Impact of a play‐based curriculum in the first two years of primary school: literacy and numeracy outcomes over seven years

In 2000–2002 an innovative early years curriculum, the Enriched Curriculum (EC), was introduced into 120 volunteer schools across Northern Ireland, replacing a traditional curriculum similar to others across the UK at that time. It was intended by the designers to be developmentally appropriate and play‐based with the primary goal of preventing the experience of persistent early failure in children. The EC was not intended to be a literacy and numeracy intervention, yet it did considerably alter pedagogy in these domains, particularly the age at which formal reading and mathematics instruction began. As part of a multi‐method evaluation running from 2000–2008, the research team followed the primary school careers of the first two successive cohorts of EC children, comparing them with year‐ahead controls attending the same 24 schools. Compared to the year‐ahead control group, the findings show that the EC children's reading and mathematics scores fell behind in the first two years but the majority of EC children caught up by the end of their fourth year. Thereafter, the performance of the first EC cohort fell away slightly, while that of the second continued to match that of controls. Overall, the play‐based curriculum had no statistically significant positive effects on reading and mathematics in the medium term. At best, the EC children's scores matched those of controls.     

Motivation and Attribution at Secondary School: The role of ethnic group and gender

Some 985 secondary school students completed a questionnaire as part of an investigation into the experiences of Asian girls in a secondary school arising out of a larger project concerned with motivational factors in educational attainment. Results indicated that (1) Asian girls enjoyed all aspects of school life as much or more than their non-Asian counterparts; (2) across both ethnic groups girls enjoyed all aspects of school except sports and clubs more than boys; (3) enjoyment of subjects followed sex stereotypical lines, irrespective of ethnicity: girls rated English, French, German, drama, music and home economics as significantly more enjoyable, and boys rated science, craft, design and technology, physical education, information technology and mathematics as more enjoyable; (4) irrespective of gender, Asian students reported more enjoyment of religious education, and lower enjoyment of drama, physical education and home economics; (5) irrespective of ethnic group, girls reported that there was not enough choice of subjects; and (6) Asian students of both sexes rated parents and friends as more important in contributing to academic success. These results are critiqued in a context that questions the desirability of conducting investigations such as this which dichotomise students into groups on the grounds of ethnicity.     

The multi‐modal redesign of school texts

Multiliteracies‐related research is just emerging from the formal discourse of pedagogical theorising and how it may look in practice needs further exploration. This research, initiated under that warrant, presents practitioner research and the enactment of a multiliteracies curriculum with Year 8 students in New York City's Chinatown. The study describes a collaborative digital literacies project with a local contemporary arts museum where students engaged in the multi‐modal redesign of school texts. First, the article outlines a move of multiliteracies theory into curriculum practice where students explored questions of Chinese‐American and immigrant identities through a discourse analysis of history texts. Then, drawing on a digital gothic and hip‐hop cartoon Web project, it outlines how students challenged ways their ethnic identities were positioned by drawing political satire cartoons about immigration to the United States. The project concluded with a virtual exhibition of students' artwork where they inserted their cartoons within existing educational websites using HTML and Flash. It argues that the redesigned websites are a new set of multi‐modal literacy practices that allow youth to disrupt racist and exclusionary discourses they encounter in school texts and their lived experiences.     

Relations of Early Childhood Education Teachers’ Depressive Symptoms,Job-Related Stress,and Professional Motivation to Beliefs About Children and Teaching Practices

Research Findings: This study used teacher questionnaires to investigate the relationships of early childhood education teachers’ depressive symptoms, professional motivation, and job-related stress to their beliefs about children and teaching practices. Teachers (N = 207) were recruited from early childhood education programs in the southern United States. Path analyses showed that teachers who exhibited fewer depressive symptoms were more likely to have a career orientation to their jobs and indicated feeling less job-related stress. Teachers with a career orientation to their jobs were also more likely to have child-centered beliefs and endorse developmentally appropriate teaching practices. Teachers’ job-related stress, however, was not related to beliefs about children or teaching practices. Practice or Policy: These results suggest that teachers’ psychological and job-related well-being are linked to their beliefs about children and teaching practice in early childhood education. It is therefore important to provide support systems and preventive programs for teachers to enhance their well-being.     

There’s No Such Thing as a Scientific Controversy

We examine 81 rhetoric and technical communication studies of “scientific controversy.” Our praxiographic analysis reveals that “scientific controversy” is not one thing but three, each staged according to a radically different ontology; yet the literature continues to handle these ontologies the same and to privilege scientists’ demarcation claims in their analysis. We conclude the modifier scientific should be abandoned entirely in controversy studies and recommend an antilogical rather than dialectical approach to controversy.     

Caregiving and 5‐HTTLPR Genotype Predict Adolescent Physiological Stress Reactivity: Confirmatory Tests of Gene × Environment Interactions

A theory‐driven confirmatory approach comparing diathesis–stress and differential susceptibility models of Gene × Environment (G × E) interactions was applied to examine whether 5‐HTTLPR genotype moderated the effect of early maternal caregiving on autonomic nervous system (ANS) stress reactivity in 113 adolescents aged 13–17 years. Findings supported a differential susceptibility, rather than diathesis–stress, framework. Carriers of one or more 5‐HTTLPR short alleles (SS/SL carriers) reporting higher quality caregiving exhibited approach ANS responses to a speech task, whereas those reporting lower quality caregiving exhibited withdrawal ANS responses. Carriers of two 5‐HTTLPR long alleles (LL carriers) were unaffected by caregiving. Findings suggest that 5‐HTTLPR genotype and early caregiving in interaction are associated with ANS stress reactivity in adolescents in a “for better and for worse” fashion, and they demonstrate the promise of confirmatory methods for testing G × E interactions.     

Developing Online Tutorials to Improve Information Literacy Skills for Second-Year Nursing Students of University College Dublin

This article explores the process of developing online tutorials for a specified student group, in this case Second-Year Nursing students in University College Dublin. The product was commissioned by the Health Sciences Library and the UCD School of Nursing, Midwifery, and Health Systems. It was developed as a “Capstone Project” for part fulfillment of the MLIS in UCD.

We focused our research on three areas of scholarship to assist in the development of our product, namely Information Behavior, Learning Technologies, and Learning Science and Design. Flemings VARK model was used to inform the team of the four different learning styles (visual, auditory, reading, and kinesthetic) and to match the presentation style to these.

An initial difficulty in the assessment phase was one of access to a large group of students, as the students were on clinical placements. We created personas and a profile of nursing students to try and compensate for this. The tutorial was developed to cater for this specific group of students and later to act as a valuable support to the Library, which is under severe pressure in terms of staff availability to support student learning.

The product is relatively straightforward to produce (and maintain) and is something the Library will be able to develop and add to in future years.     

Creativity as capital in the literacy classroom: youth as multimodal designers

Many school literacy practices ignore adolescents' new digitally mediated subjectivity as it has been shaped by the new media age. Youth possess often unappreciated repertories of practice which allow them to use their imagination and creativity to combine print, visual and digital modes in combinations that can be applied to new educational, civic, media and workplace contexts. This paper reports on research in two middle years classrooms in New York City's Chinatown, where students' design skills were recognised and validated when they were encouraged to critically re‐represent curricular knowledge through multimodal design. The curriculum, rather than privileging print‐only representations, recognised the linguistic, social, economic and cultural capital that different students brought to school. The findings suggest schools should harness youths' creativity – that often manifests itself through their capital resources – as they integrate and adapt to the new digital affordances acquired through their out‐of‐school literacy practices.