This article describes a research study in which 10 early childhood education students participated in facilitated critical reflection experiences during a 7-week practicum. Students' critical thinking skills were quantitatively assessed using the Cornell Critical Thinking Test and qualitatively documented through analysis of daily, weekly, and…

This article examines some of the ways in which girls are discursively set up as subordinate in relation to boys and men by and within the digital games industry and culture at large, and how they push back on these imposed subjects positions when engaging in media production (game development) under both regular and inverse conditions. Expanding…

Plants are an integral part of nature. Many plant species in almost any part of the world are under serious threats due to various reasons such as deforestation, pollution--of air, water and soil--caused by industrialisation, overgrazing and rapid population growth. It is likely that people have strong positive attitudes towards conservation of…

Within brief experimental analysis, assessment data are used to target interventions for struggling students. This use of assessment data aligns with prevention and early intervention frameworks, but popular measures are limited for this purpose because of issues with measuring improvement in short periods. Our study was a pilot comparison of two…

This article describes an innovative pedagogical technique for multimodal composition courses: the use of storyboarding as an invention tool across multiple composition platforms. Student response data and our textual analysis of their multimodal texts over a two-year period reveal some challenges when new media projects are taught alongside…

This article reports findings from a four-year formative experiment (Reinking & Bradley, 2008) investigating a summer writing institute for ninth graders entering an urban high school. Intended as enrichment, not remediation, for a heterogeneous group of students, and as a learning experience, not just a teaching opportunity, for…

The Summer Research Enhancement Program (SREP) at Diné College provides students with a solid foundation of public health research methods and includes a hands-on internship in their home community to test their newly acquired skills while enhancing the communities' health. Focusing on health issues prioritized by Navajo health leaders, from…

Chicago Public Schools and school districts throughout the country are seeking new ways to foster racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic equity as desegregation consent decrees are being lifted. One of Chicago's selective enrollment high schools drafted parents, educators, administrators, and community representatives to address its own diversity…

The Reading Apprenticeship is an intervention that has been shown in previous studies to increase struggling readers, tested reading achievement by 8 to 9 months during a 12 week, in-school program. This article reports on the first study of the Reading Apprenticeship method conducted in the summer using parents, rather than supervised volunteers,…

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to assess whether the Envirovet programme served to increase the number of practising ecosystem health professionals, as well as to measure the lasting professional and personal impact of the programme on participants. Design: Impact programme evaluation. Setting: An emerging strategy among global…

This paper describes the development, results, and future directions of the mathematics component of the EMERGE Summer Program at Northeastern Illinois University. Initiated summer 2014, EMERGE offered English and mathematics sessions for incoming freshmen. The mathematics session aimed to strengthen participants' mathematical foundations,…

The next several pages are intended as a "Commentary" on the six target articles bundled together as a Special Issue of the "Journal of Cognition and Development"--literature reviews and research reports all intended to "build bridges" between the study of cognitive development in typical and atypical populations.

In this study we highlight the five elements of a transfer receptive culture and its connection to the Summer Transfer Enrichment Program (STEP) administered by the Community College Outreach Center (CCOC) at Best Coast University (all pseudonyms). A quantitative and qualitative study was conducted focusing on five years of STEP, consisting of 87…

This study examines the effects of the summer period on value-added assessment (VAA) of teacher and school performance at the early grades. The results indicate that 40-62% of the variance in VAA estimates originates from the summer, depending on the outcome. Furthermore, when summer is omitted from the VAA model, 51-61% of the teachers and 58-61%…

A variety of activities are used in camps to help promote positive youth development, improving social skills and self-esteem in campers. I expanded on previous camp research in this study to address the influence camps have on trust, belief in the honesty of others, empowerment, and care for others in youth in Eastern Europe. Since 1999, New…