Using early care and education quality measures with dual language learners: A review of the research

As the number of young dual language learners (DLLs) in early care and education (ECE) programs is increasing, it is critical to examine how well measures of the quality of practices in these settings reflect the needs of the diverse groups of children being served. This review of the research literature addressed these questions for ECE settings serving children birth-five: whether quality differs for settings serving high proportions of DLLs compared to typical samples, whether existing quality measures exhibit similar psychometric characteristics and associations with child outcomes in settings serving DLL and non-DLL children, and whether DLL-specific measures perform differently than general measures of quality. The search procedure produced 10 research studies that met the criteria for inclusion in the review out of approximately 3800 that were found initially and more than 300 that were reviewed. These studies included 10 out of 46 identified measures of ECE quality, including both general and DLL-specific measures. Findings suggested that widely used general ECE quality measures function similarly for DLLs compared to typical populations with regard to overall quality, psychometric characteristics, and child outcomes. Further research is needed to broaden the knowledge base for a wider variety of measures, beyond center-based settings, and beyond Spanish-speaking DLLs, as well as to enhance methodological approaches. There appear to be potential research opportunities through numerous existing studies that included DLL populations but had not analyzed their data in regard to these groups.     

The cognitive development of young dual language learners: A critical review

Dual language exposure and bilingualism are relatively common experiences for children. The present review set out to synthesize the existing research on cognitive development in bilingual children and to identify the gaps and the methodological concerns present in the existing research. A search of major databases for research conducted with typically developing, preschool-age dual language learners between 2000 and 2013 yielded 102 peer-reviewed articles. The existing evidence points to areas of cognitive development in bilingual children where findings are robust or inconclusive, and reveals variables that influence performance. The present review also identifies areas for future research and methodological limitations.     

Government innovation through social media

Social media in government is becoming one of the major trends in Electronic Government (e-government) research and practice worldwide. During the last few years, several authors have addressed the potential of social media for the innovation of public sector organizations. Most of these contributions have focused on the technical dimensions of social media, while other aspects have not attracted equal attention. In contrast, this introductory article interrogates the role of social media in the basic areas of e-government: government information flows and the availability of government information; the use of information technology to create and provide innovative government services; the impact of information technology on the relationships between the governed and those governing; and the increasing importance of information policies and information technologies for democratic practices. Accordingly, the next few pages propose and develop three dimensions of social media in government: tools, goals, and topics. We think that these dimensions could help to better understand the use of social media in government settings. Then, after a brief review of current trends in social media and government research, we present the articles included in this special issue. Finally, we present some practical lessons and suggest ideas for future research. This special issue could be seen as a starting point for the development of innovation through social media in public administrations around the world.     

‘I'm ready for a new chapter’: The voices of young people with autism spectrum disorder in transition to post-16 education and employment

This study explores the views and experiences of 12 young people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in transition to post-16 education and employment, in light of the changes introduced by the new special educational needs and disability (SEND) legislation in England. The extension of provision until the age of 25, and the introduction of person-centred education, health and care (EHC) plans, have given a significant place to the views of young people with SEND and their families. The views, wishes and aspirations of young people must be captured in the newly developed plans, reflecting the statutory requirement for local authorities to systematically record these in a biopsychosocial way, focusing on participation and well-being. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with young people with ASD attending specialist settings or receiving specialist support under the new EHC plans. These were analysed inductively, through thematic analysis. The findings suggest that at the time of transition, young people with ASD want to become increasingly more independent, present ambivalent feelings about their future and acknowledge the relevance of support systems in their lives. Implications for practice and future research are discussed, in light of the new English policy context.     

Does Parent–Child Discussion of Peer Provocations Reduce Young Children's Hostile Attributional Bias?

Two studies investigated whether parent–child discussion of peer provocations reduces young children's hostile attributional bias. Study 1 (N = 109, age 4–7)—an observational study—showed that parent–child discussion of nonhostile attributions (when reading a picture book) predicted reductions in children's hostile attributional bias from pre‐ to postdiscussion. Study 2 (N = 160, age 4–6)—an experimental study—showed that stimulating parents to discuss either nonhostile attributions or normative beliefs (vs. a control condition) reduced children's hostile attributional bias in response to hypothetical vignettes, but not in response to a staged peer provocation. These findings suggest that by framing social situations, parents may help their children perceive less hostility in their social worlds.     

Hostile attribution of intent and aggressive behavior: a meta-analysis

A meta-analytic review was conducted to explain divergent findings on the relation between children's aggressive behavior and hostile attribution of intent to peers. Forty-one studies with 6,017 participants were included in the analysis. Ten studies concerned representative samples from the general population, 24 studies compared nonaggressive to extremely aggressive nonreferred samples, and 7 studies compared nonreferred samples with children referred for aggressive behavior problems. A robust significant association between hostile attribution of intent and aggressive behavior was found. Effect sizes differed considerably between studies. Larger effects were associated with more severe aggressive behavior, rejection by peers as one of the selection criteria, inclusion of 8- to-12-year-old participants, and absence of control for intelligence. Video and picture presentation of stimuli were associated with smaller effect sizes than was audio presentation. Staging of actual social interactions was associated with the largest effects. The importance of understanding moderators of effect size for theory development is stressed.     

Revisiting Cross-document Structure Theory for multi-document discourse parsing

Multi-document discourse parsing aims to automatically identify the relations among textual spans from different texts on the same topic. Recently, with the growing amount of information and the emergence of new technologies that deal with many sources of information, more precise and efficient parsing techniques are required. The most relevant theory to multi-document relationship, Cross-document Structure Theory (CST), has been used for parsing purposes before, though the results had not been satisfactory. CST has received many critics because of its subjectivity, which may lead to low annotation agreement and, consequently, to poor parsing performance. In this work, we propose a refinement of the original CST, which consists in (i) formalizing the relationship definitions, (ii) pruning and combining some relations based on their meaning, and (iii) organizing the relations in a hierarchical structure. The hypothesis for this refinement is that it will lead to better agreement in the annotation and consequently to better parsing results. For this aim, it was built an annotated corpus according to this refinement and it was observed an improvement in the annotation agreement. Based on this corpus, a parser was developed using machine learning techniques and hand-crafted rules. Specifically, hierarchical techniques were used to capture the hierarchical organization of the relations according to the proposed refinement of CST. These two approaches were used to identify the relations among texts spans and to generate multi-document annotation structure. Results outperformed other CST parsers, showing the adequacy of the proposed refinement in the theory.     

Quality flaw prediction in Spanish Wikipedia: A case of study with verifiability flaws

In this work, we present the first quality flaw prediction study for articles containing the two most frequent verifiability flaws in Spanish Wikipedia: articles which do not cite any references or sources at all (denominated Unreferenced) and articles that need additional citations for verification (so-called Refimprove). Based on the underlying characteristics of each flaw, different state-of-the-art approaches were evaluated. For articles not citing any references, a well-established rule-based approach was evaluated and interesting findings show that some of them suffer from Refimprove flaw instead. Likewise, for articles that need additional citations for verification, the well-known PU learning and one-class classification approaches were evaluated. Besides, new methods were compared and a new feature was also proposed to model this latter flaw. The results showed that new methods such as under-bagged decision trees with sum or majority voting rules, biased-SVM, and centroid-based balanced SVM, perform best in comparison with the ones previously published.     

Data‐driven refinements of a genetics learning progression

Learning progressions are theoretical models that describe learning of scientific ideas and practices over time. These hypothetical progressions need to be tested and refined in order to productively inform instruction and assessment. In this paper, we report our attempts to revise a learning progression in genetics. In particular, we focused on two constructs that embody core ideas in classical genetics and one molecular construct. The revisions are based on analysis of pre‐ and postinterview data obtained from sixty 11th grade students before and after they engaged in a 10‐week unit that addressed these concepts. We found that while many of the students held ideas that aligned with the progression, there were several distinct dimensions of student reasoning that were not captured and led to substantial revisions of the constructs including: (a) the splitting of the construct dealing with meiosis (E) into two subconstructs (E1‐physical passage of genetic information and E2 – the role of sex cells), (b) the addition of new levels to constructs dealing with the universal nature and organization of the genetic code (A) and construct (F). For Construct A, the lower levels were expanded to include ideas about the localization of DNA in cells and to include ideas about the composition of DNA that were not captured in the progression. Revisions to Construct F included the expansion of existing levels and the addition of modes of inheritance such as codominance and incomplete dominance. The research we present offers insights about a methodological approach that can be used to test and refine progressions, as well as insights about student learning in genetics as we further describe and expand the stepping‐stone ideas in the progression and discuss further the multidimensional nature of learning progressions.