CONTRACTS Bad Checks: Provide for Civil Remedies and Defenses

The Act adds a new section to the chapter of the Code dealing with damages in contract actions to provide for a civil remedy for the payee of a dishonored check. The Act permits double damages up to a maximum of $500, a service charge, and court costs and also provides for certain affirmative defenses and waivers in an action for such damages. April 3, 198

Language and Literacy in a Head Start Preschool: Understanding Practice to Inform Theory and Improve Outcomes

Head Start is a federally funded program providing comprehensive social and early education services to children from low-income households and their families. Seeking to boost outcomes of Head Start students, in 1998 Congress amended Head Start\u27s statement of purpose, specifying school readiness as the program\u27s top priority. This mission change necessitated that Head Start, long-focused on promoting social competence, shift attention to a new concern—supporting children\u27s development in cognitive domains such as math and literacy. Data suggest that though some progress has been made, Head Start preschoolers still lag behind their peer group in assessments of early math, language, and literacy. The reasons why this problem persists are complex and may be better addressed at the local level. This investigation—a case study of the four preschool classrooms comprising a Head Start center in the Southeastern United States—examines how teachers address early language and literacy in their practice; the extent to which literacy teaching and learning in Head Start classrooms supports emergent literacy; and the factors influencing practice decisions related to early language and literacy. Analysis of data, including teacher interviews, classroom observations, artifacts, photographs, and program quality evaluation reports, provide a rich and nuanced account of Head Start teachers\u27 language and literacy dispositions and practices. The study reveals the teachers support promoting language and literacy but have mixed understanding of Head Start\u27s mandate to promote school readiness, and lack clarity regarding readiness goals for their center. The teachers attend to the domains of language development and literacy because they feel compelled to prepare their students for the increasing demands they perceive are being made of kindergartners, rather than in response to Head Start\u27s mandated purpose. As in previous studies, promoting phonological awareness was virtually absent from practice. The data suggests that teachers lack comprehensive knowledge of language and literacy elements comprising the domains. Further, though curriculum fidelity was outside the scope of the investigation, the evidence strongly suggests the teachers have significant gaps in their knowledge of HighScope, the curriculum used at the center

Differences in Statistical Reasoning Abilities through Behavioral-Cognitive Combinations of Videos and Formative Assessments in Undergraduate Statistics Courses

This study evaluated whether significant differences in statistical reasoning abilities exist for completers of short online instructional videos and formative quizzes for students in undergraduate introductory statistics courses. Data for the study were gathered during the Fall 2013 semester at a community college in Northeast Tennessee. Computer-based pedagogical tools can promote improved conceptual reasoning ability (Trumpower & Sarwar, 2010; Van der Merwe, 2012). Additionally, prior research demonstrated a significant relationship between formative quiz access and student achievement (Stull, Majerich, Bernacki, Varnum, & Ducette, 2011; Wilson, Boyd, Chen, & Jamal, 2011), as well as multimedia object access and student achievement (Bliwise, 2005; Miller, 2013). Four research questions were used to guide the study. A series of analysis of variance (ANOVA) statistical procedures was used to analyze the data. Findings indicated no significant differences in statistical reasoning abilities between students who were provided access to supplemental online instructional videos and formative quizzes and students who were not provided access. Moreover, statistical reasoning abilities did not differ significantly based upon number of quizzes successfully completed, average number of quiz attempts, or number of videos accessed

Mild acute stress improves response speed without impairing accuracy or interference control in two selective attention tasks: Implications for theories of stress and cognition.

Acute stress is generally thought to impair performance on tasks thought to rely on selective attention. This effect has been well established for moderate to severe stressors, but no study has examined how a mild stressor-the most common type of stressor-influences selective attention. In addition, no study to date has examined how stress influences the component processes involved in overall selective attention task performance, such as controlled attention, automatic attentional activation, decision-making, and motor abilities. To address these issues, we randomly assigned 107 participants to a mild acute stress or control condition. As expected, the mild acute stress condition showed a small but significant increase in cortisol relative to the control condition. Following the stressor, we assessed attention with two separate flanker tasks. One of these tasks was optimized to investigate component attentional processes using computational cognitive modeling, whereas the other task employed mouse-tracking to illustrate how response conflict unfolded over time. The results for both tasks showed that mild acute stress decreased response time (i.e., increased response speed) without influencing accuracy or interference control. Further, computational modeling and mouse-tracking analyses indicated that these effects were due to faster motor action execution time for chosen actions. Intriguingly, however, cortisol responses were unrelated to any of the observed effects of mild stress. These results have implications for theories of stress and cognition, and highlight the importance of considering motor processes in understanding the effects of stress on cognitive task performance

Geriatric Medication Therapy: Weighing the Evidence versus Best Practice

Goals: The goal of this article is to provide a review of available evidence for safe prescribing in older adults and recommend medication therapies based on anticipated pharmacokinetic/physiologic changes in this population

Computer-based Pedagogical Tools, Conceptual Reasoning Ability, and Statistical Understanding: A Literature Review

Abstract is available to download