An Examination of Concepts of School Readiness Among Parents and Educators in Ireland

The Department of Children and Youth Affairs commissioned research through the Irish Research Council (IRC) to examine concepts of school readiness as they are understood by early years educators and managers, primary school principals, junior infant teachers and parents of children participating in the first Free Preschool Year in Ireland. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, involving interviews, an online survey and “draw and tell” sessions with children. Representative samples of FPSY settings and primary schools were selected and an online survey based on the findings of the qualitative phase was sent to 500 pre-primary settings and 500 primary schools. In this study, the concept of school readiness as understood by parents of children availing of the FPSY, and early years educators and managers, emerged as a multi-faceted and complex concept, influenced by and entwined with a range of interrelated factors at macro (policy), meso (interrelationships) and micro (pre-primary and primary) levels. These factors included children’s social and emotional skills, dispositions, language development, self-help skills, appropriate classroom behaviour and pre-academic skills. School readiness was clearly located along a maturationist-environmentalist continuum where readiness was associated with a child’s age as well as external evidence of the acquisition of specific skills. Interview and survey participants articulated a range of school readiness indicators, with significant differences in some instances between the importance allocated to these indicators by individual participant groups

Small scale structure in molecular gas from multi-epoch observations of HD 34078

We present spectroscopic observations of the runaway reddened star HD 34078 acquired during the last three years at Observatoire de Haute Provence and McDonald Observatory as well as other spectra obtained since 1990. The drift of the line of sight through the foreground cloud due to the large transverse velocity of HD 34078 allows us to probe the spatial distribution of CH, CH+, CN and DIBs carriers at scales ranging from about 1 AU up to 150 AU. In particular, time variations in the equivalent width of absorption lines are examined. A few past and recent high resolution observations of CH and CH+ absorption are used to search for line profile variations and to convert equivalent widths into column densities. The data set reveals a 20 % increase in CH column density over the past 10 years with no corresponding variation in the column density of CH+ or in the strengths of the 5780 and 5797 AA DIBs. CN observations indicate that its excitation temperature has significantly increased from < 3.1 K in 1993 to 3.6 +- 0.17 K in 1998 while the CN column shows only a modest rise of ~ 12 +- 6 %. The data also strongly suggest the existence of weak correlated variations in CH and CH+ columns over periods of 6 - 12 months (or ~ 10 AU). These results are discussed in relation to CH+ production mechanisms. A dense newly intervening clump is considered in order to explain the long-term increase in the column density of CH, but such a scenario does not account for all observational constraints. Instead, the observations are best described by CH+ production in a photodissociation region, like that suggested for the Pleiades and IC 348.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figures. accepted for publication in A&A. v2 : the few notes on the absorption line at 5772 AA have been remove

A self-consistent model for the evolution of the gas produced in the debris disc of β Pictoris

This paper presents a self-consistent model for the evolution of gas produced in the debris disc of β Pictoris. Our model proposes that atomic carbon and oxygen are created from the photodissociation of CO, which is itself released from volatile-rich bodies in the debris disc due to grain–grain collisions or photodesorption. While the CO lasts less than one orbit, the atomic gas evolves by viscous spreading resulting in an accretion disc inside the parent belt and a decretion disc outside. The temperature, ionization fraction and population levels of carbon and oxygen are followed with the photodissociation region model CLOUDY, which is coupled to a dynamical viscous α model. We present new gas observations of β Pic, of C I observed with Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment and O I observed with $\textit{Herschel}$, and show that these along with published CII and CO observations can all be explained with this new model. Our model requires a viscosity α > 0.1, similar to that found in sufficiently ionized discs of other astronomical objects; we propose that the magnetorotational instability is at play in this highly ionized and dilute medium. This new model can be tested from its predictions for high-resolution ALMA observations of C I. We also constrain the water content of the planetesimals in β Pic. The scenario proposed here might be at play in all debris discs and this model could be used more generally on all discs with C, O or CO detections.QK, MW and LM acknowledge support from the European Union through ERC grant number 279973. AJ acknowledges the support of the DISCSIM project, grant agreement 341137, funded by the European Research Council under ERC-2013-ADG.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Oxford University Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw136