The influence of gender and temperament on children's interaction with a baby

This study examined gender differences in children's interaction with a baby who visited their day-care center over several weeks. Twenty-two children ranging in age from 47 to 64 months of age participated. The children's teacher filled out a questionnaire assessing each child's extraversion, activity level, and loudness. A female baby visited the day care center from one to three times a week over a two-month period. Each child's interactions with the baby were observed twice. Active, outgoing, loud girls were much more likely to interact with the baby than either quiet girls or any boys. Several of these highly interactive girls had no younger siblings. Children were found to interact with the baby more on their second observation.The research reported here was supported by a grant from the Purdue Research Foundation. I would like to thank Connie Clauss for her help with data collection.     

Use of small group contingencies and special activity times to manage behavior in a first-grade classroom

Management procedures were succesfully employed to decrease the frequency with which first-grade children left small instructional centers. To decrease the out-of-center behavior, access to a 30-minute special activity time was made available to different groups as a function of everyone's remaining within his group instructional center. One occurrence of out-center behavior resulted in a cost of ten minutes of special activity time for the children in that center. The frequency of out-of-center behaviors quickly decreased from Baseline I to the Modification I condition, increased when the modification condition was removed, and decreased again in Modification II.Observations made on the percent of the children's appropriate social and academic behaviors showed increases during the modification conditions. Also, the time the teacher spent in responding to inappropriate behavior decreased and the time spent in instruction increased during the modification conditions.     

Improving Teacher Job Satisfaction: The Roles of Social Capital,Teacher Efficacy,and Support

In this study, we examine how social capital, teacher efficacy, and organizational support increase teacher job satisfaction. Research suggests that teachers worldwide are exceedingly dissatisfied with their jobs and have significantly higher levels of turnover than their counterparts in other professions. We investigate this phenomenon using a sample of 122 elementary school teachers. We found that teachers’ centrality position, or each teacher’s relationship with every other teacher, in their school’s trust network and the density of a teacher’s academic advice ego-network predicted the development of teacher job satisfaction. Additionally, we found that teacher efficacy mediated the relationship between teacher’s trust and academic advice relationships and job satisfaction, and perceived organizational support strengthened the relationship between teacher efficacy and job satisfaction. The article concludes by offering implications of the findings for both administrators and teachers as well as for the social capital, teaching efficacy, and teacher job satisfaction literatures.     

The organization of day-care environments: "zone" versus "man-to-man" staff assignments

In a large day-care center, measures of group participation were used to compare how much of a child's time is lost from planned activities during the daily transition from lunch, through the bathroom and dressing areas, to the nap area. Participation measures were taken using the "Zone" and "Man-to-Man" staffing procedures, two typical methods for dividing responsibility among teaching staff. In the "Zone" procedure, each teacher was assigned responsibility for a particular area, and for all children who passed through that area. In the "Man-to-Man" procedure, each teacher was assigned responsibility for shepherding a group of designated children through all activity areas during each transition. The Lunch-to-Nap transition using the Zone staffing assignment was accomplished with a smaller decrease in child participation in planned activities than the transition utilizing the Man-to-Man procedure. Thus, other things being equal, it is recommended that the Zone procedure be used in group-care programs with more than one staff member, with each teacher being responsible for specific activity areas, rather than specific children.     

Good education,the good teacher,and a practical art of living a good life: a Catholic perspective

What is good education? We value education for reasons connected to the good provided by education in society. This good is connected to be the pedagogical aim of education. This article distinguishes five criteria for good education based on the concept of ‘Bildung’.

Next, these five criteria are used to develop the idea of the good teacher. The rationale behind the analysis is that the good teacher should be able to realise what we consider to be good education. There are different traditions of religiously affiliated schools in the world. This article gives insight into the idea of the good teacher in two documents of the Catholic Congregation of Education on the lay teacher. Finally, the article focuses on the formation of a practical art of living a good life. Again, the five characteristics of good education structure the analysis of this type of educational formation.     

Understanding Change in Recycling and Littering Behavior Across a School Social Network

Understanding how communities change requires examining how individuals’ beliefs and behaviors are shaped by those around them. This paper investigates behavior change across a large social network following a recycling intervention in a New Zealand high school community. We used a mixed methods design, combining focus group data with social network analysis from two waves of a questionnaire that measured friendship networks; recycling and littering behaviors; perceived behavioral norms; and teacher, friend, and parent encouragement for these behaviors. Recycling behavior increased significantly over the course of our study. Supporting the importance of social networks in this context, both littering and recycling behavior showed clear social clustering. Further, the degree of change in an individuals’ littering and recycling behavior across time was predicted by friends’ prior behavior. Focus group data provided insight into students’ perceptions of social interactions and how these contributed to littering and recycling behavior.     

Two Case Studies of Preschool Psychosocial Safety Climates

With the call from federal and state officials to increase access to high-quality early childhood education only growing louder, programs continue to struggle to attract and support a workforce capable of providing such instruction and care. One critical component of this support is the construction of a workplace environment that teachers perceive as psychologically safe and in which they feel capable of engaging in the challenging work of early childhood education. In the present set of case studies, the authors explore the extent to which a previously developed model of psychosocial safety climate applies to preschool contexts. Using teacher focus groups and administrator interviews the authors present examples of directors’ management practices and center’s policies and procedures that reflect a degree of valuing of teacher well-being and psychological safety. Additionally, the ways teachers’ experiences of the climate relate to their beliefs and behaviors in the classroom are explored.     

Segment routing based energy aware routing for software defined data center

Despite the fact that most of the data centers are software-defined, the multifaceted network architecture and increase in network traffic make data centers to suffer from overhead. Multipath TCP supports multiple paths for a single routing session and ensures proper utilization of bandwidth over all available links. As rise in number of nodes in data center is frequent and drastic, scalability issue limits the performance of many existing techniques. Segment Routing is vibrant in reducing scalability disputes and routing overhead. Segment routing approach combined with MPTCP traffic result in efficient routing approach. The downfall of the link capacity due to drastic incoming traffic remains as a major concern in data center network which enforces preventing link energy depletion due to high network traffic. Our proposed work, segment routing based energy aware routing approach for software defined data center aims to achieve throughput maximization through preserving link residual capacity and proper utilization of links. As well, our approach shows a decrease in length of segment label stack with respect to maximum segment label depth. Analysis is done by comparing the executions of other existing approaches in a single-controller environment with our energy-aware routing approach in a distributed environment. Distributed controller setup prevents network from single point of failure. It helps to prevent controller overhead and provides improved network performance through throughput.     

小学教师职业倦怠维度发展顺序探究——来自结构方程模型和交叉滞后网络分析模型的证据

教师职业倦怠的情感衰竭、去人性化和个人成就感降低3个维度相对独立但也存在相互影响, 对其发展关系进行研究, 有助于深入理解职业倦怠的发展过程, 尽早识别倦怠症状。本研究对3837名小学教师进行追踪测试, 测试间隔为3年, 采用结构方程模型和交叉滞后网络分析模型进行分析, 结果发现小学教师职业倦怠维度最优发展模型为“T1的情感衰竭和个人成就感降低分别预测T2的情感衰竭和个人成就感降低, T1的去人性化预测T2的去人性化和个人成就感降低”, 且最优发展模型具有性别间的一致性和教龄段之间的一致性。这一结果支持并强调了去人性化在小学教师职业倦怠发展中的重要作用, 对识别教师职业倦怠早期症状并采取相应措施有效阻断教师职业倦怠的进一步发展具有一定的理论和现实意义。     

The best teacher is like a famous mage everyone knows – Just not any of your favorites

This essay draws out the useful parallels between the best kind of teacher and the Good Witch of the North, Glinda, from The Wizard of Oz. Unappealing to many viewers or readers of the classic children's story, Glinda offers an inspiring reminder of four important pedagogical points: (1) the master teacher always treats her student as a peer; (2) the master teacher acknowledges and encourages her student's abilities but lets her learn how to exercise them on her own; (3) the master teacher is often not equivalent or even similar to anyone the student has encountered before; and (4) the master teacher is not a surrogate parent but a more distant figure.     

Accounting for Movement between Childcare Classrooms: Does it Change Teacher Effects Interpretations?

Child care studies that have examined links between teachers' qualifications and children's outcomes often ignore teachers' and children's transitions between classrooms at a center throughout the day and only take into account head teacher qualifications. The objective of this investigation was to examine these traditional assumptions and to compare inferences made from these traditional models to methods accounting for transitions between classrooms and multiple teachers in a classroom. The study examined the receptive language, letter-word identification, and passage comprehension skills of 307 children enrolled in 49 community-based childcare centers serving primarily low-income families in Colorado. Results suggest that nearly one-third of children and over 80% of teachers moved daily between classrooms. Findings also reveal that failure to account for daily transitions between classrooms can affect interpretations of the relationship between teacher qualifications and child outcomes, with the model accounting for movement providing significant improvements in model fit and inference.     

Using a personal robot to teach young children.

Seventy-five preschool children were instructed about birds by a human teacher, a moving personal robot, a stationary personal robot, and a tape recorder. How much the children learned and how much attention the children paid were compared for each type of instruction. The children learned when they were taught by the human teacher and when they were taught by the animated and the stationary robots. The children paid more attention to the live teacher and to the moving robot than they did to the stationary robot or to the tape recorder. The difference between the amount of attention the children paid to the animated robot and the amount of attention they paid to the human teacher was not statistically significant.     

Teaching and learning as a bi-directional activity: investigating dyadic interactions between child teachers and child learners

Building upon Vygotsky's ideas about the shift from other- to self-regulation in the “zone of proximal development,” we study how children, when teaching a board game that they previously co-constructed with a peer to a new child, reciprocally negotiate the roles of teacher and learner. From our investigation, we find that the quality of the relationship between teacher and learner changes from one reflecting guidance to one reflecting collaboration. This collaborative model of teaching and learning differs from more traditional models by which an active adult teacher is depicted as transmitting knowledge to a relatively passive child learner. Instead, we contend and demonstrate that the practice of teaching and learning is best viewed as a bi-directional interaction that results in the cognitive growth of both teacher and learner.     

Consultee-centered consultation with a teacher as a technique in behavior management

Client-centered consultation was effective in helping a teacher to decrease one child's disruptive classroom behavior, and consultee-centered consultation helped the teacher improve her control of the class as a whole. Initially, a client-centered reinforcement program effectively decreased the disruptive behavior of one target child. Later, attention to the teacher's feelings about being the authority figure in the classroom was used in an attempt to modify the behavior of the entire class. The data describing the behavior of a second child in the classroom suggested that this consultee-centered consultation was followed by less classroom disruption. In addition, anecdotal observations indicated that consultee-centered consultation was effective in modifying the behavior of both the teacher and the rest of the class.     

Same-Sex and Other-Sex Peer Reports: Unique Contributors to Understanding Children’s School Adjustment

The present study proposed to understand how same-sex and other-sex peer nominations relate differently to teacher reports of children’s behaviors and measures of children’s friendships. Students provided peer nominations, mutual friend data, and social network data. Teachers rated students’ antisocial behavior and social competence. As expected, other-sex peer social preference scores predicted teacher ratings of antisocial behavior, while same-sex peer social preference scores predicted data on friendships and social groups. Unexpectedly, both same and other sex peer nominations predicted children’s teacher-rated social competence. Findings suggest that other-sex peers offer a unique perspective on children’s social behavior that is neither superfluous nor unimportant to understanding children’s psychosocial adjustment.     

Do organizational conditions influence teacher implementation of effective classroom management practices: Findings from a randomized trial

Although there is a growing evidence base about effective classroom management practices, teacher implementation of these practices varies due to a number of factors. A school's organizational health is one aspect of the broader social environment that has been hypothesized to influence implementation of interventions. Yet, empirical evidence is limited on whether organizational contexts can influence teacher implementation of effective interventions and subsequently, classroom environments and student outcomes. In the present study, teachers in an urban school district were randomly assigned to receive training in the Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management program (IY TCM), a classroom management intervention. We examined how teacher perceptions of their school environment moderated intervention effects for previously established treatment outcomes – implementation of effective classroom methods, students' social behaviors, emotional regulation, and social competence. Results showed that treatment effects on teacher implementation and student outcomes were moderated by teachers' sense of affiliation to their school. Specifically, main effects on implementation of effective classroom management strategies were only observed among teachers whose perceptions of initial teacher affiliation was low or average; whereas main effects on student outcomes were only found for teachers with initial high levels of affiliation.     

Maltreated Children's Emotional and Behavioral Problems: Do Teachers and Parents See the Same Things?

We examined whether parent/caregivers and teacher/therapists differ in their perceptions of the behavior problems of young maltreated children. The sample consisted of 33 maltreated preschoolers (58% neglected, 24% sexually abused, 18% physically abused, 59% African American, 41% Caucasian) enrolled in a metropolitan-area treatment center providing an educational/intervention program for maltreated children and their families. Most (82%) of the participant families had an annual income of $10,000 or less. Parent/caregivers and teacher/ therapists provided data about the children, employing the Colorado Child Temperament Inventory, Child Behavior Checklist, and Preschool Behavior Questionnaire. The results indicate that the teacher/therapists and the parent/caregivers perceived the same child as behaving differently. Implications concerning how teachers and parents might communicate are discussed, as well as possible reasons for the two different perceptions of the same child. Three potential reasons for the differences are that they are due to the different perspectives of parents and teachers in assessing child behaviors, to situational variation in child behavior (e.g., home versus school), or to some combination of both effects.     

Classroom treatment of autistic children: II. individualized instruction in a group

This study was designed to assess the feasibility of providing individualized instruction in a classroom of autistic children. In particular, we investigated whether students' unsupervised responding was a variable which would influence the effectiveness of individualized instruction procedures. Initially, one teacher attempted to teach different academic behavior to four autistic children simultaneously. During these sessions the teacher rotated from child to child, providing individualized instructions and reinforcers to each. We found, however, that each child stopped responding whenever the teacher rotated to a different child and, further, no academic progress occurred for any of the children during these sessions. In a multiple baseline design, treatment procedures were then introduced (prompt fading, chaining, and programmed instructional materials) to teach each student to continue working for an extended period of time after each instruction from the teacher. After treatment, sessions of individualized instruction in a group were reintroduced for each child. The results showed that unsupervised responding was an important variable influencing the effectiveness of individualized instruction. Specifically, the data show that (1) unsupervised responding, acquired during treatment, generalized to the group setting; (2) after treatment, each child began to make progress on his assigned tasks; and (3) programming instructional materials in small steps appeared to be necessary in order to ensure the maintenance of unsupervised responding across changes in instructional materials. By the end of this study it was possible for one teacher to simultaneously teach four autistic children — with each child learning at his own rate, on his own task, with minimal supervision from the teacher. It is suggested that the generalizability of these results, to other settings where continuous supervision is difficult, may be an important concern of future research.