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In the light of sustained interest in the potential value of young children's narrative play, this article examines Vivian Gussin Paley's approach to storytelling and story-acting, in this case with 3- to 5-year-olds. It scrutinises how children's narratives are co-constructed during adult-child and peer interactions through spoken and embodied modes, as their stories are scribed by an adult and later dramatised by their peers. Data are drawn from an evaluation of an 8-week training programme, based on Paley's approach, designed for early years professionals and undertaken in different geographic and demographic locations in England. Naturalistic data collection techniques including video and field notes were used to record the storytelling and story-acting of 18 case study children. The resultant data were subject to close discursive and multimodal analysis of storytelling and story-acting interactions. Findings reveal discursive co-construction 'in action' and illustrate how the child storytellers, story actors and practitioners co-construct narratives through complex combinations of gaze, body posture and speech in responsive and finely tuned interactional patterns. The study contributes significantly to knowledge about how young children's narratives are co-constructed through multiple modes in the classroom.

Information and communication technology (ICT) and Web 2.0 have the potential to impact on learning by supporting inquiry, literacies, collaboration and publication. Restrictions on the use of these tools within schools, primarily due to concerns about discipline and child safety, make it difficult to make full use of this potential in formal educational contexts. Studies of children at different stages of schooling have highlighted a wider range of ICT use outside school, where it can be used to support informal learning. The study reported here looks beyond the broad categories of primary and secondary education and investigates distinctive elements of pre-teens' use of ICT to support informal learning. Nineteen children aged 10 and 11 participated in focus groups and produced visual representations of ICT and Web 2.0 resources they used to support their informal learning. Thematic analysis of this data showed that pre-teens respond to a range of age-related constraints on their use of ICT. Inside formal education, these constraints appear similar at primary and secondary levels. Out of school, regulation is more age specific, contributing to the development of tensions around use of ICT as children approach their teenage years. These tensions and constraints shape the ways in which children aged 10-11 engage in formal and informal learning, particularly their methods of communication and their pressing need to develop evaluation skills.

This article offers a chronological account and critical appraisal of changes to early childhood education and care (ECEC) services in England over the past 20 years. It describes the policy initiatives, educational interventions and research programmes introduced by successive governments that have effected significant changes to ECEC since 1990. The article covers four key areas: policies designed to reduce social inequality; the professionalisation of the children's workforce and changing status of adults employed in preschool education and care settings; changes to early years pedagogy and the early years curriculum and finally how major research programmes such as the Effective Provision of Preschool Education project and the Millennium Cohort Study have informed our understanding of the effects of social disadvantage and the characteristics of "high-quality" preschool provision that can alleviate this. There is now persuasive evidence that investment in state-maintained early education is highly cost effective, particularly for disadvantaged children. The current government, however, is shifting the burden of funding for professional training and high-quality integrated services for children and families from the state to the private and voluntary sectors. Time will tell if this is a backward step or movement in the right direction.

This study investigated the behaviour and communication of seven- to eight-year-old children during a dyadic computer task. The children participating were identified by peers as: (1) initiators of bullying ("bullies"); (2) defenders of those victimised ("defenders"); and (3) those who generally do not take on a consistent role in relation to bullying ("non-role" children). Children were videotaped during the task and the interaction was coded, 34 dyads participated. Defenders used significantly higher levels of supportive communication such as explanation and guidance than bullies. The task performance of dyads consisting of defenders with non-role children was significantly superior to that of dyads comprising bullies plus non-role children. The behaviour of the non-role children was influenced according to whether they were working with a bully, a defender or another non-role child. The study suggests that the roles that children adopt in relation to bullying influence their behaviour in other, non-bullying contexts.

Children's reasoning was examined within two educational contexts (word reading and addition) so as to understand the factors that contribute to relational reasoning in the two domains. Sixty-seven 5- to 7-year-olds were given a series of related words to read or single-digit addition items to solve (interspersed with unrelated items). The frequency, accuracy, and response times of children's self-reports on the conceptually related items provided a measure of relational reasoning, while performance on the unrelated addition and reading items provided a measure of procedural skill. The results indicated that the children's ability to use conceptual relations to solve both reading and addition problems enhanced speed and accuracy levels, increased with age, and was related to procedural skill. However, regression analyses revealed that domain-specific competencies can best explain the use of conceptual relations in both reading and addition. Moreover, a cluster analysis revealed that children differ according to the academic domain in which they first apply conceptual relations and these differences are related to individual variation in their procedural skills within these particular domains. These results highlight the developmental significance of relational reasoning in the context of reading and addition and underscore the importance of concept-procedure links in explaining children's literacy and arithmetical development.

In this paper we argue that the processes of collaborative creativity are just as important within the sociocultural context of PhD supervisory practice, as they are in other organizational and educational settings. In order to test this claim a series of interviews with supervisors and students were undertaken to uncover the pedagogic processes used to encourage and support creativity within supervision sessions. The findings from this small-scale study suggest that whilst the more formal instruction and monitoring processes that lead to the acquisition of transferrable research skills are both usefully and necessary aspects of doctoral training, the more open-ended and creative developments required at this level of study should be given equal weight. There needs to be space, time and encouragement for the types of interactions identified here (e.g. informal reflection, relationship building with peers and supervisor, playful exploration and risk taking) as well as mandatory skills development. (Contains 3 tables.)

This study considered the extent to which 23 children with dyslexia differed from 23 reading age (RA) and 23 chronological age (CA) matched controls in their ability to make temporal judgements about auditory and visual sequences of stimuli, and in the speed of their reactions to the onsets and offsets of visual and auditory stimuli. The children with dyslexia were slower (p = 0.039) than the CA controls in their reactions to non-verbal auditory onsets (tones), were less able to recognize the "first" stimulus of a sequence of tones (p = 0.022), and were less accurate in identifying the initial phoneme of a sequence of three (p less than 0.001). These characteristics may be manifestations of an impaired temporal processing system for rapid auditory stimuli. CA controls responded more quickly to tone onsets than to tone offsets (p = 0.025), but the dyslexic and RA groups showed no significant difference (p less than 0.05) in their reaction times to onsets and offsets of these non-verbal auditory stimuli. Dyslexic readers showed impairment compared with CA controls in responding to the "last" of a sequence of three non-verbal visual stimuli (shapes), p = 0.02. Reaction times in the visual and auditory onset and offset tasks were richly intercorrelated in the control groups, but the dyslexic group did not show as many significant correlations in reaction times between the auditory and visual domains, or between the onset and offset RTs within each modality. These results suggest that there may be a less integrated cross-modal and intra-modal temporal system in children with dyslexia than in controls. In many of the measures in this study, the performance of the dyslexic group resembled that of the RA control group but differed from CA controls, which implies a developmental delay. The possibility that such a cognitive delay may be related to an underlying neurological disorder is discussed. (Contains 5 figures and 6 tables.)

An investigation was conducted into the visual and auditory temporal processing profiles of two groups of 4- to 6-year-old children: "pre-alphabetic" children, who showed no alphabetic ability (failing to read any non-words in a test), and those who demonstrated some alphabetic ability. This "alphabetic" group showed higher scores in reading and spelling attainment than the "pre-alphabetic" group. They were also faster than the "pre-alphabetic" group in reacting to the onset and offset of auditory and visual stimuli. However, when age was used as a covariate, only reaction times (RTs) to the offsets of visual stimuli were found to be faster in the "alphabetic" than the "pre-alphabetic group". This suggests that responses to the offset of visual stimuli are becoming more rapid during the same developmental period when alphabetic ability is beginning to be acquired. Within the "alphabetic group", after accounting for age, visual and auditory onset RTs were strongly correlated, whereas within the "pre-alphabetic" group there were high correlations between visual and auditory offset RTs. It is therefore suggested that a strong association between RTs to visual and auditory onsets may be beneficial during early alphabetic acquisition, when phoneme-grapheme associations are established. Multiple regression analyses showed visual offset RT as the only variable to account for a significant amount of variance in spelling attainment after age was taken into account, which may relate to Frith's (1985) contention that spelling is important in driving early alphabetic ability.

This study investigated gender differences in communication effectiveness between popular and unpopular 5- to 7-year-old children. Because previous research suggests that there may be gender differences in how popular and unpopular children communicate with each other, 24 same-gender pairs (each containing a popular and an unpopular child) were videotaped playing a game. Communication effectiveness was assessed by measuring the incidence of forms of speech associated with successful collaboration (questions, directives, and elaborations). Results revealed a popularity by gender interaction. Popular girls used a greater incidence of these forms of speech compared to unpopular girls. By contrast, there was no difference in the speech of popular and unpopular boys. Findings are interpreted in relation to the nature of the task and the characteristics of popular and unpopular children.

Investigates whether pairing unpopular five- to six-year old children with more popular peers would promote more effective collaboration. Examines the differences in verbal and nonverbal communication of the popular and unpopular children. Explains that the children were filmed playing a collaborative game. (CMK)

The integration of engineering content at the pre-college level is gaining global traction as a strategy to improve learning outcomes and to promote inclusion and diversity in STEM (Science. Technology, Engineering. and Mathematics). Preservice teacher (PST) programs have become natural insertion points for integration efforts by providing future K-12 teachers with the resources and preparation to teach engineering as part of their academic preparation. There is a need to understand the socio-cognitive mechanisms by which teacher preparation programs can help teachers to integrate engineering in their future classrooms. This work examines how an innovative cross-disciplinary program impacted important social-cognitive drivers of engineering integration. We used mediation analysis to understand a successful pathway to engineering integration as a result of exposure to a cross-disciplinary collaboration with engineering students. This study revealed how participation in the program as part of their academic preparation increased PSTs' confidence to teach engineering and their beliefs about the importance of engineering content, which in turn, increased their intention to integrate engineering in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. The present study describes patterns of tobacco use counseling among physicians and dentists as reported by adolescents and determines the association between provider advice to quit and cessation activities among current smokers. Methods. Data were analyzed from the 2000 National Youth Tobacco Survey, an anonymous, self-administered, school-based survey. The National Youth Tobacco Survey was administered to a nationally representative sample of 35 828 students in grades 6 to 12 in 324 schools. Results. Thirty-three percent of adolescents who visited a physician or a dentist in the past year reported that a physician counseled them about the dangers of tobacco use, and 20% reported that a dentist provided a similar message. Among students who smoked in the past year, 16.4% received advice to quit from a physician and 11.6% received advice to quit from a dentist. Physician or dentist advice to quit was correlated with 1 or more quit attempts in the past 12 months. Conclusion. On the basis of adolescent reports, physician and dentist practice patterns remain well below recommended guidelines. Results suggest that provider advice to quit is associated with cessation activity. Additional studies are needed to confirm whether the low prevalence of brief provider tobacco use counseling is a missed opportunity to affect adolescent smoking behavior. Pediatrics 2005;115:719-725; physician practice patterns, tobacco use/smoking., ABBREVIATIONS. USPHS, United States Public Health Service; NAMCS, National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey; NYTS, National Youth Tobacco Survey; OR, odds ratio. Every day in the United States, >4000 youths who [...]

Memory for discourse by older adults was examined by comparing their performance with that of younger subjects on a text recognition task. Results showed that the old were better at detecting lexical substitutions than subject-object reversals, suggesting that the old retain lexical items better than the relations between them. (FL)

Compared contextual facilitation of word recognition in old (N=12) and young (N=12) subjects. Both groups responded faster when context was supplied. For low predictability words and nonwords, the old showed greater contextual facilitation. Concluded that old people compensate for deterioration in stimulus quality by effective use of contextual information. (JAC)