The persistence of preschool effects: Do subsequent classroom experiences matter?

Using rich longitudinal data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K), we find that children who attended preschool enter public schools with higher levels of academic skills than their peers who experienced other types of child care (effect size of .14). This study considers the circumstances under which the preschool advantage persists, that is, the types of classrooms in which students who did not attend preschool “catch up” to their counterparts who did. Specifically, we focus on two dimensions of the early school environment—class size and the level of academic instruction provided. The findings suggest that most of the preschool-related gap in academic skills at school entry is quickly eliminated for children placed in small classrooms and classrooms providing high levels of reading instruction. Conversely, the initial disparities persist for children experiencing large classes and lower levels of reading instruction. These results point out that the longer-term effects of early childhood experience partly depend on classroom experiences during at least the first years of school.     

The second‐year experience: Turning attention to the academy's middle children

Sophomores are the quiet ones, finishing avoided general education courses, changing their academic majors and residences, and worrying about finances. Jimmie Gahagan and Stuart Hunter describe new efforts to bring these students out of the shadows and help them succeed.     

A Study of Reasoning Talk Between Australian Chinese Mothers and Their Preschool Children: What Messages Are Mothers Sending?

The everyday conversations that occur between mothers and children, particularly those involving reasoning, are a major vehicle for the transmission of information and values to young children. This study explored the manner in which five Australian Chinese mothers engaged in reasoning talk with their preschool-aged children. A total of 83 instances of spontaneous reasoning talk were identified and analysed according to the manner in which the mothers justified their claims or statements, using Hasan’s reasoning structure framework to underpin the analysis. Both regulatory and nonregulatory contexts were analysed. The analysis revealed that in regulatory contexts, where a child’s behaviour is being controlled (for example, “eat up your dinner quickly”), mothers provided more socially based reasons to justify their directives. In nonregulatory contexts, such as shared reading, they used more logical reasoning based on universal laws of nature. The findings suggest that the reasoning talk that takes place between mothers and children provides a rich opportunity for mothers to convey their values to their children, with implications for children’s learning across a number of domains.     

Environmental dystopias: Margaret Atwood and the monstrous child

ABSTRACT

The future of childhood is often described in terms of utopian thinking. Here, the turn is towards dystopia as a fertile source of wild imaginings about the future. The dystopian literary fictions featured here act as a message and are projections of an uneasy future requiring a reader to see the present differently. Such projections make reading dangerous as they create an alternative world often disorderly and dismissive of contexts that are familiar and safe. In these scenarios, the child is often a key figure. In the work by Atwood (Oryx and Crake; The Year of the Flood; MaddAddam), the world is an environmental nightmare. The focus is on MaddAddam, in which the child is an object of desire and both monstrous and redemptive. A reading of MaddAddam as a posthuman text is undertaken and it is argued that Atwood's dystopia creates a discourse of monstrosity (both weird and beautiful) that contaminates thoughts about the child/children/childhood and the future.     

Why Talk about Mental States? The Significance of Children's Conversations with Friends, Siblings, and Mothers

Natural language data from 38 47-month-olds recorded at home in unstructured observations were analyzed and comparisons made of characteristics of mental state term use in child-friend, child-sibling, and child-mother dyads. Significantly more references to mental states were made by the children in conversations with siblings and friends than with mothers. Frequent use of mental state terms by both partners was related to cooperative interaction in both child-friend and child-sibling dyads and several associations were found with measures of language fluency, gender, and maternal education, although these varied across the 2 dyads. Children's use of mental state terms in conversations with siblings and friends was correlated with their performance on two false belief measures. Results highlight the importance of extending investigations into the social implications of the development of children's "theories of mind."     

Explaining home education: Parents' accounts of their decisions to teach their own children

This paper analyzes the reasons that parents choose to teach their children at home. From data collected over 18 months of qualitative research in a state in the southeast, three broad explanations for choosing home schooling emerged. First, the parents believe that home education will strengthen their families. Second, many home-schooling parents (particularly those who are fundamentalist Christians) believe that schools teach values and beliefs that directly contradict those they want their children to learn. Third, many of the parents believe that only they, as parents, understand their children's unique educational needs well enough to effectively teach them. The failure of educational policy makers to consider the extraeducational issues raised by home-schooling parents is then discussed.     

Elements of Supervision in Sexual Violence Counselors' Narratives: A Qualitative Analysis

The literature on vicarious traumatization has suggested that traumasensitive supervision may help to minimize the effects of vicarious exposure to trauma; however, nothing from the perspective of trauma counselors was noted. The present qualitative study involved 1 male and 8 female sexual violence counselors who had worked with sexual violence survivors from 1 to 9 years. The use of semistructured interviews and basic interpretive analysis revealed 4 themes: counselor feelings, vicarious traumatization, helpful qualities of supervision, and organizational considerations.     

Infants' Reliance on a Social Criterion for Establishing Word-Object Relations

The language children hear presents them with a multitude of co-occurrences between words and things in the world, and they must repeatedly determine which among these manifold co-occurrences is relevant. Social factors—such as cues regarding the speaker's referential intent—might serve as one guide to whether word-object covariation should be registered. In 2 studies, infants (15–20 months and 18–20 months in Studies 1 and 2, respectively) heard novel labels at a time when they were investigating a single novel object; in one case the label was uttered by a speaker seated within the infant's view and displaying concurrent attention to the novel toy (coupled condition), whereas in the other case the label emanated from a speaker seated out of the infant's view (decoupled condition). In both studies, subsequent comprehension questions indicated that infants of 18–20 months registered a stable link between label and object in the coupled condition, but not in the decoupled condition, despite the fact that covariation between label and object was equivalent in the 2 conditions. Thus, by 18–20 months children are inclined to establish a mapping between word and object only when a speaker displays signs of referring to that object.     

Shakespeare for All? Some Reflections on the Globe Theatre’s Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank Project

ABSTRACT

Every year since 2007, the Globe Theatre has run the Playing Shakespeare project, largely funded by Deutsche Bank. This has three main components: school-based workshops, CPD sessions for teachers and free performances for school students. From 2014 to 2016, we were commissioned to evaluate this project. In what follows, we reflect on the nature of this project and its relation to the versions of Shakespeare that figure so prominently in the terrain of contemporary schooling in England.     

What's in a name? A comparison of methods for classifying predominant type of maltreatment

OBJECTIVE: The primary aim of the study was to identify a classification scheme, for determining the predominant type of maltreatment in a child's history that best predicts differences in developmental outcomes. METHOD: Three different predominant type classification schemes were examined in a sample of 519 children with a history of alleged maltreatment. Cases were classified into predominant maltreatment types according to three different schemes: Hierarchical regression analyses examined whether the HT, SFT, and EHT type classifications contributed to prediction of child behavior problems, trauma symptoms and adaptive functioning. RESULTS: After controlling for demographic factors, the HT definitions predicted four outcomes, while the SFT definitions predicted three, and the EHT classifications contributed to the prediction of five child outcomes. The co-occurrence of multiple types of maltreatment was robustly related to outcomes. However, the HT and SFT classifications predicted outcomes even after accounting for the co-occurrence of multiple maltreatment subtypes. CONCLUSION: A classification scheme that differentiates between type combinations and single maltreatment types may have the greatest predictive validity. Over and above knowing about co-occurrence of maltreatment sub-types, it is important to understand what type, or constellation of types, of maltreatment have been alleged in a child's history.