School playgroups: Which features of provision matter?

This paper identifies the shared features of provision in exemplar school playgroups defined using the social capital concepts of bonding and bridging relationships. Relationships promote capabilities amongst people, with play a known capability for advancing children's developmental and educational outcomes. By attending to the bonding and bridging relationships in each school playgroup, exemplar groups were identified and studied to reveal their shared features of provision. Six main features of provision were identified, including materials, facilitator, space, location, scheduling and health and safety. Awareness of these features may benefit school leaders and/or governance seeking to implement a school playgroup within their own community. Findings from this project suggest high-performing school playgroups can operate in areas of lower and higher socioeconomic status and/or parental education, and in regional and rural areas.     

Bottom of the class? The leaving certificate applied programme and track placement in the Republic of Ireland

Across many countries, young people are differentiated into academic and vocational tracks, a pattern that is closely related to their social class background. The Irish secondary system has been largely undifferentiated, but the introduction of a pre-vocational programme, the Leaving Certificate Applied (LCA), has brought an element of tracking into upper secondary education. This article explores whether allocation into the LCA track reflects processes similar to those highlighted in international research. It goes further than these studies by explicitly recognising the role of school organisation in influencing student's learning careers and educational decisions. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the determinants of track placement in the Republic of Ireland. Using in-depth qualitative case study interviews with students from Irish post-primary schools, this paper examines the factors influencing students' decisions to enter the LCA programme. This paper explores the extent to which individual agency and school-level factors influence track choice by focusing on the learning careers of individual students within specific school contexts.     

In a daily time–place learning task,time is only used as a discriminative stimulus if each daily session is associated with a distinct spatial location

It is difficult for rats to acquire daily time–place (TP) learning tasks. One theory suggests that rats do not use time of day as a stimulus signaling a specific response. In the present study, we tested rats’ ability to use time of day as a discriminative stimulus. A fixed-interval procedure was used in which one lever provided reinforcement on a FI-5-s schedule in morning sessions, and the same lever provided reinforcement on a FI-30-s schedule in afternoon sessions. Because only one place was used in this paradigm, the rats could only use time of day to acquire the task. Mean responses during the first 5 s of the first trial in each session indicated that the rats did not discriminate between the two sessions. In Phase II, a different lever location was used for each of the two daily sessions, which meant that both spatial and temporal information could be used to acquire the task. The rats readily acquired the task in this phase, and probe trials indicated that the rats were using a combination of spatial and temporal information to discriminate between the two different trial types. When the spatial cue was removed in Phase III, rats no longer discriminated the two sessions, suggesting that time can only be used as a discriminative stimulus when each daily session is associated with a distinct spatial location.     

Rats' performance on an interval time-place task: Increasing sequence complexity

Rats were trained on an interval time-place learning (TPL) task in which the location of food availability depended on the time since the start of the session. Each of four levers (numbered 1, 2, 3, 4) provided food on an intermittent schedule for two nonconsecutive 3-min periods. The order in which the levers provided food was 1, 2, 4, 3, 2, 3, 1, 4. This order was consistent across sessions. Previous research conducted in our lab has shown that when only four “places” are used, rather than the eight in the present study, rats use a timing strategy to track the location of food. Pizzo and Crystal (2004) recently trained rats on an interval TPL in which each of eight arms of a radial arm maze provided food. They found evidence suggesting that rats used both spatial and temporal information. In the present study, in which a revisiting strategy was used (i.e., each lever provided food on more than one occasion), the rats tracked both the spatial and the temporal availability of food for the first half of the session. Interestingly, in the second half of the sessions, the rats appeared to be timing the availability of food even though they did not know where it would occur. That is, the rats knew the temporal, but not the spatial, contingencies for the second half of the session. It appears that the requirement of revisiting a previously reinforced lever resulted in rats' no longer being able to solve the spatial aspect of the task.     

Plain language summaries: Enabling increased diversity,equity, inclusion and accessibility in scholarly publishing

• Plain language summaries (PLS) are accessible, short, peer-reviewed summaries of scholarly journal articles written in non-technical language.
• The aim of PLS is to enable a broader audience of experts and non-experts to understand the original article.
• Here, we outline the evidence base for the value and impact of PLS and how they can enable diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in scholarly publishing.
• PLS can diversify readership and authorship, address information inequity, include typically under-represented stakeholders and provide an accessible route into scholarly literature.

     

Home-schooling in the Republic of Ireland

Internationally, there continues to be a rise in the popularity of home-schooling. Although the growth in the numbers of families choosing this alternative approach was evident prior to the Covid-19 Pandemic school closures, it appears to have impacted on the decision for some to home-school permanently. Using a scoping review of the literature, this paper considers the research evidence around home-schooling in the United Kingdom and Europe. It then focuses on home-schooling in the Republic of Ireland to assess the change and development of home-schooling over time. In line with trends internationally, Irish administrative data show an increase in the numbers of families engaging in home-schooling in recent years, particularly for students with disabilities. The paper situates these findings within the context of ongoing debates on inclusive and special education in Ireland and the capacity of mainstream schools to educate and include every student.