To meet the guidelines generated by the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) pressures to raise student achievement have filtered down to and emerged in prekindergarten classrooms. The leadership of state, federal, and local policymakers is critical to the movement for high quality prek for all. The purpose of this study was to examine the scores of prekindergarten students when presented 3 different methods of literacy instruction and to compare the scores according to gender and among 3 age groups. This study found a significant difference in the scores of students when analyzed according to age. The youngest students scored significantly higher than the older students. The results support the literature that young children's brains are more active. There is evidence to support the move to provide high quality prekindergarten for all, which includes Tennessee Governor Phil Bredeson's preK Initiative.

Book Summary: This seminal text provides a scholarly overview of current evidence-based approaches to emergent literacy intervention as a component of clinical practice in speech-language pathology. The book's focus is primarily the emergent literacy period of development, transcending toddlerhood to the kindergarten year and corresponding to the years preceding formal literacy and reading instruction. By providing an accessible and usable integration of theory and research, it encourages readers to think about building early foundations in literacy to promote healthy early development and to ease children's transitions to later academic contexts. The book answers the question, "what can speech-language pathologists do today to include literacy as a target in childhood intervention?"

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Using emergent inquiry curriculum to explore physical science and measurement.

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to describe and explain the characteristics of an effective professional development model in an early intervention training program. The focus of the study was on particular aspects of literacy instruction that were emphasized during training sessions and trainer and teacher perceptions of the Accelerated Literacy Learning (ALL) program. This study examined the elements of training that two teachers chose to transfer to their classrooms, as well as modifications they chose to make, in the year following training in an effort to gain further insight into successful teacher training practices. The following research questions guided this study: 1. How do teachers who have received early intervention training for two semesters apply this knowledge in their classrooms during the following school year? 2. What do teachers choose to use and not use from the training program and why? 3. What modifications of the program do teachers make, if any, and why? 4. What are the perceptions of trainers about an early intervention training program? To obtain answers to these research questions, I conducted individual and focus group interviews with teachers and trainers, made observations of training sessions, analyzed course documents, and observed two teachers in their classrooms in the year following training. These data were analyzed using qualitative analysis procedures. I followed a phenomenological theoretical approach and reported my findings through descriptive case studies. The study findings indicated that teachers chose to use many elements of training in their classrooms in the year following training. It was discovered that the elements that the teachers chose to use in training were the elements that the trainers emphasized in training sessions. The findings also indicated that teachers made modifications to the lesson format that they were taught in training. The segment of the lesson that the teachers chose to modify was one that was not as prescriptive in training as other lesson segments. The trainers did not spend as much time discussing the writing segment of the lesson format as they did the other segments and consequently the teachers made modifications.

Two studies were performed to research potential exemplification effects throughout various stages of natural disasters. Exemplification theory (Zillmann, 1999, 2002) promotes the use of exemplars, media examples, because of their potential ability to motivate risk related information seeking and their possible influence in optimizing protective action (Zillmann, 2006). Study one examined potential exemplification effect differences between various stages of natural disasters. Study two was designed to test for differences in trust, perceptions of severity, and intentions to volunteer depending on the organization type supplying related exemplars in social media. Results indicate that exemplification effects do not differ depending on disaster stage. However, exemplification effects do depend on the source of the exemplars. Furthermore, differences in perceptions of trust were detected between the two organizations providing the exemplars. And, intentions to volunteer vary depending on the current disaster stage. Specific findings, related theoretical implications, and practical suggestions are discussed.

If an organism is explicitly taught an A->B association, then might it also spontaneously learn the symmetrical B->A association? There is only a small amount of evidence that attests to the detection of emergent symmetry in nonhuman animals (e.g., one chimpanzee and two pigeons). This report examines the necessary and sufficient conditions for finding emergent symmetry in pigeons while attempting to control for the problems of spatial and temporal location found in previous symmetry and stimulus equivalence experiments. Using a successive go/no go matching-to-sample procedure, which showed all of the training and testing stimuli in one location, four experimental manipulations were examined. In Experiment 1 temporal location was controlled without the inclusion of identity matching intermixed with arbitrary matching; Experiment 2 contained identity matching with stimuli different from arbitrary matching; in Experiment 3 identity matching was trained to criterion and then intermixed with arbitrary matching; and in Experiment 4 two sets of arbitrary matching were trained (e.g., AB and CD) but only one of those stimulus sets was trained in identity matching (e.g., AB). No evidence of emergent symmetry was found in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiment 3, two pigeons showed moderate evidence of emergent symmetry, one pigeon showed suggestive evidence of emergent symmetry, and one pigeon did not show any evidence of emergent symmetry. In Experiment 4, two pigeons showed moderate evidence of emergent symmetry with the AB Stimulus Set (one of those pigeons also showed suggestive evidence of emergent symmetry with the CD Stimulus Set) and one pigeon did not show any evidence of emergent symmetry with either stimulus set. These data suggest that intermixing identity matching with the same stimuli used in arbitrary matching is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to obtaining emergent symmetry in pigeons.

The purpose of this study was to examine the following: (a) What is the nature of Kindergarten and First grade teachers’ beliefs and self-reported practices regarding early literacy learning and teaching?; (b) What is the relationship between Kindergarten and First grade teachers’ beliefs and self-reported early literacy teaching practices?; and (c) How do teachers’ educational backgrounds and professional development experiences explain the relationship between their beliefs and practices in early literacy learning and teaching? Three instruments were administered to the participants in this study. The Theoretical Orientation to Reading Profile (Deford, 1979), hereafter known as the TORP, was used to measure teachers’ pedagogical beliefs about the teaching and learning of reading. The Preschool Literacy Practices Checklist (Burgess, Lundgren, Lloyd, & Pianta, 2001), hereafter known as the PLPC, was used to measure teachers’ self-reported literacy instructional practices. A survey questionnaire I designed was used to obtain descriptive information about the participants in this study. Data were collected from forty-seven in-service Kindergarten and First grade teachers. The results of the TORP data from this study indicated that 6% of the participants represented the decoding perspective, 92% represented the skills perspective and 2% represented the wholistic perspective. Correlation scores from the PLPC regarding teachers’ beliefs and practices show there was no significant correlation between teachers’ beliefs and self-reported practices in the classroom. Additionally, the findings showed there is a relationship between teachers’ educational backgrounds and the reading literacy practices teachers view as important or essential in the early grades such as understanding the meaning of words, recognizing basic sight words, understanding concepts of print, and identifying the elements of a story.