terms in psychoeducational reports: A survey of students,teachers, and psychologists

The usefulness of terminology in psychoeducational reports is examined. Students, teachers, and psychology interns rated the usefulness of 25 terms frequently found in reports. Psychology interns also rated each term on the frequency with which they used it in their own reports. Significant differences were found in the usefulness ratings of the terms, depending on major, category, and whether or not the rater had taken a special education course. Special education majors were found to be more comfortable with technical terms than were students who had prepared to be regular classroom teachers or students in other majors. Findings suggest that it is necessary to use clear, unambiguous terms in reports, and to explain more technical terms in context.     

Effect of a pedometer-based intervention on daily step counts of community-dwelling older adults

This study investigated the effect of a 12-week pedometer-based intervention on daily step counts of 147 older adults randomly assigned to an intervention or wait-list control group (M age = 72.9 years, SD = 8.8). The intervention group significantly increased their daily step counts after 12 weeks (M=639, SD=2239) and continued to significantly increase during a 12-week maintenance period (M=680, SD=1721). The control group exhibited no change during the control period (M = -393, SD=2050) but had a significant increase in daily step counts (M=1580, SD=2305) when enrolled in the intervention. The pedometer-based intervention was effective in increasing participants' daily step counts.