A Case Study of the Full Service Community School Model: School Level Benefits in an Urban, Southern Elementary School

Abstract The purpose of this exploratory, qualitative single case study was to explore the Full Service Community Schools model in one, urban elementary school. More specifically, the study sought to understand the impact this model had on students and teachers at one particular research site. This study was also intended to examine the impact the Full Service Community School model had on the role of school administrators. The research questions that guided this study were: (1) How does the Full Service Community School model impact students? (2) How does the Full Service Community School model impact teachers? (3) What impact does the Full Service Community School model have on the role of school administrators? The study found students who were struggling academically were assigned a volunteer that served as a tutor and provided individualized instruction to the students. These students were found to complete their classwork and homework when working with tutors while practicing academic skills they had not mastered. Findings also suggested students formed relationships with their tutors which prompted personal dialogues to occur. Students would talk to their tutors about problems they were facing at home and school. In addition, this study also found aggressive and defiant students were provided a volunteer who served as a mentor. These students would work on social, emotional and behavioral skills. Mentors would motivate the students to behave appropriately in school and reward them when this was accomplished. Lastly, the after school component of the Full Service Community Schools model was found to impact students because it gave students a safe and structured environment to attend when the regular school day had ended. The findings of the study found the Full Service Community Schools model impacted teachers in several ways. Volunteers serving as mentors and tutors worked with the most challenging students. This gave teachers more instructional time to work with other students. When volunteers listened to students’ problems, teachers were freed up to continue teaching. Also, teachers were able to relinquish responsibilities to the volunteers who worked with students. The volunteers gave teachers an extra set of hands in the classroom. Lastly, this study found the Full Service Community School model impacted the role of administrators the least. The model put extra responsibilities on principals due to having extra individuals in the building during and after the school day. Administrators also had to coordinate the schedules of these individuals. On a positive note, volunteers working with disruptive students did assist administrators because these students were less likely to visit the office

Pronouncing printed words: investigating a semantic contribution to adult word reading

When considering print-to-sound word reading, orthography and phonology are obviously involved. However, another system, that of semantic memory, might also be involved in orthography-to-phonology computation. Whether this occurs is debated in the literature both in the interpretation of behavioural results (e.g., Monaghan & Ellis, 2002; Strain et al., 1995) and in the implementation of semantic memory within computational models of word reading (Coltheart et al., 2001; Plaut et al., 1996). The central aim of this thesis was to investigate whether there is a semantic contribution to orthography-to-phonology computation in healthy adult word reading. Experiments 1-4 used a semantic priming design in which a picture prime was followed either two trials later (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) or one trial later (Experiment 2) by a word target, and this investigated priming of various word types. Regression investigations explored whether semantic features and imageability were unique significant predictors of ELexicon single word reading reaction times while statistically controlling for age-of-acquisition. The two ERP experiments (Experiments 5 and 6) investigated the neurocorrelates of imageability and semantic features and whether there are semantic effects early in the time-course of low frequency word reading. Experiments 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 and the regression investigations show evidence of a semantic contribution to low frequency regular and low frequency exception word reading. There is also some suggestion of a semantic contribution to high frequency word reading (Experiment 2 and Regression analyses). From the results of the three lines of investigation, it is concluded that semantic information is involved in healthy adult word reading, and these results are best accommodated by the connectionist triangle model of word reading. These investigations also provide information concerning various word types and factors that contribute to “easy” and “difficult” words, semantic memory models and their accounts of priming, and the measures, age-of-acquisition, imageability, and semantic features

Assumptions behind scoring source and item memory impact on conclusions about memory: A reply to Kellen and Singmann's comment (2017).

In our recent article in the journal Cortex (Cooper, Greve, & Henson, 2017), we examined memory for source and item information using data from two different source monitoring paradigms and six different groups of participants. When comparing standard accuracy analysis and various Multinomial Processing Tree (MPT) models, we found that the type of analysis determined the extent to which item and/or source memory differences were found across groups (healthy young and older groups, an older group with mild memory problems, and individuals with hippocampal lesions). Our main point was methodological: that one could draw different conclusions (e.g., whether ageing or hippocampal lesions affect only source memory, or both source and item memory) depending on the analysis used

Response to commentaries on our review of Fast Mapping in adults.

We thank all the commentators for their thoughts on our review of Fast Mapping (FM) in adults, where we questioned the evidence that FM is a distinct learning mechanism, and urged caution over the excitement generated by the original report of FM in adults with amnesia using the fast mapping paradigm (FMP) . While some commentators remain convinced that there is good evidence to support a FM process in adults, most reported a skepticism similar to ours. Here we respond to the main comments, and clarify some of the terms of debate

Little evidence for Fast Mapping (FM) in adults: A review and discussion.

Conventional memory theory proposes that the hippocampus is initially responsible for encoding new information, before this responsibility is gradually transferred to the neocortex. Therefore, a report in 2011 by Sharon et al. of hippocampal-independent learning in humans was notable. These authors reported normal learning of new object-name associations under a Fast Mapping (FM) procedure in adults with hippocampal damage, who were amnesic according to more conventional explicit memorisation procedures. FM is an incidental learning paradigm, inspired by vocabulary acquisition in children, which is hypothesised to allow rapid, cortical-based memory formation. In the years since the original report, there has been, understandably, a growing interest in adult FM, not only because of its theoretical importance, but also because of its potential to help rehabilitate individuals with memory problems. We review the FM literature in individuals with amnesia and in healthy adults, using both explicit and implicit memory measures. Contrary to other recent reviews, we conclude that the evidence for FM in adults is weak, and restraint is needed before assuming the phenomenon exists

Knowledge is power: Prior knowledge aids memory for both congruent and incongruent events, but in different ways.

Events that conform to our expectations, that is, are congruent with our world knowledge or schemas, are better remembered than unrelated events. Yet events that conflict with schemas can also be remembered better. We examined this apparent paradox in 4 experiments, in which schemas were established by training ordinal relationships between randomly paired objects, whereas event memory was tested for the number of objects on each trial. Better memory was found for both congruent and incongruent trials, relative to unrelated trials, producing memory performance that was a "U-shaped" function of congruency. The congruency advantage but not incongruency advantage was mediated by postencoding processes, whereas the incongruency advantage, but not congruency advantage, emerged even if the information probed by the memory test was irrelevant to the schema. Schemas therefore augment event memory in multiple ways, depending on the match between novel and existing information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

Semantic priming over unrelated trials: evidence for different effects in word and picture naming

Two naming experiments are reported that replicated previous findings of semantic interference as a result of naming related word or picture primes three trials before picture targets. We also examined whether semantic interference occurred when the materials were reversed and picture or word primes were named before word targets. The interest in semantic interference during word naming followed a suggestion made by Humphreys, Lloyd-Jones, and Fias (1995) that word naming, like picture naming, may be reliant on a semantic route to name retrieval when the two stimuli are mixed. In contrast to their findings, we found no evidence for semantic interference during target word naming; in fact, we found facilitation from related picture primes. No priming was found for the related word prime and word target condition. The data allow us to rule out the possibility that word naming is reliant on a semantic route when mixed with pictures in this priming paradigm and to conclude that there is no clear evidence of semantic activation during word naming. We also conclude, in line with other research, that word naming and picture naming involve different processes

Vanadium pentoxide (V2O5): a van der Waals density functional study

The past few years has brought renewed focus on the physics behind the class of materials characterized by long-range interactions and wide regions of low electron density, sparse matter. There is now much work on developing the appropriate algorithms and codes able to correctly describe this class of materials within a parameter-free quantum physical description. In particular, van der Waals (vdW) forces play a major role in building up material cohesion in sparse matter. This work presents an application to the vanadium pentoxide (V2O5) bulk structure of two versions of the vdW-DF method, a first-principles procedure for the inclusion of vdW interactions in the context of density functional theory (DFT). In addition to showing improvement compared to traditional semilocal calculations of DFT, we discuss the choice of various exchange functionals and point out issues that may arise when treating systems with large amounts of vacuum.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

Investigating Fast Mapping Task Components: No Evidence for the Role of Semantic Referent nor Semantic Inference in Healthy Adults.

Fast mapping (FM) is an incidental learning process that is hypothesized to allow rapid, cortical-based memory formation, independent of the normal, hippocampally dependent episodic memory system. It is believed to underlie the rapid vocabulary learning in infants that occurs separately from intentional memorisation strategies. Interest in adult FM learning was stimulated by a report in which adults with amnesia following hippocampal damage showed a normal ability to learn new object-name associations after an incidental FM task, despite their impaired memory under a conventional intentional memorization task. This remarkable finding has important implications for memory rehabilitation, and has led to a number of neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies in other patients and controls. Given this growing interest in adult FM, we conducted four behavioural experiments with healthy adults (N = 24 young or older adults in Experiments 1-3 using within-participant designs; N = 195 young adults in Experiment 4 using a between-participant design) that attempted to dissect which component(s) of the FM task are important for memory. Two key components of the FM task have been claimed to support FM learning: (1) provision of a known semantic referent and (2) requirement that the new association be inferred. Experiment 1 provided no evidence that removing the semantic referent impaired memory performance, while Experiment 2 provided no evidence that removing the semantic inference impaired performance. Experiment 3 was a replication of Experiment 2 with older participants, based on the hypothesis (from studies of amnesic individuals) that FM would be more effective following the hippocampal atrophy typical of increasing age, but again found no evidence that semantic inference is beneficial. Given potential concerns about contamination between tasks when each participant performed multiple variants of the FM task, we ran a final between-participant design in which each participant only ever did one condition. Despite 80% power and despite being able to detect better memory following intentional memorization in the explicit encoding (EE) control condition than in each of the FM conditions, we again found no evidence of differences between any FM conditions. We conclude that there is no evidence that the components hypothesized to be critical for FM are relevant to healthy adults

The effects of hippocampal lesions on MRI measures of structural and functional connectivity.

Focal lesions can affect connectivity between distal brain regions (connectional diaschisis) and impact the graph-theoretic properties of major brain networks (connectomic diaschisis). Given its unique anatomy and diverse range of functions, the hippocampus has been claimed to be a critical "hub" in brain networks. We investigated the effects of hippocampal lesions on structural and functional connectivity in six patients with amnesia, using a range of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) analyses. Neuropsychological assessment revealed marked episodic memory impairment and generally intact performance across other cognitive domains. The hippocampus was the only brain structure exhibiting reduced grey-matter volume that was consistent across patients, and the fornix was the only major white-matter tract to show altered structural connectivity according to both diffusion metrics. Nonetheless, functional MRI revealed both increases and decreases in functional connectivity. Analysis at the level of regions within the default-mode network revealed reduced functional connectivity, including between nonhippocampal regions (connectional diaschisis). Analysis at the level of functional networks revealed reduced connectivity between thalamic and precuneus networks, but increased connectivity between the default-mode network and frontal executive network. The overall functional connectome showed evidence of increased functional segregation in patients (connectomic diaschisis). Together, these results point to dynamic reorganization following hippocampal lesions, with both decreased and increased functional connectivity involving limbic-diencephalic structures and larger-scale networks. © 2016 The Authors Hippocampus Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Medical Research Council (Grant ID: MC-A060-5PR10); Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (Grant ID: BB/L02263X/1); Netherlands Organization for Scientific ResearchThis is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Wiley via https://doi.org/10.1002/hipo.2262