Boys Flying High in Early Literacy at Camp Hill Infants State School
In contrast with concerns elsewhere that many boys in the earliest of school experiences lose their way with literacy, those at one school in Queensland, Australia, have consistently performed well. In comparison with Statewide average scores on tests (The Year 2 Diagnostic Net), designed to identify those children with need for additional attention in their early reading, writing or numeracy, boys of Camp Hill State Infants School have been outstanding. In this presentation, educators from the school and a critical friend speak to the phenomenon of gender-different achievement in early phase education, and to their beliefs about what is happening in their school.
Gender-based differences in reading literacy in the first two years of school: In this case, type of school trumps gender.
The phenomenon of gender-based differences in students’ literacy achievement in the later years of schooling has been widely researched and reported but it cannot be taken as given that such differences span the entire age continuum. The current study considered the reading literacy of boys and girls in the first years of schooling from two major perspectives: The expectations of students, teachers, and parents were sampled, and the literacy of those boys and girls measured by system measures of reading performance and an external assessment of reading comprehension. It was not surprising that student, parent, and teacher attitudes predicted gender-based differences in reading literacy, nor that the school-based Year 2 Diagnostic Net test provided statistical evidence of such differences, nor was it surprising that girls generally outperformed boys. What was surprising was that other internal and external measures of achievement found no significant differences for gender. Instead, what emerged was a significant gap in terms of both achievement and attitude related to type of school attended together with some agreement about a child’s judgment that he/she reads well as the most important concomitant of reading literacy.
The relation of food quantity to rumination behavior.
Preliminary work suggested that the quantity of food ingested by retarded individuals who usually ruminated following meals was related to the frequency and duration of ruminating responses. This possible relation was experimentally examined by systematically varying food quantity from regular portions to satiation levels for three retarded individuals who exhibited high levels of ruminating. A clear functional relation of food quantity to ruminating emerged, with satiation procedures producing rapid and large decreases in the relatively high frequencies and durations of ruminating characteristic of baseline food quantity conditions.