Age-related changes in sustained attention for older children from high poverty communities in the USA

Sustained attention influences academic achievement because maintaining focus on a task for an extended period supports the acquisition of new skills. Investigating the development of sustained attention has been an important topic in educational and psychological research. This study includes secondary analysis of data collected as part of a larger project that provided opportunities for children to learn chess after school. This study analysed data related to sustained attention, which was measured by the Continuous Performance Task across one academic year in a predominantly African American sample. This sample consists of 149 participants (n = 66 females, M age = 9.57 years, SD = 0.89 years) attending schools in high poverty communities in the USA. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to examine changes in sustained attention in ethnic minority students from high poverty areas using a longitudinal design. A repeated-measures ANOVA was used to conduct statistical analysis. The results indicated that participants’ performance on the sustained attention task improved significantly from the beginning to the end of the school year. Although past studies have examined changes in sustained attention in children using this same task, no studies have used a repeated-measures design in ethnic minority samples. These findings demonstrate the possibility that sustained attention improves continuously in children, despite the difficulties associated with growing up in high poverty environments

Country-Level Research Review: EdTech in Ghana

This document presents a review of the research landscape in Ghana in relation to EdTech research focused at the level of school-based education (not including higher education). The search strategy identified research literature, policy documents, grey literature, and communications with key experts and stakeholders. A growing body of relevant EdTech research is identified to have been undertaken in Ghana. After undertaking searches for relevant literature since 2007, 132 research articles or papers were identified for inclusion. The review provides an overview of trends in this literature in addition to identifying key actors and projects. It also considers how existing research on EdTech in Ghana relates to five research topics that will be the focus of future EdTech Hub research. In combination with political economy analysis, the research identifies potential areas for new research which would be practical and likely to have high impact

Effects of different learning environments on late primary school students’ Decision-making Competence in Socio-Scientific Issues

The main focus of the present study is to explore different ways of training late primary school students to make informed decisions on socio-scientific issues, namely issues that involve scientific knowledge and affect their local community and the society in general. The research design features three supplementary experiments employing a variety of data collection and data analysis methods. Experiment 1 adopts an experimental pre-test post-test design with three learning conditions (Explicit instruction, Guided Discovery and Unguided Discovery) and whole-class interventions and aims to determine the most effective learning environment for primary school students to master decision-making skills in the context of socio-scientific issues. The sample consisted of 190 11-year-old students from four primary schools in Greece and showed that Explicit Instruction and Guided Discovery were significantly more effective than Unguided Discovery. When taking into account achievement Level, though, only Explicit Instruction closed the achievement gap, while Guided Discovery favoured high-achieving students. Experiment 2 employs one-to-one think-aloud tasks with 30 students to capture their reasoning while they are making their decisions. Experiment 2 provides context to the question under study and insight as to why and how one of the learning conditions promotes better learning outcomes. The results showed that students in the Explicit instruction tended to pay more attention to the process they were following and listed the next steps, as well as they provided more explanations on their rationale when making a decision. However, they also seemed to be less independent than students assigned in the Guided and Unguided Discovery conditions asking for the teacher’s confirmation more often. Experiment 3 features thematic analysis of student’s socio-scientific views of vegetarianism that results in two thematic maps of the risks and benefits students associate with vegetarianism. The analysis showed that students hold many misconceptions about vegetarianism and that the decision-making intervention did not have a significant effect on students’ knowledge of vegetarianism.The study has been funded by Onassis Foundation, the Faculty of Education at University of Cambridge and Caius Fund by Gonville & Caius colleg

Reviewing Different Types of Working Memory Training on Reading Ability among Children with Reading Difficulties

This review evaluates the effectiveness of different types of working memory training on reading performance among children with reading difficulties. Reading performance is closely related to academic achievement whilst working memory (WM) serves as a crucial cognitive component to reading. Some researchers believe that WM training can improve WM capacity, intelligence and other cognitive functions. However, whether the effect extends to reading performance has rarely been examined. According to the multi-component WM model, the current review classifies WM training into domain-general, domain-specific (verbal WM and visuospatial WM), and mixed training and evaluates their effectiveness to reading ability correspondingly. According to the existing studies, verbal WM training seems to be most effective for improving reading ability, while other types of training show effects on WM or cognitive skills but only limited effects for reading. Limitations of these findings and reasons for transfer failure are discussed

Improving children’s oracy skills: a qualitative study highlighting the student’s voice towards different dialogic teaching strategies used in the classroom within one U.K. Primary School

Throughout the past 50 years, dialogic teaching techniques have experienced some ups and downs. The benefits of dialogic interactions for children's oracy abilities are widely documented in the literature (Maxwell et al., 2015), however the child's perspective is not often highlighted. The current study aims to determine children's perceptions of a sample of dialogic teaching strategies used in one primary setting, as well as how these impact children's self-confidence and participatory processes to engage in educational dialogue. The study focuses on children who face significant socio-economic deprivation because it has previously been discovered that their language development is underdeveloped compared to their more advantaged peers (Millard & Menzies, 2016). The study utilised a semi-structured interviewing technique in an inner-city primary academy in a city located in the southwest of the UK. Eight children aged 9 to 10 and one primary classroom teacher contextualised their experiences during 20-minute semi-structured interviews. Four key themes were extrapolated using thematic analysis. Theme One is an examination of a primary school's overall oracy metacognitive strategy. Theme Two is how this strategy contributes to the development of a dialogic classroom culture. Children from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds can directly benefit from Themes Three (Physicality of Talk) and Four (Visual Indicators), which are prominent and recurrent strategies to boost confidence and involvement. The "Physicality of Talk" theme showed novelty in the field of study because there is a paucity of research on how standing to speak affects a child's perception and increases their confidence to participate in educational discourse. The study has several implications for educational policy, teaching practice, and the use of specific research tools to elicit children's voices

The Role of Inhibitory Control in Achievement in Early Childhood Education

This review paper explores the relationship between academic achievement in early childhood education and inhibitory control, namely students’ ability to regulate behaviour, emotions and thoughts to complete specific tasks. The majority of research in this area has focused on achievement in mathematics, literacy or a combination of both. Despite the recent uptake of ‘whole child’ focused education initiatives, few studies explore social-emotional learning, or all three areas collectively, a gap this paper aims to address. This paper offers a comprehensive review of previous research on inhibitory control and achievement to highlight areas of focus for future research and provide a theoretical basis for study design. The review draws on articles published in the English language and systematically compares research methodologies to elucidate the choices made by researchers. The findings indicated correlations between inhibitory control and the three areas of early childhood education, mathematics, literacy and social-emotional learning, although causation is not established. Hot inhibitory control, involving emotion or an external motivator, was found to be closely related to social-emotional learning and cool inhibitory control, limited emotional and an abstract motivator, with mathematics and literacy. Notably, emergent literacy varied by the language spoken by students. A look at the measures and samples used revealed that purposefully employing inhibitory control measures that align with real-world classroom activities may provide greater insight into the relationship between achievement and inhibitory control. The findings of this paper pose significant implications for research, policy and practice, especially with the recent uptake of social-emotional learning by education programs, as they reveal how inhibitory control relates to students’ ability to thrive in early childhood education settings. In the light of these findings, it is important for educators and researchers to consider how inhibitory control may in itself, be considered a goal of early childhood education