99,479 research outputs found
Impact of California's Transitional Kindergarten Program, 2013-14
Transitional kindergarten (TK)—the first year of a two-year kindergarten program for California children who turn 5 between September 2 and December 2—is intended to better prepare young five-year-olds for kindergarten and ensure a strong start to their educational career. To determine whether this goal is being achieved, American Institutes for Research (AIR) is conducting an evaluation of the impact of TK in California. The goal of this study is to measure the success of the program by determining the impact of TK on students' readiness for kindergarten in several areas. Using a rigorous regression discontinuity (RD) research design,1 we compared language, literacy, mathematics, executive function, and social-emotional skills at kindergarten entry for students who attended TK and for students who did not attend TK. Overall, we found that TK had a positive impact on students' kindergarten readiness in several domains, controlling for students' age differences. These effects are over and above the experiences children in the comparison group had the year before kindergarten, which for more than 80 percent was some type of preschool program
Indirect language therapy for children with persistent language impairment in mainstream primary schools : outcomes from a cohort intervention
A manualized language therapy developed via a randomized controlled trial had proved efficacious in the short-term in developing expressive language for mainstream primary school children with persistent language impairment. This therapy had been delivered to a predetermined schedule by speech and language therapists or speech and language therapy assistants to children individually or in groups. However, this model of service delivery is no longer the most common model in UK schools, where indirect consultancy approaches with intervention delivered by school staff are often used. A cohort study was undertaken to investigate whether the therapy was equally efficacious when delivered to comparable children by school staff, rather than speech and language therapists or speech and language therapy assistants. Children in the cohort study were selected using the same criteria as in the randomized controlled trial, and the same manualized therapy was used, but delivered by mainstream school staff using a consultancy model common in the UK. Outcomes were compared with those of randomized controlled trial participants. The gains in expressive language measured in the randomized controlled trial were not replicated in the cohort study. Less language-learning activity was recorded than had been planned, and less than was delivered in the randomized controlled trial. Implications for 'consultancy' speech and language therapist service delivery models in mainstream schools are outlined
A logic with temporally accessible iteration
Deficiency in expressive power of the first-order logic has led to developing
its numerous extensions by fixed point operators, such as Least Fixed-Point
(LFP), inflationary fixed-point (IFP), partial fixed-point (PFP), etc. These
logics have been extensively studied in finite model theory, database theory,
descriptive complexity. In this paper we introduce unifying framework, the
logic with iteration operator, in which iteration steps may be accessed by
temporal logic formulae. We show that proposed logic FO+TAI subsumes all
mentioned fixed point extensions as well as many other fixed point logics as
natural fragments. On the other hand we show that over finite structures FO+TAI
is no more expressive than FO+PFP. Further we show that adding the same
machinery to the logic of monotone inductions (FO+LFP) does not increase its
expressive power either
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Expressive Policy Analysis with Enhanced System Dynamicity
Despite several research studies, the effective analysis of policy based systems remains a significant challenge. Policy analysis should at least (i) be expressive (ii) take account of obligations and authorizations, (iii) include a dynamic system model, and (iv) give useful diagnostic information. We present a logic-based policy analysis framework which satisfies these requirements, showing how many significant policy-related properties can be analysed, and we give details of a prototype implementation. Copyright 2009 ACM
Secure Querying of Recursive XML Views: A Standard XPath-based Technique
Most state-of-the art approaches for securing XML documents allow users to
access data only through authorized views defined by annotating an XML grammar
(e.g. DTD) with a collection of XPath expressions. To prevent improper
disclosure of confidential information, user queries posed on these views need
to be rewritten into equivalent queries on the underlying documents. This
rewriting enables us to avoid the overhead of view materialization and
maintenance. A major concern here is that query rewriting for recursive XML
views is still an open problem. To overcome this problem, some works have been
proposed to translate XPath queries into non-standard ones, called Regular
XPath queries. However, query rewriting under Regular XPath can be of
exponential size as it relies on automaton model. Most importantly, Regular
XPath remains a theoretical achievement. Indeed, it is not commonly used in
practice as translation and evaluation tools are not available. In this paper,
we show that query rewriting is always possible for recursive XML views using
only the expressive power of the standard XPath. We investigate the extension
of the downward class of XPath, composed only by child and descendant axes,
with some axes and operators and we propose a general approach to rewrite
queries under recursive XML views. Unlike Regular XPath-based works, we provide
a rewriting algorithm which processes the query only over the annotated DTD
grammar and which can run in linear time in the size of the query. An
experimental evaluation demonstrates that our algorithm is efficient and scales
well.Comment: (2011
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Expressive vocabulary predicts non-verbal executive function: a 2-year longitudinal study of deaf and hearing children
Numerous studies suggest an association between language and executive function (EF), but evidence of a developmental relationship remains inconclusive. Data were collected from 75 deaf/hard-of-hearing (DHH) children and 82 hearing age-matched controls. Children were 6-11 years old at first time of testing, and completed a battery of nonverbal EF tasks and a test of expressive vocabulary. These tasks were completed again two years later. Both groups improved their scores on all tasks over this period. DHH children performed significantly less well than hearing peers on some EF tasks and the vocabulary test at both time points. Cross-lagged panel models showed that vocabulary at Time 1 predicted change in EF scores for both DHH and hearing children but not the reverse
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