Focus in creative learning: drawing on art for language development

This article asks what happens to the learning of young children when they work regularly with a professional visual artist in their school. Through Creative Partnerships, a national programme initiated in 2002 to bring creative professionals into schools across England, some school children have had the opportunity for sustained project work with artists. Examined here is the context in which children (ages 4, 5, 6 and 7) worked one day a week during the academic year of 2003–2004 with Roy Smith, resident artist in Hythe Community School. Key to the children's drawing, painting and talking was close focused attention on details of three‐dimensional objects, portraits, still‐life works and their own creations. Smith's conversations with the children routinely included three and four‐syllable technical terms, biographical details of artists' lives and comparative critiques. Within several months, the art of the children reflected understanding of concepts such as foregrounding, and they showed confidence in working with problems Smith set up for them (“What do you think would happen if …?”). Particularly important here is the combination of manual and linguistic work that demands attention to detail, receptive understanding of complex terms and processes, and familiarity with the analytical and sequential thinking needed to identify and solve problems.     

Learning Environment, Attitudes and Achievement among Middle-school Science Students Using Inquiry-based Laboratory Activities

This study compared inquiry and non-inquiry laboratory teaching in terms of students’ perceptions of the classroom learning environment, attitudes toward science, and achievement among middle-school physical science students. Learning environment and attitude scales were found to be valid and related to each other for a sample of 1,434 students in 71 classes. For a subsample of 165 students in 8 classes, inquiry instruction promoted more student cohesiveness than non-inquiry instruction (effect size of one-third of a standard deviation), and inquiry-based laboratory activities were found to be differentially effective for male and female students.     

Creating prop boxes to stimulate dramatic play and literacy development

The sign says OPEN and five excited preschoolers are at play in a thematically based dramatic center. Their teacher has transformed a corner of the room into a shoe store, complete with materials designed to support the children's early literacy development.Cathleen S. Soundy is with the College of Education, Temple University, and Phyllis Wolf Gallagher is with the Education Department, Holy Name College, Philadelphia, PA.     

Naming,reading, and the dyslexias: A longitudinal overview

In research in the cognitive and neurosciences, a co-occurrence between naming and reading disorders has been found in children and aphasic adults. Evidence from a completed cross-sectional study will be briefly summarized and an ongoing longitudinal study will be presented to suggest that factors disrupting specific stages of the naming process can impede the development of children’s reading in particular, perhaps predictable, ways. Based on the components of a neurolinguistic model of naming, a battery of naming and reading tests was administered to a longitudinal sample of 115 children before, during, and after reading acquisition. Preliminary trends indicate that poor readers are significantly different (p<.001) from average readers on all naming tests except those emphasizingreceptive vocabulary perception. Tests emphasizing retrieval rate are best able to predict patterns of naming performance and errors characterize specific subgroups of the dyslexias. The research was supported in part by funds from the Livingston Fellowship Foundation, Department of Social Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School and Biomedical Research Support Grants from Tufts University.     

Impact of Process Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care on Academic Outcomes: Longitudinal Meta-Analysis

This meta-analysis studies the association of pedagogical processes in early childhood care and education with outcomes in two academic domains: language and literacy as well as mathematics. It synthesizes evidence from 17 longitudinal studies in nine European countries with 16,461 children in regular center-based care spanning the period between ages 3 and 16. Results of a three-level meta-analysis provided small overall effect sizes for both global and domain-specific process quality, and indicated lasting associations with academic development over children’s school career (ES = .11, Cohen’s d = .22, and ES = .10, Cohen’s d = .20). Effects varied by outcome domain, type of process measure, and differences in adopted analyses, with important implications for pedagogical practice and future research.     

Growth Stocks and Lemons: diplomas in the English market‐place 1976–1996

There has been enormous growth in English young people's participation in education over the last 20 years, and a commensurate growth in the number and perceived importance of formal diplomas. However, the growth has been uneven. Politicians have embraced a rather simple theory about the link between economic prosperity and education (and the formation of ‘human capital'). As a result they have supported the creation of a large number of new vocational qualifications, and tried to encourage their uptake. The general population, however, has viewed these qualifications as the lemons of the diploma world; a view supported by evidence on earnings and employment, and the economic returns to different qualifications. Rather than taking vocational qualifications, young people and adults have enrolled for university courses in unprecedented numbers, transforming the higher education sector and the role of diplomas in the labour market. Although the ‘diploma disease’ has advanced with respect to numbers of diplomas, and pressure to stay in school, there is little evidence that this has reduced the quality of English education at school level. Moreover, changes in the world economy have reduced opportunities for unskilled workers in the UK, and suggest that longer schooling may be justified on economic grounds.     

Theoretical links among naming speed,precise timing mechanisms and orthographic skill in dyslexia

In this paper, we review several lines of convergent research to discuss the relationship between developmental dyslexia and slow symbol naming speed. We describe the interactive development of orthographic and phonological codes, and we discuss the methodological problems that may have led to underestimating the importance of individual differences in orthographic processing in our account of reading disabilities. Symbol naming speed is typically subsumed under phonological processing, yet it contributes variance to reading, especially to reading fluency, independently of phonological awareness. We speculate that naming speed may reflect precise timing mechanisms necessary to the development of orthographic codes and to their integration with phonological codes. We argue that an understanding of this precise timing dimension is necessary to incorporate in our models of phonological, orthographic, and semantic processes in reading acquisition and reading failure.     

Ethics of the software vulnerabilities and exploits market

In this article we establish three claims: (1) When the target software is proprietary, in the absence of other overriding ethical considerations, the identification of a vulnerability and the development, sale, and purchase of non-zero-day exploits are ethically justified; (2) when the target software is Free/Libre/Open Source, the buying and selling of vulnerabilities can be ethically justified only in a very narrow situation, while the sale and purchase of non-zero-day exploits is ethically justified absent of any other overriding information; and (3) democratic governments should promote legislation that either incentivizes corporate in-house vulnerability identification and mitigation programs or requires firms to more fully absorb the societal costs of insecure software.