The Challenges of Promoting Literacy Integration within a Play-based Learning Kindergarten Program: Teacher Perspectives and Implementation

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in the Journal of Research and Child Education on January 19th 2018, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02568543.2017.1416006Kindergarten teachers face the challenge of balancing traditional developmental programming and contemporary academic standards. In classrooms following a play-based learning framework, academic content such as literacy is to be taught within children’s play. However, educators have reported both conceptual and practical challenges with integrating play and literacy. Although the educative contexts of direct instruction, teacher-guided play, and child-directed free play have been individually examined and endorsed for promoting early literacy, the enactment of literacy behaviours across these contexts in kindergarten has not been widely examined. The current study investigated teacher perspectives on play and literacy development and the resulting integration of literacy behaviours across educative contexts. Semi- structured teacher interviews and video data were collected in 12 participating classrooms. Results revealed three common challenges with integrating play and literacy learning: direct instruction plays a key instructional role, play is less structured and difficult to plan, and feeling uncertain how to implement guided play. These challenges were reflected in the differing frequencies of literacy behaviours observed across contexts. These results point to the need for additional research and teacher training with respect to implementing guided play for literacy learning, as well as strategies for balancing direct instruction with play-based approaches

Performance-Based Incentives in a Dynamic Principal-Agent Model

The principal-agent paradigm, in which a principal has a primary stake in the performance of some system but delegates operational control of that system to an agent, has many natural applications in operations management (OM). However, existing principal-agent models are of limited use to OM researchers because they cannot represent the rich dynamic structure required of OM models. This paper formulates a novel dynamic model that overcomes these limitations by combining the principal-agent framework with the physical structure of a Markov decision process. In this model one has a system moving from state to state as time passes, with transition probabilities depending on actions chosen by an agent, and a principal who pays the agent based on state transitions observed. The principal seeks an optimal payment scheme, striving to induce the actions that will maximize her expected discounted profits over a finite planning horizon. Although dynamic principal-agent models similar to the one proposed here are considered intractable, a set of assumptions are introduced that enable a systematic analysis. These assumptions involve the "economic structure" of the model but not its "physical structure." Under these assumptions, the paper establishes that one can use a dynamic-programming recursion to derive an optimal payment scheme. This scheme is memoryless and satisfies a generalization of Bellman's principle of optimality. Important managerial insights are highlighted in the context of a two-state example called "the maintenance problem".dynamic principal agent problem, incentives in operations management, maintenance