Education Research Report

Learning to read and write opens doors to progress and prosperity across a lifetime. The years before kindergarten are a particularly fertile and profitable time to prepare young children to read and learn by teaching them essential literacy skills. The challenge of helping all children become successful readers requires early teaching, using home and school instruction built upon proven research and effective practices.

This is the message delivered tas the National Institute for Literacy (the Institute) released findings from the much-anticipated report, Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel, A Scientific Synthesis of Early Literacy Development and Implications for Intervention. The National Early Literacy Panel's (NELP) report serves as the basis of several powerful, research-based recommendations to the early childhood community – educators, caregivers, Head Start providers, and parents – on promoting the foundational skills of life-long literacy.

Some of the key findings of the report reveal the best early predictors of literacy, which include alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness, rapid naming skills, writing (such as writing one's name), and short-term memory for words said aloud. Instruction on these skills may be especially helpful for children at risk for developing reading difficulties. More complex oral language skills also appear to be important.

In addition to presenting findings on which early measures of a child's skills predict later decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling achievement, Developing Early Literacy identifies a wide-variety of interventions and instructional approaches that improve a child's early literacy skills. NELP researchers also looked at the role of environment and at child characteristics that may link to future outcomes in reading, writing, and spelling.

Full report:

http://www.nifl.gov/nifl/publications/pdf/NELPReport09.pdf

Governors, Superintendents and Education Experts Offer Recommendations for Improving Competitiveness of U.S. Education System and Call for State and Federal Government Action

Underscoring the link between a world-class education and a sound U.S. economy, leading education experts have issued a report offering sweeping recommendations to internationally benchmark educational performance.

The report, "Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-class Education" released by the International Benchmarking Advisory Group,provides states a roadmap for benchmarking their K-12 education systems against those of top-performing nations. The report explains the urgent need for action and outlines what states and the federal government must do to ensure U.S. students receive a world-class education that provides expanded opportunities for college and career success. The Advisory Group was convened by three of the nation’s leading education policy organizations – the National Governors Association, Council of Chief State School Officers and Achieve, Inc. – and consists of governors, state commissioners of education, representatives from the business community, researchers, former federal officials and current state and local officials.

International benchmarking will help state policymakers identify the qualities and characteristics of education systems that best prepare students for success in the global marketplace. Understanding these intricacies will provide state leaders the insights necessary to ensure U.S. students are receiving a world-class education and provide students with expanded opportunities for college and career success.

"We are now living in a world without borders, and in order to maintain America’s competitive edge into the future we need students who are prepared to compete not only with their American peers, but with students from all across the globe for the jobs of tomorrow," said Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, co-chair of the Advisory Group.

"The time is now – we must ensure that our students are prepared to compete and innovate in the 21st century," said Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, co-chair of the Advisory Group. "Benchmarking for Success is a call to action and provides a clear path to follow."

The Advisory Group identified five transformative steps American education needs to undergo to produce more globally competitive students:

· Upgrade state standards by adopting a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts for grades K-12;

· Leverage states’ collective influence to ensure textbooks, digital media, curricula and assessments are aligned to internationally benchmarked standards and draw on lessons from high-performing nations;

· Revise state policies for recruiting, preparing, developing and supporting teachers and school leaders to reflect the "human capital" practices of top-performing nations and states around the world;

· Hold schools and systems accountable through monitoring, interventions and support to ensure consistently high performance, drawing upon international best practices; and

· Measure state-level education performance globally by examining student achievement and attainment in an international context to ensure that students are receiving the education they need to compete in the 21st century economy.

International benchmarking is crucial for the United States to remain competitive on a global scale. The U.S. is losing its historic edge in educational attainment and international assessments routinely show America behind other nations. In the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) released earlier this month, U.S. eighth graders were significantly outscored by peers in five nations in mathematics and nine nations in science. The U.S. has not made progress on racial achievement gaps since 1999. As recently as 1995, America still tied for first in the percentage of college-age people who obtain a bachelor’s degree; however, by 2006, the country had dropped to 14th. That same year the United States had the highest college dropout rate of 19 industrialized countries.

In addition to the actions above, the report reiterates the importance of a strong state-federal partnership for improving U.S. competitiveness and offers suggestions for how the federal government can support and incentivize states’ international benchmarking efforts.

Full report:

http://www.nga.org/Files/pdf/0812BENCHMARKING.PDF

Inflation continues to outpace teacher salary growth

Average teachers' salaries declined over the past decade

Teachers across the nation are continuing to lose spending power for themselves and their families as inflation continued to outpace teacher salaries last year, according to the National Education Association's update to the annual report Rankings and Estimates: Rankings of the States 2008 and Estimates of School Statistics 2009.

Over the decade from 1997-98 to 2007-08, in constant dollars, average salaries for public schoolteachers declined 1 percent while inflation increased 31.4 percent. Twenty-six states and the District of Columbia saw real declines in average teacher salaries over those years, adjusting for inflation.

"Public schoolteachers deserve professional pay for professional work," said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. "If we are going to close the achievement gaps, reduce school dropouts and recruit and retain highly qualified teachers, we need to compensate teachers across the country fairly for the work they do."

According to the report, the average one-year increase in public schoolteacher salaries was 3.1 percent, while inflation increased 4.3 percent. The national average public schoolteacher salary for 2007-2008 was $52,308. State average public schoolteacher salaries ranged from those in California ($64,424), New York ($62,332) and Connecticut ($61,976) at the high end, to South Dakota ($36,674), North Dakota ($40,279) and Utah ($41,615) at the low end.

Rankings and Estimates provides statistics to raise public understanding of key issues affecting teaching and learning conditions in the nation's public schools. Teacher salaries and public education indicators including school enrollment, student-teacher ratios and school funding at the local, state and federal levels are reported in the annual state-by-state report. Among the other highlights:

· " Public school enrollment - Public school enrollment was 48,949,723 million, up 0.3 percent over fall 2006. The largest percentage enrollment increases from fall 2006 to fall 2007 were in Nevada (3.5 percent), Arizona (2.5 percent), Delaware (2.1 percent) and Ohio (2.1 percent). Twenty states and the District of Columbia experienced declines in student enrollment in fall 2007. The greatest declines were in the District of Columbia (-3.6 percent), Michigan (-2.6 percent), Vermont (-2.0 percent) and North Dakota (-1.6 percent).

· " Gender diversity in teaching - Males comprised 24.5 percent of public schoolteachers in 2008. Many of them taught in Kansas (33.6 percent), Oregon (31.6 percent), Alaska (30.9 percent) or Indiana (30.5 percent). States with the lowest percentage of male faculty were Arkansas (16.2 percent), Virginia (17.4 percent), Mississippi (17.5 percent), Louisiana (18 percent), South Carolina (18.5 percent) and Georgia (19.7 percent).

· " Expenditures per student - The U.S. average per student expenditure for public elementary and secondary schools in 2007-08 fall enrollment was $9,963. States with the highest per student expenditures were New Jersey ($15,374), New York ($15,286), Vermont ($14,336), Wyoming ($13,967) and Massachusetts ($13,768). Arizona ($5,346), Utah ($5,734), Nevada ($7,133), Mississippi ($7, 175) and Idaho ($7, 305) had the lowest per student expenditures.

Rankings and Estimates has presented selected education statistics since the 1960s.

Full report:

http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/02rankings08.pdf

Adults at the Lowest Literacy Level for 1992 and 2003

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) assessed the English literacy skills of a nationally representative sample of 18,500 U.S. adults (age 16 and older) residing in private households. NAAL is the first national assessment of adult literacy since the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). The NAAL and NALS produced direct estimates of Prose, Document, and Quantitative literacy, each reported on a 0 to 500 scale and on four performance levels: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate, and Proficient based on this scale.

This report, describes the statistical methodology used to produce the model-dependent—indirect—estimates of the percentages of adults at the lowest literacy level for individual states and counties for 1992 and 2003. The county and state indirect estimates themselves are provided at the NAAL website http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL (the state indirect estimates are also provided in appendices to this report). The measure chosen for the indirect estimation is the percentage of adults lacking Basic prose literacy skills (BPLS).

The literacy of adults who lack BPLS ranges from being unable to read and understand any written information in English to being able to locate easily identifiable information in short, commonplace prose text, but nothing more advanced. It should be noted that adults who were not able to take the assessment because they were not able to communicate in English or Spanish (i.e. language barrier cases) are included in the indirect estimates and classified as lacking BPLS because they can be considered to be at the lowest level of English literacy.

Full report: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009482.pdf

Majority of Federal Education Dollars Are Spent on Instruction and Instructional Support by Local School Districts

Despite NCLB's increased focus on targeting federal resources to help students with the greatest needs, all federal education programs combined have not closed the funding gap between the highest- and lowest-poverty school districts around the country, according to a new analysis conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) for the U.S. Department of Education.

The new report examines the use of $18.4 billion in funds from six federal education programs to determine:

1) how well federal funds are targeted to high-need districts and schools,

2) how districts are spending federal funds, and

3) the comparability of the base of state and local resources to which federal funds are added.

Overall, federal education funds from Title I, Part A; Reading First; Comprehensive School Reform; Title II, Part A; Title III, Part A; and Perkins Vocational Education State Grants were more strongly targeted to high-poverty districts than state or local funds, but they did not close the schools' funding gap.

"Perhaps the most interesting thing we found is that, even with three times as much funding from federal programs going to the country's highest-poverty school districts, it's not enough to make up for the gap in local funds," said the report's lead author, Dr. Jay Chambers. "The highest-poverty districts still received 7 percent less in total funding."

The report's other findings include:

· A variety of changes to Title I have been made in an effort to increase targeting of funds to the highest-poverty districts and schools. However, in the highest-poverty schools, Title I funding per low-income student has not increased since 1997-98, despite substantial increases in appropriations, and the highest-poverty Title I schools continued to receive less Title I funding per low-income student in 2004-05 than both medium- and low-poverty Title I schools.

· Most of the $18.4 billion from the six programs studied went to instruction (e.g., teachers, aides, and instructional materials) or for instructional support (e.g., professional development), with relatively small amounts allocated for administrative activities. Across the six federal programs, about 10 percent of the funds ($1.8 billion) were used for professional development, with Title I providing more than half of these funds ($1.0 billion), followed by Title II ($518 million).

· Schools across the nation appeared to have a similar base level of state and local expenditures on personnel. However, teachers in the highest-poverty schools tended to have less experience, were less likely to have advanced degrees and had lower salaries than teachers in the lowest-poverty schools.

· Title I added $408 (or a 9 percent increase) per low-income student to staffing expenditures in 2004-05. In an average-size Title I school, this translates to the addition of two teachers and one teacher aide.

· A marked increase in the number of Title I teachers (a 50 percent increase from 1997-98 to 2004-05), accompanied by a decrease in the number of Title I teacher aides, suggests some improvement in the qualifications of the Title I instructional workforce over this period.

· The highest- and lowest-poverty schools were similar in their student-to-teacher ratios, percentage of secondary English and math teachers with a degree in the field they taught, and total spending on school personnel.

The report is based upon the results of two national studies - the National Longitudinal Study of NCLB (NLS-NCLB) and the Study of State Implementation of Accountability and Teacher Quality Under NCLB (SSI-NCLB).

The full report:

http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/disadv/nclb-targeting/nclb-targeting.pdf

New Book on New Jersey's Efforts to Close the Achievement Gap Shows That Money Matters - But So Do Well-Supported Teachers and a Coherent Plan

With the No Child Left Behind Act up for renewal, education reform is among the many areas the Obama administration will need to address. As the president and his team consider policies and funding to improve academic success for all students, a new book from The Century Foundation about New Jersey's efforts to close the achievement gap offers lessons about how - and how not - to improve public education.

"In Plain Sight: Simple, Difficult Lessons from New Jersey's Expensive Effort to Close the Achievement Gap" explores what happened when the state education department partnered with city school districts in an attempt to close the achievement gap between poor, minority students in urban districts and their counterparts in the predominantly white and more affluent suburban districts. The program, created as a result of the landmark New Jersey Supreme Court case Abbott v. Burke, provided generous funding to improve educational outcomes in poor districts. The focused effort by many of the state's poorest school districts on closing the achievement gap by introducing effective early literacy practices, rather than relying on packaged programs and curricula tied to preparing for the achievement tests, led to a fairly dramatic improvement in the state's test scores. Only in Massachusetts did fourth graders score higher than those in more diverse New Jersey on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test.

The lessons from New Jersey apply in any American city that has concentrations of poor children in failing school districts. When attention is focused on supporting and enhancing teachers' efforts to assess the needs of their students and tailor their instruction to those needs, dramatically better results are possible. However, if no coherent plan for improved classroom instruction is implemented, more money makes no difference.

"In Plain Sight" was written by Gordon MacInnes, a fellow at The Century Foundation and lecturer at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, who has devoted four decades to government service and leadership on issues related to education, poverty, and urban living. He served from 2002 to April 2007 as assistant commissioner for Abbott implementation for the New Jersey Department of Education, where he oversaw a division that was created to coordinate the implementation of Abbott v. Burke, the nation's most prescriptive and sweeping state supreme court ruling on school funding for the state's poorest cities. He was also elected to the New Jersey General Assembly and Senate, where he served on the education committee. MacInnes provides a frank and comprehensive examination of those districts where poor, minority students have demonstrated continued academic improvement. Based on lessons from

New Jersey, he offers recommendations for policies and practices that will narrow the achievement gap and improve the academic prospects for all. These include:

- Academic achievement trumps other important objectives.

- The state, and the district, must set forth a clear set of ambitious academic goals by grade level and content.

- Priority must go to teaching primary grade students to read and write English well.

- The district must keep track of the progress that each student is making in meeting academic goals.

- When a student falls behind, there must be a system for rescuing him or her, which includes spending whatever additional time is required to bring that student up to par. The expense for such attention must take precedence over other spending demands.

- Teachers must be treated as front-line professionals and provided continuous support in their efforts to improve their student's academic results.

- The process and set of practices must never end. Effective instruction involves constant adjustment, checks on how the adjusted instruction is working, and then (usually) readjustments.

- As students become literate in language and mathematics, the next step is to make school an engaging, fascinating experience. That means using diverse instructional materials that cut across content areas, and projects that showcase the wonder of learning.

MacInnes concludes that the most important lesson from New Jersey is that the restoration of teaching as the primary activity of schools, and the return of respect for the professionalism of those who oversee and teach in those schools are the essential ingredients for improving educational prospects for all children. He suggests that in difficult economic times, these simple, straight-forward prescriptions must command scarce resources in states and school districts. However, he believes that the results in New Jersey show that it's an investment worth making.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In Plain Sight: Simple, Difficult Lessons from New Jersey's Expensive

Effort to Close the Achievement Gap

129 pages, paper, $14.95

ISBN 978-0-87078-513-9

School Resegregation

A new report from the Civil Rights Project, Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge concludes the opposite: the U.S. continues to move backward toward increasing minority segregation in highly unequal schools.

The report's author, Professor Gary Orfield, commented, "It would be a tragedy if the country assumed from the Obama election that the problems of race have been solved, when many inequalities are actually deepening. The lesson to take from this is that we have elected a brilliant president, who is the product of excellent integrated schools and colleges. We should work hard to extend such opportunities to and develop the talents of the millions of blacks and Latinos who still face isolation and denial of an equal chance."

For more than a decade, the Civil Rights Project has been issuing regular reports on the nation's progress in realizing the goal of the Brown decision and the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act the aim that the nation end separate but unequal education and create schools that are integrated and successful for all children. Very large progress was made during the civil rights era but it is slipping away year by year. Since the Supreme Court reversed course in 1991 and authorized return to segregated neighborhood schools, there has been an increase in segregation every year, particularly for black and Latino students. The report shows that 40% of Latinos and 39% of blacks now attend intensely segregated schools. The average black and Latino student is now in a school that has nearly 60% of students from families who are near or below the poverty line. These doubly segregated schools by race and poverty have weaker teaching forces, much more student instability, more students who come to school not speaking English and many other characteristics related to family and neighborhood poverty and isolation that make for challenging educational environments. These are the schools where much of the nation's dropout crisis is concentrated. More than 40 years after passage of the Fair Housing Act, there continues to be almost no serious enforcement against widespread housing discrimination, which impacts the segregation in districts with neighborhood school policies, and is making it difficult to maintain integration in suburbia.

The country has experienced a large increase in students attending multiracial schools, defined here as schools with more than a tenth of students from each of three or more racial groups. These are schools that can either be integrated across racial and class lines or schools that combine three highly impoverished communities of different racial backgrounds. They offer both challenges and possibilities, but almost no attention is being paid to studying them or to developing curriculum and training to help realize their possibilities. The substantial increase of whites attending multiracial schools the percentage of white students in such schools has doubled in less than two decades may well be one of the reasons why whites tend to believe that progress is being made on integration even as segregation deepens, on average, for black and Latino students.

The report also indicates that the frontier of racial change and school resegregation is now in the suburbs, where about a third of black and Latino students attend school. Even though there is a large white majority in suburban schools, two million black and Latino suburban students currently attend highly segregated schools. By contrast, only 2% of suburban white students attend these same segregated minority schools, while a majority attends suburban schools with at least 80% of white students. After two decades of a hostile Supreme Court and two terms of a presidency committed to reversing civil rights gains, only the nation's small towns and rural areas retain substantially integrated schools.

The report concludes that efforts to make separate schools equal, which have been the dominant approach since the federal government abandoned significant positive support for integration almost three decades ago, have failed. This failure includes No Child Left Behind, which was supposed to quickly equalize achievement across racial lines but has fallen far short. Instead, it is sanctioning scores of segregated minority schools without providing them enough help to make a difference. The report notes that too often the high hopes accompanying a racial change in leadership when, for example, black or Latino mayors and school superintendents were first appointed--were often disappointed since the underlying racial barriers to opportunity were not addressed.

Full report:

http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/deseg/reviving_the_goal_mlk_2009.pdf

Title I School Choice and Supplemental Educational Services: Final Report

This new report provides updated information on the implementation and usage of choice options that are offered to students in Title I schools that have been identified for improvement. The report is based on the second round of data collection from the National Longitudinal Study of NCLB and the Study of State Implementation of Accountability and Teacher Quality Under NCLB. The report presents findings from interviews with state education officials in all states and surveys of nationally-representative samples of districts, principals, and teachers conducted in 2004-05 and 2006-07, as well as surveys of parents in eight large urban school districts in those same years.

Key findings include: Numbers of students eligible for and participating in choice and supplemental educational services (SES) have increased substantially, although participation rates remained stable at about 1 and 17 percent, respectively. Nearly all districts required to offer these options reported that they notified parents, and the timeliness of parent notifications has improved. However, eligible parents who were surveyed in the eight districts were often unaware of the choice options, even though all eight districts provided evidence that they had sent notification letters to parents about the options. Among parents surveyed who took advantage of the Title I choice options, over 80 percent said they were satisfied.

Full report:

http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/choice/nclb-choice-ses-final/choice-ses-final.pdf

Myths About Gifted Children

Though not often recognized as “special needs” students, gifted children require just as much attention and educational resources to thrive in school as do other students whose physical, behavioral, emotional or learning needs require special accommodations. So says a Florida State University professor who has studied gifted students for years.

Steven I. Pfeiffer is a professor in Florida State’s Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems. He also is a licensed psychologist who works with gifted children and their families in counseling, and has long been recognized as one of the nation’s leading authorities on issues related to gifted children.

“There is a view occasionally expressed by those outside of the gifted field that we don’t need programs devoted specifically to gifted students,” Pfeiffer said. “‘Oh, they’re smart, they’ll do fine on their own’ is what we often hear. And because of this anti-elitist attitude, it’s often difficult to get funding for programs and services that help us to develop some of our brightest, most advanced kids -- America’s most valuable resource.

“Giftedness is still not well understood, and children with advanced intellectual and academic abilities can perplex and challenge both educators and parents,” Pfeiffer said.

A key problem in working with gifted children is one of definition. What exactly does it mean to be “gifted”?

“Even within the gifted field, there is considerable controversy regarding definitional, conceptual and diagnostic issues,” Pfeiffer said. “However, as a generally agreed-upon definition, gifted children are those who are in the upper 3 percent to 5 percent compared to their peers in one or more of the following domains: general intellectual ability, specific academic competence, the visual or performing arts, leadership and creativity.”

A key area of Pfeiffer’s research has been finding ways to best identify children who are gifted. To that end, he led a group that developed a diagnostic test which complements the widely used intelligence test in identifying children who might be gifted. Pfeiffer’s test is now being used in more than 600 school districts across the nation and has been translated for use in a number of other countries. (For more information on the Gifted Rating Scales, visit www.fsu.com/pages/2006/11/20/gifted_rating_scales.html.)

“For almost a hundred years, schools used one measure, the IQ test,” Pfeiffer said. “Our own research indicates that the IQ test, although it works fairly well, is not without limitations in identifying giftedness. We launched a project to develop a test that would be a companion to the IQ test in helping educators better identify those children who have potential but perhaps are missed on IQ tests.”

Pfeiffer discusses the issue of defining giftedness and many of the emotional and social challenges facing gifted children in a new paper, “The Gifted: Clinical Challenges and Practice Opportunities for Child Psychiatry,” that will soon be published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

In other work involving gifted students, the state of Florida recently asked Pfeiffer and his team to lead an effort to help Florida’s best and brightest high school students reach their potential so they can help the state reach its. The result was the establishment of the Florida Governor’s School for Space Science and Technology, which was created by the Legislature in 2007. (Visit www.fsu.com/pages/2008/04/08/space_science_and_tech.html to read more.)

“The Florida State University -- in partnership with the Florida Institute of Technology and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University -- was fortunate to be asked to develop a plan to design a state-of-the-art residential academy for Florida’s most capable high school students,” Pfeiffer said. “Essentially, the Florida Legislature was interested in providing resources for Florida’s brightest students in high schools, particularly in terms of a curriculum which would emphasize science, math, engineering and technology.”

Pfeiffer also edited a recently published book, “Handbook of Giftedness in Children: Psycho-Educational Theory, Research, and Best Practices,” that brings together experts from the fields of psychology and education to discuss a wide variety of topics pertaining to giftedness. He says the book is intended to be an essential resource for anyone working with gifted and talented children, including clinical child and school psychologists, educators, child psychiatrists, family therapists, social workers, pediatricians and other health care professionals.

And finally, Pfeiffer is working with the national organization SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted) to develop a certification system so that professionals working with gifted children -- educators, mental health providers, pediatricians and others -- will be able to receive an official designation citing their expertise in this area.

Use of Hand Gestures Is Key to Picking Up Vocabulary in a New Tongue

A new study conducted by Colgate University Associate Professor of Psychology Spencer Kelly and two Colgate undergraduate researchers reveals that people understand and remember foreign words better when gestures are associated with them.

"Verbal instruction alone is not the most effective teaching method," said Kelly. "The combination of hand gestures and words is a powerful tool for picking up vocabulary in a new tongue."

The research team's report on the role of gestures in learning a foreign language will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Language and Cognitive Processes.

The study points out that it is not just mere hand waving that makes people remember a word. The gesture must be connected to the meaning of a word.

For example, study participants were more likely to remember the Japanese word for drink, "Nomu," when the instructor made a drinking motion while defining the word compared to when no gesture or an unrelated one was present.

Kelly believes the practical implications of the study will be of interest to students and instructors of any language.

"Because mastering multiple languages is becoming more and more important in an increasingly global society," he said, "this research can be useful in developing new and improved teaching strategies."

He added that the research findings provide evidence for the limits of traditional audio-only listening exercises and demonstrate the positive impact of video for vocabulary learning.

Learning Science in Informal Environments

New report from National Research Council examines science learning outside of school

Each year, tens of millions of Americans, young and old, choose to learn about science in informal ways -- by visiting museums and aquariums, attending after-school programs, pursuing personal hobbies, and watching TV documentaries, for example. There is abundant evidence that these programs and settings, and even everyday experiences such as a walk in the park, contribute to people's knowledge and interest in science, says a new report from the National Research Council.

"Learning is broader than schooling, and informal science environments and experiences play a crucial role," said Philip Bell, co-chair of the committee that wrote the report, and associate professor of learning sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. "These experiences can kick-start and sustain long-term interests that involve sophisticated learning. Think of the child who sees dinosaur skeletons for the first time on a family trip to a natural history museum, and then goes on to buy dinosaur models and books, do Web searches about dinosaurs, write school reports on the subject, and on and on."

The report notes that experiences in informal settings can significantly improve science learning outcomes for individuals from groups which are historically underrepresented in science, such as women and minorities. Evaluations of museum-based and after-school programs suggest that these programs may also support academic gains for children and youth in these groups.

More broadly, there is strong evidence that educational television can help people learn about science, although few studies have been done on the effects of other media, including digital media, video games, and radio. There is also some evidence that participation in informal science learning -- for example, volunteering in the collection of scientific data -- can promote informed civic engagement on science-related issues such as local environmental concerns, says the report.

The report offers recommendations for people who design programs in these settings, such as the creators of museum exhibits. The programs and environments should be interactive and designed with specific learning goals in mind. They should provide multiple ways for learners to engage with concepts within a single setting. And they should prompt visitors to interpret what they have learned in light of their prior experiences and interests.

In addition, educators should partner with local communities to develop exhibits and experiences. When possible, such exhibits and environments should be rooted in scientific problems, ideas, and activities that are meaningful to these local communities.

The report also offers recommendations for those on the front line -- the professional and volunteer staffs of institutions and programs who interact with the public about science. In discussing new science concepts, they should draw on learners' experience and knowledge by using everyday language, referring to common cultural experiences, and using familiar tools.

There are few good outcome measures to assess science learning in informal settings, and efforts to develop relevant measures have often been controversial, the report notes. Some people have advocated using the same standards as for school settings, while others have urged measuring outcomes based on peoples' perceptions of whether they have learned something. It is not productive to blindly adopt either purely academic goals or standards that are personally subjective, the report says. Evaluations should not be limited to factual recall or other narrow cognitive measures; rather, they should assess the range of capabilities that museums and similar settings are designed to nurture.

The report outlines six "strands" of science learning that can happen in informal settings, and these strands could help refine evaluations of how well people are learning in these environments. For example, learners can experience excitement and motivation to learn about phenomena in the natural and physical world. They can come to understand and use concepts and facts related to science. They can learn how scientists actually conduct their work using specialized tools and equipment. And they can develop an identity as someone who knows about, uses, and sometimes contributes to science.

The committee also pointed to the need for more professional development and a common knowledge base among scholars and educators in the field -- including a more widely shared language, values, learning theories, and standards of evidence. "There's a lot of good research and practice out there," said committee co-chair Bruce Lewenstein, professor of science communication at Cornell University. "Now we need to find better ways to bring that work together and continue extending it."

NO ACCOUNTING FOR FAIRNESS:

Additional Federal and State Funds Intended for Ohio’s

Low-Income Students Often Don’t Reach the State’s

Highest Poverty Schools

In Some Schools, These Inequities Can Mean a Difference of Tens of Thousands, and Sometimes Hundreds of Thousands, of Dollars Every Year

Additional funding for Ohio’s low-income students often fails to reach the highest poverty schools, undermining policymakers’ efforts to boost student achievement through additional federal and state investments, according to a report released by The Education Trust.

No Accounting for Fairness examines funding patterns in the state’s 14 largest school systems by looking at publicly available school-level expenditure data on teacher salaries, which typically accounts for 80 to 90 percent of elementary school budgets. The analysis found that expenditures on teacher salaries during the 2007-2008 year vary dramatically between elementary schools within the same district.

Though Ohio school districts get additional funding for low-income children, only three of the largest 14 districts (Dublin, Lakota, and Parma) have higher average teacher salaries in their highest-poverty schools than in their more affluent schools. In the remaining 11 districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Hilliard, Olentangy, South-Western, Toledo, and Westerville), average salaries were lower in schools serving the highest concentration of students from low-income families.

For example, teachers in the highest poverty elementary schools in Akron were paid an average of $4,919 less than their counterparts in the city’s schools serving the fewest low-income students. In Columbus, the comparable figure was $1,509 less for teachers in the highest poverty elementary schools.

“Common sense and basic fairness tell us that schools educating low-income students need significantly more—and certainly not less—if we expect them to reach the same high standards and achievement levels as children who have more resources at home,” said Ross Wiener, vice president of The Education Trust and author of the report. “When districts dilute the extra state and federal funding intended to help poor kids, students don’t get the supports they need to reach high levels of achievement.”

The Education Trust also looked beyond teacher salary averages to examine how this affected per-student spending on salaries. While low-income students generate significant state and federal dollars to augment their educational opportunities, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, and Olentangy actually spent less per pupil on teacher salaries in their highest poverty schools than in their more affluent schools. But even in districts that spent slightly more per pupil, those additional amounts were minimal in comparison to the extra federal and state aid that their low-income students generated for the districts.

These disparities in teacher spending can have an enormous impact on a school’s budget. For example, if Cleveland spent the same amount per pupil on teacher salaries at Clark Elementary School as it does in its lowest poverty schools, Clark would receive more than $566,250 more funding per year—money that could go a long way to improving the quality of instruction in the school.

Often, these within-district spending inequities result from long-standing budget and teacher compensation practices. School districts typically allocate staff positions to each school, rather than providing them with an actual salary budget. Because the highest-paid teachers are usually concentrated in the lowest poverty schools, those schools get more than their share of the district’s teacher salary budget, and low-income schools get less.

In recent years, officials in Ohio have worked hard to equalize spending between school districts in the state. But the state has yet to tackle the problem of inequitable funding within school districts, and that—it turns out—can undercut the good intentions of legislators to equalize funding between districts.

Unless elected officials and educators squarely address this baseline problem, Ohio will continue to face challenges in closing achievement gaps that separate low-income students from their more affluent peers, undermining other steps the state may take in the name of boosting achievement in high-poverty schools.

The Education Trust recommends that the state adopt two complementary strategies to promote funding fairness at the school level. First, districts should be required to report school-level expenses to the state, creating a system that provides both transparency and comparability between schools and districts. And second, the state should enlist school districts as partners in pursuing fiscal equity, moving as rapidly as possible to fair funding of schools based upon student need.

Full report:

http://www2.edtrust.org/NR/rdonlyres/4E65A719-C9A5-41FC-A800-3D96F65CFA6E/0/NoAcctgforFairnessOH.pdf

Boston charter school students consistently outperform their peers at pilot schools and at traditional schools

The Boston Foundation and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released a groundbreaking report by a team of Harvard and MIT researchers at an Understanding Boston forum that effectively compares student performance at charter and pilot schools against students attending traditional public schools in Boston. The report uses an innovative two-part research design. One part uses observational data from every charter and pilot school in Boston, and the other examines the experience of a subset of students who took part in lotteries for admission. The result is, for the first time nationally, a rigorous, direct comparison of student performance in three different kinds of schools—charter, pilot and traditional.

According to the findings, charter school students consistently outperform their peers at pilot schools and at traditional schools. First launched in the Commonwealth in the wake of historic education reform legislation passed in Massachusetts in 1993, charter schools now stand as the first example of new educational strategies that have made a demonstrable improvement in the academic performance of their students.

The new study is titled Informing the Debate: Comparing Boston’s Charter, Pilot and Traditional Schools.

Key findings

For elementary Pilot School students, a significant impact was seen in English Language Arts scores, but not for math scores. In middle school, the observational results suggest Pilot School students may actually lose ground when compared to their peers in traditional schools, while the lottery-based results showed no difference between Pilot School and traditional school performance. At the high school level, observational results showed significant improvement of performance by both charter and pilot school students, compared to student performance in traditional schools. The lottery-based study, however, showed no significant difference between high school students in Pilot School and high school students in traditional schools.

Among other key findings of the report: the impact of charter schools was particularly dramatic in middle school math. The effect of a single year spent in a charter school was equivalent to half of the black-white achievement gap. Performance in English Language Arts also significantly increased for charter middle school students, though less dramatically. Charter students also showed stronger performance scores in high school, in English Language Arts, math, writing topic development, and writing composition. Students in pilot high schools also made measurable progress.

Two separate research designs were incorporated into the project in part to address the common complaint that the charter school students are significantly different from their peers in the traditional public schools in ways that influence how they perform in school, and that this difference undermined any meaningful comparison between the two. In particular, the use of a lottery-based component enabled the researchers to compare the academic performance of students—one accepted and one rejected by means of an impartial lottery—to reduce differences such as the role that families typically play in their children’s schooling.

The report directly addresses two of the most frequent criticisms leveled at earlier studied of Pilot and Charter schools: that their students are not representative of traditional Boston schools but rather are more likely to succeed; and that charters and pilots tend to shed students who do not perform up to their standards, again creating an elite student body that will inevitably outperform their BPS peers.

“At the time of admission, the only difference between applicants who were offered admission and those who were not was a coin flip,” said Kane. “The fact that there are large differences in subsequent performance suggests that the charter schools were indeed having an impact.”

Findings for students in pilot schools were limited in their impact, compared to charter schools, in part because of the smaller population that fit the experimental model of the report.

Although the researchers employed both observational and lottery approaches, they acknowledge limitations remain. The observational study includes all schools but does not control for many hard-to-measure differences in students' background. The lottery study controls for all differences in student background, including unobserved differences, but does not include all schools.

In addition, the control variables used in the study are necessarily limited. For instance, they include only participation in special education and limited English proficiency programs – not the level of need. It is possible that pilot and charter schools serve different populations within each of these programs; this could be particularly relevant for the observational study.

Finally, the authors stress that this study was designed to respond to the important question of whether different types of schools produce significant achievement gains, and not to explain why or how charters and pilots might have an impact on performance. The Boston Foundation has announced its intentions of funding future studies that will address these questions.

“This by no means ends the debate about what schools can best serve our young people, but it points the way forward, underscoring the need for further scholarship,” said Grogan. “In the meantime, charters are generating extraordinary results and the Boston Foundation will continue to support Charter and Pilot schools and to support the scholarship that will extend our understanding of why they work.”

Charter/Pilot background  Charter schools are public schools that are chartered by the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Each school is managed by an independent board of trustees and is independent of local school committees. Charters come in two forms: Horace Mann Charters and Commonwealth Charters. Horace Mann Charters must be initially approved by a local school committee and by the local teachers union, while Commonwealth Charters apply directly to the state and do not need those local sign-offs. In addition, Horace Mann Charter employees continue to be members of the local collective bargaining unit, accrue seniority and receive, at a minimum, the salary and benefits set by the local unit.

In contrast, Commonwealth Charter employees are not required to be members of the local collective bargaining unit.

Today, 54 Commonwealth Charter Schools operate statewide, as well as seven Horace Mann Charter Schools. They serve a student population of 25,034, while fully 21,312 students remain on charter school waiting lists. Charters are distributed widely, with 16 in Boston, 25 in other urban settings and 20 not located in urban centers.

State law caps the number of charters at 120, which would allow for 48 Horace Mann Charters and 72 Commonwealth Charters.

Pilot schools were created by the Boston Public Schools and the Boston Teachers Union in 1995 to provide an alternative to traditional schools and to the newly created charter schools. They hold considerable autonomy over five areas: budget, staffing, governance, curriculum and the calendar. Each new pilot school must pass an approval process that includes a two-thirds vote by all school employees who are members of the Boston Teachers Union, as well as a vote by the school district. Teachers in a pilot school retain their seniority, and BPS pay scale provides a minimum for teacher pay.

In the current school year, 20 pilot schools are in operation in Boston, with seven new pilots scheduled to open by September of 2009. They serve a total of 6,337 students, 11 percent of the total Boston Public School population. Four pilot schools serve exclusively an elementary school population, four include elementary and middle school students, two are middle schools, one includes middle and high school students, and nine serve high school students alone.

Full report:

http://www.tbf.org/uploadedFiles/tbforg/Utility_Navigation/Multimedia_Library/Reports/InformingTheDebate_Final.pdf

Study Compares Charter Schools, Traditional Public Schools

A new University of Indianapolis study suggests that students with achievement deficits experience greater academic growth in charter schools than similar students at traditional public schools.

The study and subsequent report, A Comparison of Student Academic Growth between Indiana Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools, was prepared by the Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning (CELL) at the University of Indianapolis, in collaboration with Research and Evaluation Resources.

Key findings:

· Charter school students differ from traditional school students in critical ways: They enter charter schools at an academic disadvantage relative to their traditional school counterparts, as evidenced by their entering scores on the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress (ISTEP), and they are more likely to be members of minority groups and low-income households.

* Charter schools have the same attendance and stability rates as traditional schools.

· Students who had been enrolled at least two years in their charter school showed significantly greater academic growth when compared to a controlled sample of students from traditional Indiana schools that were similar in demographic characteristics and baseline academic achievement. Charter school students showed 22% more growth in reading, 18% more growth in math and 25% more growth in language usage.

* The growth in reading and language usage for charter students exceeded national growth averages. Math growth was on a par with the national average.

* Cost per unit of academic growth was lower in charter schools.

The study was commissioned by Indiana Black Expo, the Indianapolis Urban League and the DeHaan Family Foundation. “We support efforts to identify successful educational practices that can be replicated by any school working to improve academic achievement,” said Joseph A. Slash, president and chief executive officer of the Urban League. “Charter schools represent one option.”

The CELL study is significant in that it is the first in Indiana to compare academic growth of students in charter schools with similar students attending traditional public schools—students matched for gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and initial level of academic performance.

The study used information from the Indiana Department of Education to compare students in 40 charter schools throughout the state with traditional public school students in those same communities, including Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Evansville, Gary, Richmond, Lafayette, New Albany, Noblesville and Carmel. The data included attendance, enrollment stability, ISTEP scores, teacher salaries, student-teacher ratio and spending per pupil.

The researchers then examined scores from across the state on the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) twice-annual Measures of Academic Progress, to gauge academic growth in reading, language usage and math from Fall 2006 through Spring 2008. All but one of Indiana’s charter schools, as well as 126 school districts in the state, use the NWEA assessment, making it well suited for such a comparison.

CELL researchers caution that while the differences in growth between charter and traditional students are statistically significant, the specific factors that contributed to the academic growth are not known. Also, no conclusions can be drawn about academic gains for students who do not fit the socioeconomic and educational profile of the students studied.

“These results are very interesting, but more long-term analyses are needed to see if the findings are stable and if the same patterns emerge when we measure the outcome in different ways,” said Mary Jo Rattermann, chief researcher.

The third area of study, cost effectiveness, sought to determine the cost to produce one unit of academic growth in a student on the NWEA assessment. Using that gauge, charter schools produced greater gains in achievement for every dollar spent than did comparable traditional public schools. However, only general fund expenses were compared, and other factors may exist that were not included in the study.

The researchers note that their work, while not the first to analyze the impact of charter schools, represents a different way of benchmarking academic success by not basing it on traditional achievement testing practices that are designed to determine whether a student meets a fixed minimum standard, such as ISTEP cut scores. Instead, the CELL study examined specific academic growth over a period of time.

While far from definitive, the study points to several directions for further research, including studies that evaluate specific aspects of charter school students’ experiences as well as those of students in traditional public schools that are most associated with gains in academic achievement.

TRENDS IN TECHNOLOGY PLANNING AND FUNDING IN FLORIDA K–12 PUBLIC SCHOOLS

This empirical research investigates trends in technology planning and funding in Florida’s K–12 public schools between the 2003–04 and 2005–06 academic years. Survey items that focused on funding and planning issues on Florida’s statewide school technology integration survey were analyzed using logistic models.

Results indicate a significant increase in the number of schools revising their technology plans on a regular basis; a significant increase in the frequency with which Florida’s K–12 public schools are seeking funding for technology-related initiatives; a significant increase in parent, administrator, teacher, and student involvement in the technology planning process; and a significant decline in adequate funding for software and hardware needs. In addition, schools with low proportions of economically disadvantaged students sought and were awarded significantly more funds from donations and federal and state grants.

Implications for educational leadership and policy are provided.

Complete study:

http://journals.sfu.ca/ijepl/index.php/ijepl/article/view/146/57

Rethinking Human Capital in Education: Singapore As A Model for Teacher Development

This report describes Singapore’s coherent system of teacher education and employment and suggests lessons for the United States.

http://www.aspeninstitute.org/atf/cf/{DEB6F227-659B-4EC8-8F84-8DF23CA704F5}/SingaporeEDU.pdf

Link found between early education failure and teenage depression

Students’ successes in the first grade can affect more than their future report cards. In a new study, University of Missouri researchers found links among students’ weak academic performance in the first grade, self-perceptions in the sixth grade, and depression symptoms in the seventh grade.

“We found that students in the first grade who struggled academically with core subjects, including reading and math, later displayed negative self-perceptions and symptoms of depression in sixth and seventh grade, respectively,” said Keith Herman, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. “Often, children with poor academic skills believe they have less influence on important outcomes in their life. Poor academic skills can influence how children view themselves as students and as social beings.”

In the study, MU researchers examined the behaviors of 474 boys and girls in the first grade and re-examined the students when they entered middle school. Herman found that students who struggled academically with core subjects, such as reading and math, in the first grade later showed risk factors for negative self-beliefs and depressive symptoms as they entered sixth and seventh grade. Herman suggests that because differences in children’s learning will continue to exist even if all students are given effective instruction and support, parents and teachers should acknowledge student’s skills in other areas.

“One of the main ways children can get others to like them in school is by being good students. Children with poor academic skills may believe that they have one less method for influencing important social outcomes, which could lead to negative consequences later in life. Children’s individual differences will always exist in basic academic skills, so it is necessary to explore and emphasize other assets in students, especially those with lower academic skill relative to their peers,” Herman said. “Along with reading and math, teachers and parents should honor skills in other areas, such as interpersonal skills, non-core academic areas, athletics and music.”

The researchers also found the effect of academic proficiency on self-perceptions was significantly stronger for girls. Girls who did not advance academically believed that they had less control of important outcomes, a risk factor for symptoms of depression.

The study, “Low Academic Competence in First Grade as a Risk Factor for Depressive Cognitions and Symptoms in Middle School,” was recently published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology.

Adolescent Sleep, School Start Times, and Teen Motor Vehicle Crashes

Study objectives: To assess the effects of delayed high-school start times on sleep and motor vehicle crashes.

Methods: The sleep habits and motor vehicle crash rates of adolescents from a single, large, county-wide, school district were assessed by questionnaire before and after a 1-hour delay in school start times.

Results: Average hours of nightly sleep increased and catch-up sleep on weekends decreased. Average crash rates for teen drivers in the study county in the 2 years after the change in school start time dropped 16.5%, compared with the 2 years prior to the change, whereas teen crash rates for the rest of the state increased 7.8% over the same time period.

Conclusions: Later school start times may both increase the sleep of adolescents and decrease their risk of motor vehicle crashes.

The findings were reported in the December issue of The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Peer discussion improves student performance with 'clickers,' says study

Across the University of Colorado at Boulder campus students are sharing answers, checking their responses to questions against those of their neighbors and making adjustments to those answers in hopes of earning a better grade.

Not surprisingly, the students are getting more answers right. But what may be startling is that professors are encouraging the whole thing.

The students aren't cheating, they are learning from each other in a meaningful way, according to Tin Tin Su, an associate professor in the molecular, cellular and developmental biology department. Su is one of a group of CU-Boulder researchers that also includes Michelle Smith, William Wood, Wendy Adams, Carl Wieman (also of the University of British Columbia), Jennifer Knight and Nancy Guild, who authored a paper in the Jan. 2 issue of the journal Science showing how peer discussion during "clicker" questions helps students learn in a way that simple lecturing does not.

Clickers are simple audience response devices, similar to a TV remote control, that allow students to record their answers to thought-provoking, multiple-choice questions in class. After students answer a question individually, the instructor often asks them to discuss the question and then vote again before revealing the answer. After discussion, they usually do better on the question - but why?

"I was skeptical about whether in-class discussion really led to students' learning," said Su. "The clickers are a good way to get instant feedback, but do the students really learn from discussion or are they just changing their answers because of peer pressure?" Since no study had ever been done to determine which of these possibilities was true, Su and a number of other researchers decided to find out.

"We came up with a method for testing whether the students are actually learning or just being influenced by other students who they think know the right answer," said Michelle Smith, a science teaching fellow with CU's Science Education Initiative and a research associate in MCD biology.

The researchers used pairs of similar clicker questions in lectures during the semester and evaluated student responses. Each time, the students answered the first question of the pair individually, then talked to their neighbors about their answers.

Then they were asked to answer a second, similar question individually. About 50 percent got the question right on the first try. After talking to neighbors, the number jumped to 68 percent. And when they individually answered a follow-up question about the same concept, the number jumped again to over 70 percent, much better than the 50 percent of individual correct answers on the first question.

"There was no influence from the instructor during the clicker question series," said Smith. "We were just giving students the opportunity to talk to each other."

Su said the improvement on the first question after discussion didn't surprise her. She said it's possible the students were not learning but just copying answers. But by adding the element of a follow-up question, the truth became clear.

"The important point is that none of the students were told what the right answer was," said Su. "Even when students in a discussion group all got the initial answer wrong, after talking to each other they were able to figure out the correct response, to learn. That was unexpected, and I think that's dramatic."

Instructors at CU-Boulder began using a simple colored card system for student voting -- a precursor to clickers -- during lectures in 1996. Mike Dubson, senior instructor and associate chair in the physics department, got the first wave of clickers in 2000 when a system known as H-ITT became cheap enough for students to afford. At the height of their popularity, H-ITT clickers were used by about 6,000 CU-Boulder students in astronomy, atmospheric sciences, geology, engineering and MCD biology, according to Dubson.

But Dubson said the H-ITT clickers had their drawbacks. They required a lot of maintenance, infrastructure and training of instructors and students. By spring of 2006 the problems were solved by the introduction of the current generation of iClickers, a cheaper, simpler design than the H-ITT clicker that requires no wiring. The iClicker has only one small base receiver that attaches to an instructor's laptop.

Dubson said the most important advance in clicker usage at CU-Boulder came in the spring of 2007 when the university's Information Technology Services began supporting the iClicker and maintaining a clicker registration site. "The centralized clicker registration system really lowered the barrier for a lot of students and made the logistics of using clickers in your classroom easier," said Dubson.

The iClicker costs $40 and requires a one-time registration. The best part, said Dubson, is that a freshman can use his or her clicker for the entire four years at CU-Boulder.

"A physics major is going to use the iClicker in 15 courses in their career," said Dubson. "That's not much of a financial burden."

Today 17,000 CU-Boulder students own a clicker and 135 classes require them, according to Dubson. Clickers also are used by professors in the social sciences and humanities.

Exercise Is Healthy Option for Kids With Developmental Disabilities

Group exercise programs, treadmill training and horseback riding can be healthy choices for children with developmental disabilities, a new review of studies concludes.

With these kinds of activities, children with disorders such as autism, mental retardation and cerebral palsy can improve their coordination and aerobic fitness, according to research analyzed by Connie Johnson, PT, a physical therapist with the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia.

The findings are encouraging, since studies show that children with developmental disabilities tend to be less fit than their peers. In many cases, the children lack the resources and community support that would encourage them to be more active, Johnson said.

Children and adults with disabilities “can ill afford to have a downturn in health and yet when told by their doctor to exercise or lose weight, they are rarely — if ever — given the resources or knowledge to do so,” said James Rimmer, Ph.D., director of the National Center on Physical Activity and Disability.

However, “parents may be more likely to provide their children with opportunities for physical activity if the specific potential benefits for their children are proven,” said Johnson, whose review appears in the January-February issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion.

Johnson analyzed 14 studies and three other evidence reviews to determine how youth with developmental disabilities might benefit from physical activity. The strongest evidence of benefits came from studies of group exercise, therapeutic horseback riding and treadmill workouts. Skiing and swimming programs might also be beneficial, but the evidence from those programs was not as strong, she concluded.

As other studies have suggested, however, the children all found “some level of enjoyment, satisfaction or physical benefit from the activities,” Johnson said.

Only two studies reported any problems with the exercise programs, including one study of children with severe cerebral palsy where therapeutic horseback riding raised some heart rates above the healthy levels recommended for all children by the American Heart Association.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, developmental disabilities affect nearly 17 percent of children.

Letting infants watch TV can do more harm than good says wide-ranging international review

25-year review looked at 78 studies

A leading child expert is warning parents to limit the amount of television children watch before the age of two, after an extensive review published in the January issue of Acta Paediatrica showed that it can do more harm than good to their ongoing development.

Professor Dimitri A Christakis, from the Seattle Children's Research Institute and the University of Washington, USA, has also expressed considerable concerns about DVDs aimed at infants that claim to be beneficial, despite a lack of scientific evidence.

And he points out that France has already taken the matter so seriously that in summer 2008 the Government introduced tough new rules to protect the health and development of children under three from the adverse effects of TV.

Professor Christakis' extensive review looked at 78 studies published over the last 25 years and reiterates the findings of numerous studies he has carried out with colleagues into this specialist area.

He points out that as many as nine in ten children under the age of two watch TV regularly, despite ongoing warnings, and some spend as much as 40 per cent of their waking hours in front of a TV.

"No studies to date have demonstrated benefits associated with early infant TV viewing" says Professor Christakis, whose review looked at the effect that TV has on children's language, cognitive skills and attentional capacity, as well as areas for future research.

"The weight of existing evidence suggests the potential for harm and I believe that parents should exercise due caution in exposing infants to excessive media" he says.

"For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics discourages TV viewing in the first two years of life, but only six per cent of parents are aware of this advice despite ongoing publicity."

Key findings of Professor Christakis' review includes:

· 29 per cent of parents who took part in a survey of 1,000 American families published in 2007 said they let their infants watch TV because they thought it was "good for their brains". But claims made by manufacturers are not substantiated by peer-reviewed medical papers and industry studies.

· Watching TV programmes or DVDs aimed at infants can actually delay language development, according to a number of studies. For example, a 2008 Thai study published in Acta Paediatrica found that if children under 12 months watched TV for more than two hours a day they were six times more likely to have delayed language skills. Another study found that children who watched baby DVDs between seven and 16 months knew fewer words than children who did not.

· Infants as young as 14 months will imitate what they see on a TV screen, but they learn better from live presentations. For example, one study found that children learnt Mandarin Chinese better from a native speaker than they did from a video of the same speaker.

· A study of 1,300 children conducted by the author and colleagues in 2004 found a modest association between TV viewing before the age of three and attentional problems at the age of seven, after a wide range of other factors were ruled out.

· In another study, the author and colleagues looked at the effects of early TV viewing on cognitive development at school age. They found that children who had watched a lot of TV in their early years did not perform as well when they underwent tests to check their reading and memory skills.

· More than one in five parents who took part in another study said that they got their infants to watch TV when they needed time to themselves. This, says the author, is an understandable and realistic need, but not one that should be actively promoted.

But why does television have such a negative effect on children of this age? "We believe that one reason is the fact that it exposes children to flashing lights, scene changes, quick edits and auditory cuts which may be over stimulating to developing brains" says Professor Christakis. "TV also replaces other more important and appropriate activities like playing or interacting with parents."

There have been concerns about infants viewing TV for the last four decades but it has only been in recent years that studies have provided the empirical data to back up those concerns.

"The explosion in infant TV viewing and the potential risks associated with it raise several important policy implications" concludes Professor Christakis.

"First and foremost, the lack of regulation related to claims made by people promoting programmes and DVDs aimed at infants is problematic. Educational claims should, and can, be based on scientific data. Despite this, the names of the products and the testimonials they use often convince parents that TV viewing has a positive impact on their infants.

"Secondly, parents need to be better informed about what activities really do promote healthy development in young children. This may provide some defence against the aggressive marketing techniques being employed.

"Last, but not least, more resources need to be made available to fund critical research related to the effects of media on young children."

Packing a Lunch for Preschoolers May Not Be a Good Idea 

Approximately 13 million children in the United States eat three or more meals and snacks each day at one of the country’s 117,000 regulated child-care centers. Due to increasing cost of food preparation and storage, more and more of these centers are requiring parents to provide food for their children.

But sack lunches sent from home may not regularly provide adequate nutrients for the growth and development of young children, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Third Coast Research and Development Inc. of Galveston, Texas. The study included 74 three to five-year-olds attending full-time child-care centers that required parents to provide lunches. Lunch contents were observed and recorded for three consecutive days.

The researchers found more than 50 percent of lunches provided less than minimum amounts of calories, carbohydrates, vitamin A, calcium, iron and zinc, and 96 percent of lunches provided less than minimum recommended amounts of dietary fiber. The lunches did contain 114 percent of the recommended amount of sodium.

When parents were asked if lunch provides an important opportunity for their children to receive nutrients, all 97 agreed. But 63 percent responded that they tend to pack only foods they know their child will eat.

The researchers concluded that, even though parents understand the importance of lunch, they may not know how to consistently pack a nutritious sack lunch for their children. “When parents do not consistently pack a nutritious sack lunch they miss an opportunity to teach and reinforce good dietary habits to their children. As child-care centers shift the responsibility for providing meals and snacks to parents, they must address the practices that affect the long-term health and well-being of the children they serve,” the researchers said.