The Salience and Utility of School Sex Education to Young Women

This article explores young women's accounts of the role that school sex education had in their learning about sex. It focuses on the influence of school sex education on behaviour, the importance of timing in understanding its utility, and the extent to which other sources of information complement or supplement school sex education. Thirty in-depth interviews and eight group discussions were conducted with female pupils from six schools in the east of Scotland. Nearly all of those interviewed cited school as a useful source in learning about sex. In particular, lessons intended to develop pupils' skills were valued. These were thought likely to influence behaviour positively in the future, although only one person could illustrate how this had already happened. A common feature of accounts was that school sex education had been delivered 'too late' for themselves or their peers, and it tended to be seen as an introduction or as supplementary to other sources, particularly friends, magazines and mothers. The utility of school sex education should not be dismissed but more attention should be given to the needs of those who become sexually active in their early teens.     

Integrating technical editing students into a multidisciplinary engineering project

A three‐year experiment in integrating technical editing students into a multidisciplinary engineering design project developed several ways of helping students apply classroom learning to practical problems. Each year, the engineering students formed Integrated Product Teams (IPTs) and the technical editing students provided editorial support, first as full members of IPTs, then as separate editorial support teams. Research from cooperative learning and teamwork indicates strategies and techniques for best integrating the technical editing students.     

Keeping the Focus on the Child: Supporting and Reporting on Teaching and Learning With a Classroom-Based Performance Assessment System

Abstract

This article describes the findings of studies conducted on a large-scale, classroom-based performance assessment of literacy for the early grades designed to provide information that is useful for reporting, as well as teaching. Technical studies found the assessment to be a promising instrument that is reliable and valid. Follow-up studies of the assessment's use point to its positive impact on teachers' practice and on school and district policies. The studies' findings suggest that classroom-based performance assessment can be a viable accountability, as well as instructional, tool, capturing a range of students' abilities in a range of formats, and that use of such an assessment has the potential to enhance teachers' knowledge about literacy and their abilities to effectively support students' learning.     

Models and Strategies for Factor Mixture Analysis: An Example Concerning the Structure Underlying Psychological Disorders

The factor mixture model (FMM) uses a hybrid of both categorical and continuous latent variables. The FMM is a good model for the underlying structure of psychopathology because the use of both categorical and continuous latent variables allows the structure to be simultaneously categorical and dimensional. This is useful because both diagnostic class membership and the range of severity within and across diagnostic classes can be modeled concurrently. Although the conceptualization of the FMM has been explained in the literature, the use of the FMM is still not prevalent. One reason is that there is little research about how such models should be applied in practice and, once a well-fitting model is obtained, how it should be interpreted. In this article, the FMM is explored by studying a real data example on conduct disorder. By exploring this example, this article aims to explain the different formulations of the FMM, the various steps in building a FMM, and how to decide between an FMM and alternative models.     

The Growth of Phonological Awareness by Children With Reading Disabilities: A Result of Semantic Knowledge or Knowledge of Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences?

According to the Lexical Restructuring Model (Metsala & Walley, 1998 Metsala, J. L. and Walley, A. C. 1998. “Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representation: Precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability”. In Word recognition in beginning literacy, Edited by: Metsala, J. L. and Ehri, L. C. 89–120. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.  [Google Scholar]), children move from holistic representations of words, to syllabic representations, and finally to phonemic representations through a restructuring process driven by their developing lexical base. In contrast, the psycholinguistic grain size theory put forth by Ziegler and Goswami (2005) Ziegler, J. C. and Goswami, U. 2005. Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: A psycholinguistic grain size theory.. Psychological Bulletin, 131: 3–29. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] suggests that the awareness of individual phonemes is not possible without direct literacy instruction. The purpose of this study was to examine whether semantic knowledge and/or knowledge of grapheme/phoneme correspondences influenced the acquisition of word-blending skills by a sample of children with a reading disability. Participants were 211 second-grade and third-grade students from public elementary schools who were assigned to a reading intervention. Hierarchical Linear Modeling techniques were used to model individual growth curves of word-blending skills. Overall, findings support the psycholinguistic grain size theory of reading and suggest that instruction in the relationship between orthographic patterns and their corresponding sounds is necessary for the development of phonological awareness.     

Reflection on their first five years of teaching: understanding staying and impact power

Teacher turnover in urban schools is occurring at a breakneck pace; thus, it is important for us to understand the characteristics of teachers who stay and succeed in these settings. In order to address this need, this study examines the preparation and induction experiences of teachers who completed a Transition to Teaching – a funded urban apprenticeship program. Three research questions guided the study: (1) How do participants describe the characteristics that influence their five-year retention? (2) How do participants describe their success as teachers? and (3) How do participants describe the professional support they received in their preparation program and during the subsequent four years after completing the program? Quantitative and qualitative data via interviews, focus group, and an examination of teachers’ district performance scores were utilized, as a means of understanding teachers’ staying and impact power. Staying power refers to the ability to endure or last within challenging contexts by possessing strength enough to persevere. Impact power refers to their ability to influence student learning. Four assertions describe the factors influencing developing teachers who stay and have impact as they teach in challenging urban schools, suggesting that these teachers possess a strong work ethic, seek specific resources to improve pedagogy, have the knowledge and skills necessary to differentiate instruction, and seek teacher leadership opportunities in their schools. This study suggests several implications for teacher educators, educational leaders, administrators, and researchers working with new teachers in urban schools or with populations that are predominantly children of color.     

Place,food practices,and scientific knowledge

Cultural Studies of Science Education - This commentary seeks to extend the discussion on place, food practices, and ancestral scientific knowledge presented in Silvia Lizette Ramos de...     

Social media for the community college library

Abstract

This article summarizes the experience of a multi-campus urban community college library developing and managing a social media presence. The author describes the organization of social media efforts, institutional rules that affect implementation of social media, developing themes for content, and other considerations.