Classroom Activities and Areas: Regularity of Use and Perceptions of Adaptability by General Early Educators

This report describes a mail survey of general early educators from Head Start, public school pre-kindergarten, public school kindergarten, and community preschool/child care programs. The purposes were to secure information about the availability of classroom activities and areas, and to obtain the respondents' perceptions of the ease with which activities and areas could be adapted to accommodate children with disabilities. Of the 893 mailed questionnaires, 483 (54.1%) were returned and coded. The respondents reportedly used a wide range of classroom activities and areas, and they rated those activities and areas as moderately easy to adapt. Also, respondents from mainstreamed programs used slightly more activities and perceived the activities as easier to adapt than did respondents from non-mainstreamed programs. The findings appear to indicate that placement of children with disabilities in segregated programs cannot be justified on grounds that integration will restrict the range of activities available to typically developing children, or on the grounds that the adaptations are perceived by program staff as too difficult to be accomplished.     

Predicting acceptance of diversity in pre-kindergarten classrooms

This study examined classroom-level contributors to an acceptance of diversity in publicly supported pre-kindergarten classrooms across 11 states. Classroom composition, process quality, and teacher characteristics were examined as predictors of diversity-promoting practices as measured by the ECERS-R, acceptance of diversity construct. Findings reveal that emotional climate, bilingual classrooms, family poverty levels within classrooms, and Latino teacher ethnicity are predictive of diversity-promoting classrooms; while classroom-level ethnic sameness to teacher prohibits diversity-promoting practices in pre-kindergarten classrooms.     

The Roles and Responsibilities of Kinesiology Regarding Sport

This article is a response to the 2013 NAKHE meeting in San Diego, California. The assigned strand was the roles and responsibilities of kinesiology regarding sport. The article is a response of the strand leader, comments from the participants in the strand, and possible solutions to the strand direction.     

Gendered educational leadership: beneath the monoglossic façade

Recent gender retheorisation has drawn on Mikhail Bakhtin's literary and linguistic theories of monoglossia and heteroglossia to reconcile seemingly contradictory gender discourses. Thus, girls/women and boys/men as they are biologically sexed might be discussed within a poststructural gender theory discourse that disconnects gender from the body. The concepts of gender monoglossia, gender heteroglossia and polyglossia have been applied here to empirical research into the construction of gendered leadership as it was seen to be done by one woman head teacher. The accounts of members of staff expose heteroglossia in the articulation of their understandings of gendered leadership beneath the construction of a monoglossic façade. They also reveal an understanding of polyglossic simultaneity as the head teacher is observed to ‘switch’ seamlessly between modes of doing gendered leadership depending on context and circumstances. There is also evidence of polyglossic simultaneity in the reports that might lead to the rejection and/or redefinition of gender theory discourses.     

Training Planning and Working Memory in Third Graders

Working memory and planning are fundamental cognitive skills supporting fluid reasoning. We show that 2 games that train working memory and planning skills in school‐aged children promote transfer to 2 different tasks: an attentional test and a fluid reasoning test. We also show long‐term improvement of planning and memory capacities in 8‐year‐old children after playing adaptive computer games specifically tailored to entrain these cognitive functions. Working memory capacity expanded from 5 to 7 items by using our games. Furthermore, steady progression in the task indicates that this capacity can be trained rapidly. Planning abilities persisted in a nonmarkovian form of play, where a move is highly influenced by previous moves, avoiding back‐ups. Here, we introduce a public and growing platform ( http://www.matemarote.com.ar/ ) developed for this research which has the potential for wide use in educational research.     

An Opportunity,Not a Crisis: How Google Is Changing the Individual and the Information Profession

ABSTRACT

This article explores some of the key impacts that Google and new technologies such as Web 2.0 have had on the way people see information and information professionals and presents the argument that much of what is typically seen as negative about Google is, in fact, positive.     

Optimal Results: What Libraries Need to Know About Google and Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or the practice of designing a web site so that it rises to the top of the results page when users search for particular keywords or phrases, has become so prevalent on the modern web that it has a significant influence on Google search results. This article examines the techniques used by search engine optimization practitioners, the difference between “white hat” and “black hat” optimization tactics, and why it is important for library staff to understand these techniques and their impact on search engine results pages. It also looks at ways that library staff can help their users develop awareness of the factors that influence search results and how to better assess the quality and relevance of results listings.     

Mastering cognitive development theory in computer science education

To design an effective computer science curriculum, educators require a systematic method of classifying the difficulty level of learning activities and assessment tasks. This is important for curriculum design and implementation and for communication between educators. Different educators must be able to use the method consistently, so that classified activities and assessments are comparable across the subjects of a degree, and, ideally, comparable across institutions. One widespread approach to supporting this is to write learning objects in terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy. This, or other such classifications, is likely to be more effective if educators can use them consistently, in the way experts would use them. To this end, we present the design and evaluation of our online interactive web-based tutorial system, which can be configured and used to offer training in different classification schemes. We report on results from three evaluations. First, 17 computer science educators complete a tutorial on using Bloom’s Taxonomy to classify programming examination questions. Second, 20 computer science educators complete a Neo-Piagetian tutorial. Third evaluation was a comparison of inter-rater reliability scores of computer science educators classifying programming questions using Bloom’s Taxonomy, before and after taking our tutorial. Based on the results from these evaluations, we discuss the effectiveness of our tutorial system design for teaching computer science educators how to systematically and consistently classify programming examination questions. We also discuss the suitability of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Neo-Piagetian theory for achieving this goal. The Bloom’s and Neo-Piagetian tutorials are made available as a community resource. The contributions of this paper are the following: the tutorial system for learning classification schemes for the purpose of coding the difficulty of computing learning materials; its evaluation; new insights into the consistency that computing educators can achieve using Bloom; and first insights into the use of Neo-Piagetian theory by a group of classifiers.