Reassessing the People's Choice: Revisiting a Classic and Excavating Lessons for Research About Media and Voting

This article reassesses The People's Choice by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, one of the foundations of communication and voting behavior research. As with most classics, which are often cited but seldom read, we believe this book has much to teach contemporary social scientists. We return to the original context of the research and use voting data from the period with three broad goals: (a) to find ideas and lessons from this work that generally have been overlooked, (b) to suggest new ways of applying these ideas, and (c) to encourage scholars to engage more with this seminal work to understand ideas that are often overlooked when a complex piece of research is reduced to a brief discussion or passing citation.     

Using a Problem-Solving Approach to Teach Classroom Skills to a Student with Moderate Intellectual Disabilities within Regular Classroom Settings

We examined the use of a problem-solving intervention to teach classroom skills to a student with moderate intellectual disabilities. She was receiving her education in regular classrooms at her local primary school. The student was taught the targeted skills in a resource room removed from the regular classroom. She successfully generalised the skills to regular classrooms. The problem-solving intervention was evaluated using a multiple baseline design across classrooms. Regular classroom teachers indicated that the student's behaviour significantly improved during the intervention.     

Politics,Civil Rights,and Disproportional Identification of Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

The civil rights movements involving skin tone, gender or gender orientation, disability, and other physiognomic features remain important in securing the legal rights of individuals to equal treatment and equal opportunities regardless of their personal characteristics of color, origin, gender, and so on. Unfortunately, these welcome civil rights movements have led to a misunderstanding of unfairness in another group of individuals whose rights and opportunities have often been abridged—students with disabilities. Individual rights and opportunities must be insured, but doing so requires the discrimination of differences among differences. That is, not all differences require the same remedy to insure equal rights and opportunities. Misunderstanding of differences and their implications have led to political concerns about disproportional representation, particularly of students with emotional or behavioral disorders, which place unwarranted constraints on special education services.     

Increased Implementation of Emergent Literacy Screening in Pre-Kindergarten

The recent emphasis on universal prekindergarten programs, coupled with ongoing concern about children’s’ early literacy development in the first years of school, carry significant implications for how preschool educators program for literacy and assess literacy growth. We discuss the evolving role of literacy development in expanded preschool, examine key features of literacy assessments with particular attention to the content that might be assessed in preschool, and provide as an example one preschool literacy assessment tool that is in widespread use in the United States. We discuss the policy and practice implications of the growing emphasis on literacy assessment in preschoolers.     

The Influence of Teacher Expectations about Twice-Exceptional Students on the Use of High Quality Gifted Curriculum: A Case Study Approach

Twice-exceptional students show evidence of high academic performance or potential and also have a disability that impedes their ability to learn. Twice-exceptional students remain under-represented in gifted programs, and some researchers attribute such under-representation to the negative beliefs and low expectations about twice-exceptional students held by teachers. While researchers have begun to investigate the curricular models and instructional strategies that are effective for twice-exceptional students, little research addresses how teacher beliefs and expectations about student ability are reflected in the ways teachers implement such models and strategies for twice-exceptional students in gifted classrooms. Even less research addresses gifted students with emotional and behavioral disabilities. We used a case study of a third-grade teacher using a structured, model-based language arts curriculum to better understand how her expectations about a gifted student with an emotional disability influenced her instructional choices. Using observational and interview data, the case study approach allowed the researchers to personalize the experiences of this teacher and provided a context in which to examine the subtleties of teacher expectations when teaching a gifted student with an emotional disability. Implications for educational practice, particularly the need for comprehensive school-based support systems for students with emotional disabilities, are discussed.     

Age-Related Effects of Study Time Allocation on Memory Performance in a Verbal and a Spatial Task

Past studies have suggested that study time allocation partially mediates age relations on memory performance in a verbal task. To identify whether this applied to a different material modality, participants ages 20–87 completed a spatial task in addition to a traditional verbal task. In both the verbal and the spatial task, increased age was associated with poorer utilization of study time, suggesting that age differences in study time allocation are qualitatively similar across material modality. Furthermore, age differences in how individuals allocated their study time partially mediated the age relations on memory performance in both tasks, indicating the importance of effective regulation of study time when learning information. Finally, age differences in study time allocation did not appear to be due to differences in awareness of performance. When a subset of participants was asked about their prior performance, awareness of previous performance was not associated with study time allocation on either task. Interestingly, asking participants about their prior performance tended to decrease recall performance. Overall, these results illustrate that how one allocates study time is related to subsequent memory performance in both a verbal and spatial modality, but knowledge about prior performance is not associated with study time utilization, and inquiring about past performance during study may disrupt rather than facilitate learning.