Family Fun Nights: Collaborative Parent Education Accessible for Diverse Learning Abilities

Quality early childhood education programs have a responsibility to provide enriched educational services to preschool students paired with parent support, education, and outreach. Pearl Buck Preschool, a non-profit organization devoted to the delivery of preschool services for children of parents with intellectual disabilities or learning difficulties, created a unique parent program titled Family Fun Night. This six-session series was developed with a strengths-based, collaborative framework and was connected to the Program-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports implementation in the preschool. The following paper discusses the development, facilitation, implementation, logistics, and assessment of the Family Fun Night series. Barriers to implementation are also discussed.     

Moving an Evidence‐Based Parenting Program Into the Community

Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch‐up (ABC) is a parenting program developed to enhance sensitivity among parents of infants who experience early adversity. In several randomized clinical trials, the intervention's efficacy has been demonstrated. Moving interventions into the community with adequate fidelity is challenging, though, and intervention effects are often much smaller than when tested in randomized clinical trials. To enhance the likelihood that ABC is delivered with high fidelity, a microanalytic fidelity assessment was developed. Using this fidelity tool as a central component of training, supervision, and certification, changes in parent sensitivity for 108 families with children ages 6 months to 2 years were as large as those seen in laboratory settings. These findings are discussed with regard to implications for moving other evidence‐based interventions into the community.     

Observing and analyzing children’s mathematical development,based on action theory

Children who experience difficulties with learning mathematics should be taught by teachers who focus on the child’s best way of learning. Analyses of the mathematical difficulties are necessary for fine-tuning mathematics education to the needs of these children. For this reason, an instrument for Observing and Analyzing children’s Mathematical Development (OAMD), based on action theory, has been developed. The use of levels of action is a new insight in the diagnostic process. Using the OAMD makes it possible to explore and analyze a child’s knowledge, proficiency and possible difficulties on four levels of acting in the domain of Number (counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). The research concerns children from kindergarten up to grade three. In this article, we will discuss the purpose and the construction of the instrument with the focus on the usability of the OAMD. The study examines the quality and the diagnostic value of the instrument by means of the internal consistency, the test–retest reliability and the construct validity. The analyses show positive results. The conclusion of the research is that the OAMD is a suitable instrument for the analysis of numerical development of young children and their possible difficulties in this domain.     

Deciding How to Deceive: Differences in Communication and Detection Between Good and Bad Liars

To study deception, participants were randomly assigned the role of allocator or recipient in an ultimatum negotiation game. Allocators “earned” 7 dollars and divided the money between themselves and recipient and communicated the decision either face-to-face or through text chat. Recipients were unaware the amount the allocator had, and therefore, allocators could deceive. Most allocators used deception. We hypothesized that participants who self-identified as good liars would communicate more face-to-face than through text chat when deceiving, and this was supported for deceptive omission but not fabrications. Good liars were more likely to have their truths correctly detected than bad liars.     

Individual,co‐operative and collaborative data use: A conceptual and empirical exploration

In recent decades, the belief has originated that data use contributes to more thought‐out decisions in schools. The literature has suggested that fruitful data use is often the result of interactions among team members. However, up until now, most of the available research on data use has used ‘collaboration’ as an umbrella concept to describe very different types of interaction, without specifying the nature of collaboration or the degree of interdependency that takes place in interactions. Therefore, the current study investigates and describes Flemish teachers’ individual, co‐operative and collaborative data use. In doing so, the level of interdependency of teachers’ interactive activities (storytelling, helping, sharing, joint work) is taken into account. The results of a qualitative study with semi‐structured interviews show that teachers’ data use is predominantly of an individual nature and that felt interdependencies among teachers are few. The study enhances knowledge and opens the conceptual debate about teachers’ interactions in the context of data use.     

Emphasis on emotions in student learning: Analyzing relationships between overexcitabilities and the learning approach using Bayesian MIMIC modeling

The aim of this study is to investigate interrelationships between overexcitability and learning patterns from the perspective of personality development according to Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration. To this end, Bayesian structural equation modeling (BSEM) is applied which allows for the simultaneous inclusion in the measurement model of all, approximate zero cross-loadings and residual covariances based on zero-mean, small-variance priors, and represents substantive theory better. Our BSEM analysis with a sample of 516 students in higher education yields positive results regarding the validity of the model, in contrast to a frequentist approach to validation, and reveals that overexcitability – the degree and nature of which is characteristic of the potential for advanced personality development, according to Dabrowski’s theory – is substantially related to the way in which information is processed, as well as to the regulation strategies that are used for this purpose and to study motivation. Overexcitability is able to explain variations in learning patterns to varying degrees, ranging from weakly (3.3% for reproduction-directed learning for the female group) to rather strongly (46.1% for meaning-directed learning for males), with intellectual overexcitability representing the strongest indicator of deep learning. This study further argues for the relevance of including emotion dynamics – taking into account their multilevelness – in the study of the learning process.     

The effects of antecedent physical activity on the academic engagement of children with autism spectrum disorder

A multiple baseline design was used to examine the effects of participation in antecedent physical activity on the academic engagement of four elementary‐school children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The results indicated large effect sizes for academic engaged time for all four students. It was suggested that physical activity in the form of something as simple to implement as jogging may be efficacious in promoting academic achievement for students diagnosed with ASD. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Examining the validity of office discipline referrals as an indicator of student behavior problems

Office discipline referral (ODR) data are increasingly used to monitor student behavior problems and the impact of interventions, but there has been limited research examining their validity. The current study examined the concordance of ODRs with teacher ratings of student behavior using data on 8,645 children in 335 classrooms at 21 elementary schools. The results of a variety of analyses (e.g., correlations, multivariate analysis of variance, receiver operating characteristics) suggested that ODRs are moderately valid and reliable. Multilevel analyses revealed that teacher ratings of disruptive behaviors were significantly associated with ODRs, even after controlling for other student‐, classroom‐, and school‐level factors. These findings suggest that ODRs are moderately valid indicators of student behavior problems and may be an efficient source of information for use in school‐based research and data‐based decision‐making. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

How do teachers in Ireland and England conceptualise dyslexia?

This paper presents the findings of a comparative study using data from questionnaire surveys carried out in England (n=57) and Ireland (n=72). The researchers examine how teachers and teaching assistants who are currently teaching pupils with dyslexia in primary schools describe dyslexia and what may have influenced their conceptualisation. The paper examines teachers' responses both in terms of how they view their pupils presenting difficulties in the classroom, and how far they link these to underlying differences in cognitive processing. The researchers suggest ways in which this might influence their teaching in terms of methodology. Findings have been mapped to the Morton and Frith causal modelling framework. The implications of these findings for the training and support of teachers are discussed in the light of recent national initiatives to improve the teaching of dyslexic pupils in both countries.