Measuring Motivation Orientation and School Readiness in Children Served by Head Start

Currently, the most widely used direct assessment of motivation orientation for preschoolers has little to no research on its reliability and validity. This study examined the test–retest reliability and concurrent and predictive validity of this direct assessment. Results highlight potential limitations of this measure in capturing motivation orientation in preschoolers from low-income families

Early Childhood Science and Engineering: Engaging Platforms for Fostering Domain-General Learning Skills

Early childhood science and engineering education offer a prime context to foster approaches-to-learning (ATL) and executive functioning (EF) by eliciting children’s natural curiosity about the world, providing a unique opportunity to engage children in hands-on learning experiences that promote critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, persistence, and other adaptive domain-general learning skills. Indeed, in any science experiment or engineering problem, children make observations, engage in collaborative conversations with teachers and peers, and think flexibly to come up with predictions or potential solutions to their problem. Inherent to science and engineering is the idea that one learns from initial failures within an iterative trial-and-error process where children practice risk-taking, persistence, tolerance for frustration, and sustaining focus. Unfortunately, science and engineering instruction is typically absent from early childhood classrooms, and particularly so in programs that serve children from low-income families. However, our early science and engineering intervention research shows teachers how to build science and engineering instruction into activities that are already happening in their classrooms, which boosts their confidence and removes some of the stigma around science and engineering. In this paper, we discuss the promise of research that uses early childhood science and engineering experiences as engaging, hands-on, interactive platforms to instill ATL and EF in young children living below the poverty line. We propose that early childhood science and engineering offer a central theme that captures children’s attention and allows for integrated instruction across domain-general (ATL, EF, and social–emotional) and domain-specific (e.g., language, literacy, mathematics, and science) content, allowing for contextualized experiences that make learning more meaningful and captivating for children

Shared Decision Making in Early Childhood Research: A Foundation for Successful Community-University Partnerships

This section is devoted to contributions from the readership. These include articles, essays, commentary, and previously published chapters of special interest to the child development, early childhood intervention, and family support fields. The Editors and members of the Advisory Board welcome the participation of practitioners, researchers, and policy makers to continue "Dialogue From the Field.&quot

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Novelty and familiarity as redundant cues in retardate discrimination learning

Forty retarded children, a Low Mental Age (MA) Group (mean MA 3-3 yrs.) and a High MA Group (mean MA 5–7 yrs.) were trained on 120 different two-choice visual discrimination problems. For all subjects, half of these problems were standard four-trial problems (Standard Condition). The remaining 60 problems were variants of the Moss-Harlow Design, the first trial differing from the initial two-choice trial of the Standard Condition in having only a single stimulus present, either the positive stimulus (Positive Condition) or the negative stimulus (Negative Condition), in both cases followed by three trials with both stimuli present. Each subject received either Positive Condition Problems or Negative Condition Problems, but not both. An analysis of Trial 2 performance revealed that although no interproblem changes in the Standard Condition occurred, there were large initial performance differences and large interproblem changes in the Positive and Negative Conditions which varied with MA. Initial performance differences were interpreted as a differential preference for novel and familiar stimuli in the two MA Groups. Changes in interproblem performance were consistent with the hypothesis that these MA dependent novelty-familiarity preferences could be influenced by novelty-familiarity redundancy training. These interpretations were supported by predictions from theory

Assessment in Early Childhood Science Education

The state of research and practice in early childhood science education is at a critical tipping point. The encouraging news is the considerable national, state and local activity around early childhood science education. An increased focus on science has the potential for improving multiple areas of school readiness through learning opportunities that draw on young children’s natural curiosity to understand their world. Active engagement in doing science also provides young children with a foundation for thinking and problem solving that can serve as cognitive models for the challenging years of school that lie ahead. The flip side, however, is the dearth of empirical research validating the effectiveness of science activities and early childhood science curricula. A major barrier to conducting such research is the lack of reliable and valid assessments to provide a strong evidence base on best practices in science education, key factors that support these practices and how these practices affect young children’s competence in science. This chapter presents an assessment framework for programs seeking solid evidence to understand what constitutes best practices in early childhood science consistent with the recently published Next Generation Science Standards. The current state of assessment in early childhood science is also reviewed. Chapter sections cover summative, screening and formative assessments of children’s science competence, teacher’s science pedagogical knowledge, teaching practices, and attitudes and beliefs about science, and assessing classrooms for facilitating science learning. Although very little critically needed assessment work has been published, promising work is underway and is also reviewed

Building Statewide Partnership Capacity to Assess School Readiness for Florida Head Start Children and Families

The purpose of this paper is to describe a research partnership model being used b y the Florida Head Start Association through its Research Committee as a means of contributing to statewide efforts focused on program quality and school readiness. Florida has enacted readiness legislation that has long-tern consequences for early childhood programs and the children and families these programs serve. Head Start practitioners and researchers from across the state have been working in collaboration for the past year to ensure that Head Start programs in Florida have input to school readiness policies and practices. The paper briefly discusses legislative initiatives and concerns that these initiatives raise for Head Start programs, and then describes the statewide research partnership model used to address these concerns. The paper concludes with a discussion of ongoing work of the partnership group in relation to issues of program quality and school readiness

Teacher and observer ratings of head start children’s social skills

The purpose of this study was to compare teacher and observer ratings of young children’s social behaviors in the context of peer play with both sources using the same measure and instructions. Moreover, we sought to examine and compare the construct validity of the Penn Interactive Peer Play Scale (PIPPS) as a teacher and an observer rating scale. Two hundred and fifteen African-American and Hispanic head start children from 22 classrooms were rated on their social behaviors by their teacher and an observer. The ratings from these two sources produced both convergences and divergences. Both teacher and observer ratings revealed factor structures that reflect play interaction, disruption, and disconnection. However, observer ratings distinguished between nonaggressive disruption and aggressive disruption. Also, teachers were better able to identify positive play behaviors than observers. Furthermore, despite considerable overlap in the factors observed, ratings of individual children by teachers and observers were significantly correlated on only one of the three factors. In light of these findings, the role of teachers and observers in bringing unique perspectives to the assessment of young children’s social behaviors is discussed