Attributes of effective and efficient kindergarten reading intervention: an examination of instructional time and design specificity

A randomized experimental design with three levels of intervention was used to compare the effects of beginning reading interventions on early phonemic, decoding, and spelling outcomes of 96 kindergartners identified as at risk for reading difficulty. The three instructional interventions varied systematically along two dimensions--time and design of instruction specificity--and consisted of (a) 30 min with high design specificity (30/H), (b) 15 min with high design specificity plus 15 min of non-code-based instruction (15/H+15), and (c) a commercial comparison condition that reflected 30 min of moderate design specificity instruction (30/M). With the exception of the second 15 min of the 15/H+15 condition, all instruction focused on phonemic, alphabetic, and orthographic skills and strategies. Students were randomly assigned to one of the three interventions and received 108 thirty-minute sessions of small-group instruction as a supplement to their typical half-day kindergarten experience. Planned comparisons indicated findings of statistical and practical significance that varied according to measure and students' entry-level performance. The results are discussed in terms of the pedagogical precision needed to design and provide effective and efficient instruction for students who are most at risk.     

Reflections on Andreas Kazamias and Greek Myth

As a graduate student I had the opportunity to study with Professor Andreas Kazamias and see his dynamic teaching and scholarship in action. This short reflection piece discusses the turn to Greek literature in Kazamias’s work and the enduring relevance it has today.     

New Rules for Business in a Flat World: A Trustees Call to Action

As policymakers, community college trustees have a responsibility to help keep their communities strong. How they do this is by helping to give everyone a chance for higher education. Thomas Friedman says that John F. Kennedy's vision was to put a man on the moon. His vision is to put every American on a campus. To do this, trustees can use these 7 “New Rules of Business:” (a) having a renewed focus on higher education accountability, (b) continued anxiety over college affordability, (c) waning public support, (d) growing expectations, (e) increasing competition, (f) changing demographics, and (g) the growing leadership crisis.     

Researching emotion and affect in the history of education

This exploratory paper was prepared for a symposium held at the 2011 ISCHE conference in which participants were asked to envision future challenges in the historiography of education, to predict where the field was moving, and to imagine what innovations and new interests would arise in the subsequent 30 years. While the paper is playfully written from the vantage point of 30 years in the future and pretends to offer a retrospective review of what happened in the field over that period, its primary purpose is to seriously suggest a number of ways that historians of education might engage with the history of emotion and affect in their work. The first section of the paper describes the consolidation of the history of emotions as a field of historical study and discusses the importance of a ‘governmentality' approach. It is then suggested in the second section that historians of education increasingly drew on the concept of ‘affect' and developed ‘affective histories' of education that both built upon and departed from earlier histories of emotions. The third section of the paper discusses some of the ways in which historians of education incorporated into their work insights from neuroscience into consciousness and choice-making as well as an increased awareness of the object-mediated body.     

Strategies for Designing Engaging Online Kinesiology Courses Based on the Community of Inquiry Model

Technology integration has become an ever-present phenomenon in institutions of higher education. This has led to an increase in online learning experiences that make higher education accessible to those who previously experienced barriers, such as having full-time jobs. One issue that affects online education is the challenge of engaging the learner in meaningful learning experiences that they subsequently use once they are in their careers. This article uses the Community of Inquiry (CoI) theoretical model to explain how instructors can increase student engagement in online kinesiology courses. By focusing on the CoI constructs of teaching presence, cognitive presence, and social presence, instructors can design engaging online classes that can help to positively influence each student’s experience with online education.     

Use of the K‐ABC with Children in Zaire,Africa: An Evaluation of the Sequential‐Simultaneous Processing Distinction within an Intercultural Context

There is a continuing need for formalised assessment procedures that can be adapted for group comparisons across diverse cultures to facilitate school and occupational placement, as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of nutritional, education, and medical intervention programs. This study used a direct translation of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K‐ABC) to evaluate 130 Zairian primary school children. The distinction between Sequential Processing and Simultaneous Processing abilities on the K‐ABC was generally found to be valid in this sample. The K‐ABC also discriminated effectively among grade levels, differences in health and family environment indicators, and tribal membership. Reasonable test‐retest correlations for the K‐ABC global scales were also found with a subsample of the children. The Zairian children's K‐ABC scores, particularly for the Simultaneous subtests, were markedly lower than the American normative sample. Education and experiential factors inherent in the sub‐Sahara environment may put these children at a significant cultural disadvantage in terms of the skills required for successful completion of K‐ABC items.     

Decoloniality as inversion: decentring the west in emancipatory theory and pedagogy

ABSTRACT

This study starts from contemporary scholarship in decolonial theory as well as from the seventeenth century political thinker Guaman Poma de Ayala, whose critique of colonial society in Peru enacted an epistemological displacement of colonial authority in its own method and perspective. On this theoretical basis, and by means of a contrast with the accumulative drive that has partly characterised both capitalism and Western critical theory, I argue that interrogating the Eurocentric architecture of emancipatory praxis from a decolonial standpoint necessarily involves a project of inversion that disrupts modernity’s developmentalist imaginary, and that restores historical agency to the marginalised while exposing the corruption of power’s supposed virtue. Extrapolating from Guaman Poma and contemporary theorists of decolonisation, the paper argues that rather than a dialectical process of progression, emancipatory theory and practice must be thought of first of all as a process of unwinding, in which the catastrophe of colonialism is reckoned with and what has been taken is restored. In education, both on the terrain of curriculum proper as well as in the process of subject formation in schools, this means a radical reconstitution of the values underwriting canon, rationality, and ways of being – as they are lived within the school and in its relationship to the communities around it.     

Beyond the Search for Truth: Dewey's Humble and Humanistic Vision of Science Education

In this essay, David Waddington and Noah Weeth Feinstein explore how Dewey's conception of science can help us rethink the way science is done in schools. The authors begin by contrasting a view of science that is implicitly accepted by many scientists and science educators — science as a search for truth — with Dewey's instrumentalist, technological, and nonrealist conception of science. After demonstrating that the search‐for‐truth conception is closely linked to some ongoing difficulties with science curricula that students find particularly alienating, they then analyze some of the educational opportunities that Dewey's vision opens up. Ultimately, Waddington and Weeth Feinstein argue that Dewey offers a humble and humanistic vision of science and science education practice that captures the power of science by connecting it clearly to everyday human activities and challenges.