How do primary grade teachers teach handwriting? A national survey

A random sample of primary grade teachers from across the United States was surveyed about their instructional practices in handwriting. Nine out of every ten teachers indicated that they taught handwriting, averaging 70 minutes of instruction per week. Only 12% of teachers, however, indicated that the education courses taken in college adequately prepared them to teach handwriting. Despite this lack of formal preparation, the majority of teachers used a variety of recommended instructional practices for teaching handwriting. The application of such practices, though, was applied unevenly, raising concerns about the quality of handwriting instruction for all children. Preparation of this paper was supported by the Center to Accelerate Student Learning, funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs Grant H324V980001.     

Preparing the Workforce to Prevent Behavioral Health Problems in Children and Youth

Educating social work students to address behavioral health needs of youth requires new training approaches that prepare students for interprofessional prevention-focused practice. This study examines whether a newly developed graduate certificate in integrated behavioral health effectively prepares students for prevention-focused behavioral health practice. A mixed method approach is used for evaluation, with 34 students completing the program from 2016 to 2017. Quantitative, qualitative, and employment data are analyzed to identify if and how the program prepares graduates for prevention practice. Results highlight key components that support student attainment of program competencies. Implications for curriculum development, field site training, and future research are discussed.     

Disconnect: Contradictions and Disagreements in Faculty Perspectives of Information Literacy

Broward College, an early adopter of Guided Pathways, has made efforts to incorporate information literacy throughout the curriculum by embedding librarians in pathways and through General Education learning outcomes. However, although college administrators and faculty acknowledge that the integration of information literacy instruction throughout the curriculum is crucial to student success, librarians have struggled to become true teaching partners. A survey was administered to discipline faculty to determine attitudes, perceptions, and a self-assessment of information literacy. This study includes a nuanced analysis of discipline faculty responses and reveals conflicting attitudes and behaviors related to information literacy instruction.     

Thinking in action: Some insights from cognitive sport psychology

Historically, cognitive researchers have largely ignored the domain of sport in their quest to understand how the mind works. This neglect is due, in part, to the limitations of the information processing paradigm that dominated cognitive psychology in its formative years. With the emergence of the embodiment approach to cognition, however, sport has become a dynamic natural laboratory in which to investigate the relationship between thinking and skilled action. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore some insights into the relationship between thinking and action that have emerged from recent research on exceptional performance states (e.g., ‘flow’ and ‘choking’) in athletes. The paper begins by explaining why cognitive psychologists’ traditional indifference to sport has been replaced by a more enthusiastic attitude in recent years. The next section provides some insights into the relationship between thinking and skilled action that have emerged from research on ‘flow’ (or peak performance) and ‘choking’ (or impaired performance) experiences in athletes. The third section of the paper explores some practical issues that arise when athletes seek to exert conscious control over their thoughts in competitive situations. The final part of the paper considers the implications of research on thinking in action in sport for practical attempts to improve thinking skills in domains such as business organizations and schools.     

‘Doing the Best for the Students’: dilemmas and decisions in carrying out statutory assessment tasks

This paper considers the effects on teachers, students and the curriculum of the experience, in the spring of 1993, of the first extended assessement tasks in Design in Technology in England and Wales. It examines the frustrations experienced and the dilemmas faced by teachers in working on these tasks with students, and their attempts to resolve their resulting role conflicts. It is suggested, that in this case at least, teachers' loyalties to their ideas about good teaching and learning took precedence over the requirement to follow the Government's assessment procedures. This is because teachers felt that the tasks set by the Government were inappropriate both for student learning and for assessing the curriculum which they had followed, and that the ways in which they were expected to carry them out were detrimental both to student learning and to ‘fair’ assessment. It is suggested that in some cases this led to a ‘radicalisation’ of a comparatively conservative group. The effects on the curriculum, the schools and the teachers concerned are critically examined in the light of planned changes in the Design and Technology curriculum.     

Cross-validation of two creativity tests designed for preschool children

Two tests, designed to assess ideational fluency through different response modes, were administered to 24 middle-class preschool children. The Multidimensional Stimulus Fluency Measure (MSFM) requires verbal responses to verbal and visual-tactile stimuli. Thinking Creatively in Action and Movement (TCAM) employs a kinesthetic, nonverbal response mode to verbal and visual-tactile stimuli. Concurrent and construct validity were established for these two instruments. Significant intercorrelations among the subtests of each instrument demonstrated construct validity, and concurrent validity was established with Spearman rank-order correlations between the scores of the two tests, r=.55, p<.01. The results showed construct validity in that ideational fluency assessed via the two instruments was not related to IQ. The low correlations found between subtest D of the TCAM and all of the subtests of the MSFM were discussed with regard to differences in response modality and stimulus specificity.     

Competition between ethanol-induced reward and aversion in place conditioning

Previous place conditioning studies in mice have shown that injection of ethanol immediately before a conditioned stimulus (CS+) produces conditioned preference, whereas injection of ethanol immediately after CS+ produces conditioned aversion. In the present experiments, we examined the learning that occurs when ethanol is injected in “ambiguous“ procedures that provide the opportunity for both types of conditioning. When ethanol was given midway through the CS (Experiments 1 and 2) or both before and after the CS (Experiment 3), the direction of place conditioning was the same as when mice were exposed only to whichever contingency occurred first (a primacy effect). That is, injection of ethanol in the middle of the CS conditioned aversion, whereas injection both before and after the CS conditioned preference. Because these results support the idea that ethanol elicits both aversive and rewarding effects, they are most consistent with conditioning theories that conceptualize unconditioned stimuli (USs) as events that can activate multiple representational components.     

A roadmap for offering MOOC from an LMIC institution

MOOCs are massive open online courses that are globally accessible, free of charge. Given their cost-free and open accessibility, it is surprising that only a few institutions have offered MOOCs from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Pakistan recently made this short list of LMICs as the first two MOOCs were launched from the country, in 2014 and 2016. Drawing from that experience, the organizers of that course present a roadmap for LMIC institutions for developing a MOOC, focusing especially on the technological and pedagogical limitations that an LMIC institution might find deterring.