幼儿园建筑综合防噪设计实践探索——以北京石门营幼儿园为例

幼儿园是幼儿生活的重要场所,而伴随社会经济的迅猛发展,尤其是汽车这一现代化交通工具的大量使用,导致城市的声环境污染日益严重.以建筑隔声的基本原理为基础,讨论了如何在外界不利的声环境下进行建筑防噪设计,并结合工程实例论述了运用低技术防噪的措施和方法.     

湖南农村幼儿教育的现状与建议

21世纪以来,湖南农村幼儿教育面临着一系列新问题、新挑战,如幼儿教育规模不断萎缩,在园(班)幼儿的绝对人数不断下滑,农村传统的幼儿教育办学模式遇到了前所未有的挑战;乡镇幼儿园发展相对滞后;幼儿教师队伍不稳定。为此,我们建议各级政府要完善农村幼儿教育管理体制,加大对农村幼儿教育事业的投入,并积极探索农村及贫困山区幼儿教育发展的新模式。     

The Effect of School-Based Kindergarten Transition Policies and Practices on Child Academic Outcomes.

This study examined the effect of school-based kindergarten transition policies and practices on child outcomes. The authors followed 17,212 children from 992 schools in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten sample (ECLS-K) across the kindergarten school year. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that the number of school-based transition practices in the fall of kindergarten was associated with more positive academic achievement scores at the end of kindergarten, even controlling for family socioeconomic status (SES) and other demographic factors. This effect was stronger for low- and middle-SES children than high-SES children. For low-SES children, 7 transition practices were associated with a .21 standard deviation increase in predicted achievement scores beyond 0 practices. The effect of transition practices was partially mediated by an intervening effect on parent-initiated involvement in school during the kindergarten year. The findings support education policies to target kindergarten transition efforts to increase parent involvement in low-SES families. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Kindergarten Prediction of Reading Skills: A Longitudinal Comparative Analysis.

There is considerable focus in public policy on screening children for reading difficulties. Sixty years of research have not resolved questions of what constructs assessed in kindergarten best predict subsequent reading outcomes. This study assessed the relative importance of multiple measures obtained in a kindergarten sample for the prediction of reading outcomes at the end of 1st and 2nd grades. Analyses revealed that measures of phonological awareness, letter sound knowledge, and naming speed consistently accounted for the unique variance across reading outcomes whereas measures of perceptual skills and oral language and vocabulary did not. These results show that measures of letter name and letter sound knowledge, naming speed, and phonological awareness are good predictors of multiple reading outcomes in Grades 1 and 2. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fathers' and Mothers' Parenting Behavior and Beliefs as Predictors of Children's Social Adjustment in the Transition to School.

The current study focuses on the association between children's social adjustment in the transition to school and the early elementary school years and their fathers' and mothers' parenting behaviors and beliefs and quality of marital relationship. The authors found that the most competent and least problematic children from the teachers' perspectives are those whose fathers are sensitive and supportive of their children's autonomy, whose mothers' parenting beliefs support self-directed child behavior, and whose parents maintain an emotionally intimate relationship. These findings have implications for efforts to prevent early school problems in children and support the children's transitions into formal schooling. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Kes Sesi: A mobile game designed to improve kindergarteners' recognition of letter sounds

Learning letters is an important area of language learning, conducive to the beginning of reading and writing. Indeed, today's generation prefers to learn through digital games rather than through formal teaching processes. Inspired by this need, the researcher designed this study (a) to test the effectiveness of an instructional digital game, “Kes Sesi,” designed to teach letter recognition skills and (b) to briefly present its instructional development process, which was based on the ADDIE model. This was a quasi‐experimental study with two treatment groups and a control group involving 87 kindergarteners. Treatment groups played the game for 12–6 weeks for learning, 6 weeks for practice. The control group continued with its regular class activities. One treatment group played the game based on predefined sound categorization, the other without any categorization. A test on children's sound recognition abilities was administered three times as a pretest, a midtest, and a posttest. The treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group. The game enhanced the kindergarteners' ability to practice uncategorized content while it enhanced their ability to learn categorized content. The results are promising in that Kes Sesi can be useful in self‐supported learning contexts with little adult input and with minimum outside interference.     

Bilingual phonological awareness: Multilevel construct validation among Spanish-speaking kindergarteners in transitional bilingual education classrooms.

The construct validity of English and Spanish phonological awareness (PA) tasks was examined with a sample of 812 kindergarten children from 71 transitional bilingual education program classrooms located in 3 different types of geographic regions in California and Texas. Tasks of PA, including blending nonwords, segmenting words, and phoneme elision, were measured in Spanish and in English and analyzed via multilevel confirmatory factor analysis at the task level. Results showed that the PA tasks defined a unitary construct at both the student and classroom levels in each language. English and Spanish PA factors were related to each other (.93 and .83 at the student and classroom levels, respectively) as well as to word reading, both within languages (correlations estimated between .74 and .93) and across languages (correlations estimated between .47 and .79). Although the PA constructs were statistically separable in each language, the high correlation between Spanish and English PA indicates considerable overlap in these abilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predicting reading and mathematics achievement in fourth-grade children from kindergarten readiness scores.

This study examined age and gender differences in verbal skills and visuomotor skills at kindergarten, in achievement in reading and mathematics at Grade 4, and in the link between skills at kindergarten and later achievement (n?=?281). Older children had higher verbal skills and visuomotor skills than younger children, and girls had higher visuomotor skills and reading achievement than boys. With controls for age, verbal skills uniquely predicted later reading achievement, whereas both verbal skills and visuomotor skills uniquely predicted later mathematics achievement. Readiness in the specific areas of auditory memory and verbal associations predicted later reading achievement, whereas readiness in the specific areas of auditory memory, number skills, and visual discrimination predicted later mathematics achievement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pictures and words: Spanish and English vocabulary in classrooms.

The current study evaluated the relation between Spanish and English vocabulary. Whereas previously reported correlations have revealed strong differences among types of vocabulary measures used and the ages of the students tested, no prior study had used a multilevel model to control for classroom-level differences. The current study used multiple measures of vocabulary—picture vocabulary and narrative production tasks—in multilevel models of 1,300 Spanish-speaking students in 247 kindergarten and 1st-grade classrooms in English immersion and bilingual transitional programs. The current results highlight the need to separate classroom effects from student effects, since for vocabulary measures, student-level correlations were strongly biased toward zero when classroom-level correlations were opposite in direction from student-level correlations. Most important, the current results support a strong distinction between types of vocabulary measure (e.g., picture vs. narrative) and suggest sizable influence of instruction for questions of bilingual performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Accuracy-based phonological awareness tasks: Are they reliable, efficient, and sensitive to growth?

This two-experiment study examined the efficiency and sensitivity of five accuracy-based phonological awareness tasks for monitoring the development of these skills in kindergarten and Grade 1 students. The first experiment examined responses to different numbers and types of items included in each phonological awareness task for their correspondence to responses obtained from a larger, more inclusive item pool. Results suggested that an internally consistent and valid measure of each skill included 10 items per task, each representing a different linguistic combination. The second experiment examined the interscorer reliability and concurrent validity of the 5 measures, and compared their sensitivity to growth. Sensitivity was examined by administering 12 alternate forms of the tasks once per week to 32 kindergarten and 35 Grade 1 students. Mean slopes computed for each task suggested positive growth across all tasks and grades. Mean kindergarten slopes were significantly steeper than mean Grade 1 slopes for each of the 5 tasks, whereas the most sensitive task for both kindergarten and grade I students was Segmentation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)