Welfare families' use of early childhood care and education programs, and implications for their children's development

With recent legislation placing a strong emphasis on the transition of welfare mothers into the workforce, it becomes increasingly important to understand whether and how participation in early childhood care and education programs has implications for the development of children from welfare families. This study focused on a sample of 182 African-American families, all of whom had applied for or were receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children, and each with a child of between 3 and 5 years of age. We first examined which of a wide range of background characteristics predicted participation in early childhood care and education programs. We then examined whether measures of the children's school readiness and social maturity were predicted by current participation in an early childhood program, above and beyond the background characteristics associated with the use of such a program. Our results indicate that participation in an early childhood program is associated with significantly higher scores on the measure of school readiness.     

The changing value of vigorous activity and the paradox of utilising exercise as punishment in physical education

Background: Previous research on physical education (PE) teaching practice indicates that an exercise physiology discourse has assumed a dominant position within the field. Research shows that PE teachers are likely to emphasise physical fitness training in their teaching, and PE teachers seem to appreciate pupils who show high levels of physical exertion.

Purposes: Our aim is to examine how vigorous activity/exercise is represented in the practice of PE teaching. We will also examine teaching as a discursive practice, and thereby contribute to a critical perspective on PE pedagogy.

Research design: This study was conducted in four upper secondary schools in Oslo, Norway. Data material was produced through fieldwork, during which we observed 92 PE lessons. Additionally, we conducted qualitative interviews with the eight teachers who participated in the study. Our methodological framework was discourse analysis.

Findings: Our material shows that vigorous activity plays a complex role in PE class: it can be beneficial, but it can also be punitive. The PE teachers we observed drew on an exercise physiology discourse to portray vigorous activity/exercise as beneficial and valuable to the promotion of pupils’ physical fitness and health. However, the teachers also drew on a military discourse when assigning vigorous activity to rebuke a disobedient pupil. The teachers also introduced vigorous activity in the form of additional exercise ‘punishment’, which they assigned to losers in competitive activities. In these instances, the teachers drew on exercise physiology and sports discourses. Thus, we identified how vigorous activity changed value according to context, and discuss how teachers’ use of vigorous activity as punishment can seem paradoxical in a PE setting.

Conclusion and recommendation: Our study indicates that, rather than adhering to modern educational practices, PE is rooted in ideas and practices derived from military, sports and exercise physiology discourses. PE teachers inculcated with these discourses have limited ability to discern the paradox of assigning vigorous exercise to their pupils as both a high-value activity and a punishment. PE Teacher Education should therefore problematise how teaching practice is influenced by these discourses, and facilitate discussions on how such discourses constitute PE.     

Neurodevelopmental Effects of Early Deprivation in Postinstitutionalized Children

The neurodevelopmental sequelae of early deprivation were examined by testing ( N  =   132) 8- and 9-year-old children who had endured prolonged versus brief institutionalized rearing or rearing in the natal family. Behavioral tasks included measures that permit inferences about underlying neural circuitry. Children raised in institutionalized settings showed neuropsychological deficits on tests of visual memory and attention, as well as visually mediated learning and inhibitory control. Yet, these children performed at developmentally appropriate levels on similar tests where auditory processing was also involved and on tests assessing executive processes such as rule acquisition and planning. These findings suggest that specific aspects of brain-behavioral circuitry may be particularly vulnerable to postnatal experience.     

Executive function performance and trauma exposure in a community sample of children

ObjectiveThough children exposed to familial violence are reported to have difficulties with a range of emotional and behavioral problems (e.g., lower school achievement) that implicate executive function (EF) deficits, relatively little research has specifically examined EF as a function of trauma exposure in children.MethodsBased on parent report of children's exposure to potentially traumatic events, children (N = 110; Age_Mean = 10.39) from an ethnically diverse community sample were compared across three trauma-exposure groups: familial trauma, non-familial trauma, and no trauma. Children completed a battery of tests to assess working memory, behavioral inhibition, processing speed, auditory attention, and interference control.ResultsFamilial trauma (relative to non-familial and no trauma exposure) was associated with poorer performance on an EF composite (composed of working memory, inhibition, auditory attention, and processing speed tasks); the effect size was medium. Both trauma-exposure status and dissociation symptoms explained unique variance in EF performance after controlling for anxiety symptoms, socio-economic status, and potential traumatic brain injury. While IQ and EF performance were related, SES predicted unique variance in IQ (and not EF) scores, while familial-trauma exposure did not.ConclusionsThe contribution of trauma exposure to basic executive functioning held after taking into account symptoms (anxiety and dissociation), socio-economic status, and possible traumatic brain injury exposure. EF problems may provide one route via which maltreated children become at risk for peer, academic, and behavior problems relative to their peers.Practice implicationsEF problems may provide one route via which maltreated children become at risk for peer, academic, psychological, and behavior problems relative to their peers. Recently, intervention strategies have emerged in the anxiety and mood disorder treatment literatures that appear to effectively target EFs. As future research continues to specify the relationship between child trauma exposure and EF performance, these innovative treatments may have important practice implications for addressing EF deficits.     

Improving seventh grade students’ learning of ratio and proportion: The role of schema-based instruction

The present study evaluated the effectiveness of an instructional intervention (schema-based instruction, SBI) that was designed to meet the diverse needs of middle school students by addressing the research literatures from both special education and mathematics education. Specifically, SBI emphasizes the role of the mathematical structure of problems and also provides students with a heuristic to aid and self-monitor problem solving. Further, SBI addresses well-articulated problem solving strategies and supports flexible use of the strategies based on the problem situation. One hundred forty eight seventh-grade students and their teachers participated in a 10-day intervention on learning to solve ratio and proportion word problems, with classrooms randomly assigned to SBI or a control condition. Results suggested that students in SBI treatment classes outperformed students in control classes on a problem solving measure, both at posttest and on a delayed posttest administered 4 months later. However, the two groups’ performance was comparable on a state standardized mathematics achievement test.     

Library Student Employee Expertise: Strategies for Maximizing Your Student Employee Contributions to the Library

The University of Baltimore Library was recently renovated. Part of the design in the newly renovated space was having one single service point, that we call the Information Desk. This desk serves as the public facing portal for what was previously three public facing service points to services by three separate departments, Academic Success, Access Services and Reference & Instruction.

This article describes in depth how our Information Desk Leadership Team encouraged and used our library student employees’ expertise and knowledge in the formation of policy and procedure manual, training documents, reference tools and resume lines for use at a single service point.     

Creating Self‐Generating Knowledge Sharing Spirals: Improving Motivation in a Knowledge Economy

Many new research advancements have been gained in fields other than the basic social sciences. Some of these advancements come from multidisciplinary studies that merge social sciences with theories from other fields of study. This article takes a multidisciplinary approach, juxtaposing some of the more recent findings from other disciplines to develop a general model for improving performance. The proposed model utilizes social theory from sociology and community studies, knowledge spirals from the knowledge management discipline, motivation theories derived in part from evolutionary biology, and research on engagement from different fields of study within the social sciences. By incorporating a multidisciplinary theory for performance improvement, the authors are adhering to recommendations from researchers calling for alternative paradigms to be utilized, providing a more holistic understanding of the phenomena being studied (Storberg‐Walker, 2007 ; Torraco, 2004 ).     

Motivation Terminology in Reading Research: A Conceptual Review

Despite the importance of motivation in understanding the development and practices of reading, problems persist in how motivation-related constructs are defined and investigated. This article reports a concept analysis of how 12 terms have been used in current reading research. Selection criteria resulted in the identification of 92 data-based articles published in 28 peer-reviewed journals from 2003 to 2013. Over the period examined, there was a steady increase in the number of studies reported. Most were conducted in North America and Europe. Only 17 % of the studies offered explicit definitions of the target constructs they examined. Another 64 % relied on various forms of implicit definitions, and 19 % provided no definitions of any kind. Usage problems frequently occurred as well. These included instances of vague associations among terms, occurring in 20 % of the studies, synonymous reference to distinctly different constructs in 32 %, and inaccurate statements made about constructs in 20 %. Although a variety of motivation theories were used to ground the investigations, some 22 % were essentially atheoretical. These difficulties were unrelated to the impact factor of the journals in which they appeared. Possible causes are discussed, together with suggestions for improvement.     

Children's Judgments About Prosocial Decisions and Emotions: Gender of the Helper and Recipient Matters

Children ages 5–13 years (N = 82) responded to prosocial and prohibitive moral dilemmas featuring characters whose desires conflicted with another person's need for help or ownership rights. The gender of the characters matched for half the trials (in‐group version) and mismatched for the other half (out‐group version). Both boys and girls judged that people would more likely help and not harm the gender in‐group versus out‐group. Only girls exhibited gender bias in emotion attributions, expecting girls to feel happier helping girls and better ignoring the needs of boys. With increasing age, children exhibited greater awareness of the emotional benefits of prosocial sacrifice and made stronger distinctions by need level when evaluating prosocial decisions, obligations, and permissibility.