Seven-Year Outcome of the Vermont Intervention Program for Low-Birthweight Infants

We compared 24 low-birthweight subjects of an experimental intervention (LBWE), 32 no-treatment controls (LBWC), and 37 normal birthweight (NBW) subjects. The intervention involved 7 hospital sessions and 4 home sessions in which a nurse helped mothers adapt to their LBW babies. At age 7, LBWE scored significantly higher than LBWC on the Kaufman Mental Processing Composite (p less than .001), Sequential (p = .02), and Simultaneous (p = .001) Scales, after statistical adjustments for socioeconomic status. LBWE did not differ from NBW (F less than 1). These results bear out a divergence between the LBWE and LBWC that first became statistically significant at age 3. The findings suggest that the intervention prevented cognitive lags among LBW children, and that long-term follow-ups are needed to evaluate the developmental effects of efforts to overcome major biological and environmental risks.     

The economic legacy of gothic cathedral building: France and England compared

Conclusion The accomplishments of the Gothic cathedral builders are immense. They are usually examined in terms of technical and artistic achievement, however, This seems shortsighted in view of their economic ramifications. The legacy of these works can be seen in technology, specialization and mobility of labor, and procedures in accounting. They thus served as a vehicle for the transformation of feudal society to the early capitalism which generated our modern world.     

The effects of kinetic structure and micrograph content on achievement in reading micrographs by college biology students

The effects of kinetic structure and micrograph content on student achievement of reading micrograph skills were examined. The purpose of the study was to determine which form of kinetic structure, high or low, and/or micrograph content, unified or varied, was most effective and if there were any interactive effects. Randomly assigned to four treatment groups, 100 introductory college biology students attended three audiovisual presentations and practice sessions on reading light, transmission electron, and scanning electron micrographs. The micrograph skills test, administered at two points in time, assessed knowledge acquisition and retention. The test measured general concept skills and actual reading micrograph skills separately. All significant tests were considered with an α = 0.05. High kinetic structure was found to be more effective than low kinetic structure in developing general concepts about micrographs. This finding supports Anderson's kinetic theory research. High kinetic structure instruction does not affect actual reading micrograph skills, but micrograph content does. Unified micrograph content practice sessions were more effective than varied micrograph content practice sessions. More attention should be given to the visual components of perceptual learning tasks.     

Using a Standardized Task to Assess the Quality of Teacher–Child Dyadic Interactions in Preschool

Research Findings: This study explored the quality of teacher-child interactions within the context of a newly developed standardized task, Teacher-Child Structured Play Task (TC-SPT). A sample of 146 teachers and 345 children participated. Children who displayed the highest disruptive behaviors within each classroom were selected to participate. Teacher-child dyads (n=345) participated in a play session that included free play and clean-up tasks. We adapted two coding schemes to assess the quality of both teachers’ and children’s interactive behaviors during these two tasks. The coding schemes exhibited internal and inter-rater reliability. Significant associations with classroom-level teacher-child interactions and children’s observed classroom engagement provide support for the measure’s validity. Differences in teacher and child-interactive behaviors across the two tasks (free play versus clean-up) suggest that task features may affect the quality of teacher-child interactive behaviors. Practice and Policy: Examining the interactions of different teacher-child dyads within the same standardized context will allow researchers to better understand the child and teacher factors that contribute to the quality of those interactions. Thus, use of this task in future field-based research may help to assess the impact of early interventions and professional development efforts that target improvement in the quality of teacher-child interactions.     

Phoneme awareness and pathways into literacy: A comparison of German and American children

Where American kindergartners are taughtletters and letter sounds, Germankindergartners are not; where American firstand second graders receive an eclectic blend ofwhole language, whole word and phonics-basedapproaches, their German counterparts aretaught by an intensive synthetic phonicsapproach. As a probe to the consequences ofthese pedagogical differences on the emergenceof phoneme awareness, this study administeredtwo tests of phoneme awareness tokindergarten-, first- and second-grade childrenin Germany and America, along with readingtests, the digit span test and a test of RANcolor naming ability. The American kindergartenchildren excelled on a phoneme identityjudgement and a phoneme deletion task that theGerman kindergartners found difficult. Theiradvantage held equally whether the manipulatedsound was a syllable onset or the initial partof a consonant cluster. The first and secondgraders surpassed the kindergartners in bothcountries; however, the German first and secondgraders equaled their American peers on bothtasks and both types of units. In addition,the German children were more accurate decodersof pseudowords by the end of second grade, andthe association between phoneme awareness andGerman decoding ability was weaker. Anincreased emphasis on phonics and the greatertransparency of the German alphabet arediscussed as possible factors in the decodingexcellence of the German second graders and itsdecreased association with phoneme awareness.The contrast between the American and Germankindergartners and the equivalence of the firstand second graders in the two countries areconsistent with a view that phoneme awarenessdevelops primarily as a product of literacyexposure.     

Learning Communities: Beliefs Embedded in Content-Based Rituals

This article addresses the underlying beliefs needed by teachers of young children if their learning communities are to be successful and self-sustaining. The relationships of language arts and social studies content to specific academic, social and literary rituals are discussed in the context of classroom examples in the United States. Trust and respect are treated as critical components supported by the work of Parker Palmer, Alfie Kohn and others. Relevant resources are also provided.