Early Intervention Can Improve Low-Income Children’s Cognitive Skills and Academic Achievement

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National Head Start program conceptualized while psychologists were beginning to study preventive intervention for young children living in poverty.
Findings
As a group, children who live in poverty tend to perform worse in school than do children from more privileged backgrounds. For the first half of the 20th century, researchers attributed this difference to inherent cognitive deficits. At the time, the prevailing belief was that the course of child development was dictated by biology and maturation. By the early 1960s, this position gave way to the notion popularized by psychologists such as J. McVicker Hunt and Benjamin Bloom that intelligence could rather easily be shaped by the environment. There was very little research at the time to support these speculations but a few psychologists had begun to study whether environmental manipulation could prevent poor cognitive outcomes. Results of studies by psychologists Susan Gray and Rupert Klaus (1965), Martin Deutsch (1965) and Bettye Caldwell and former U.S. Surgeon General Julius Richmond (1968) supported the notion that early attention to physical and psychological development could improve cognitive ability.
Significance

These preliminary results caught the attention of Sargent Shriver, President Lyndon Johnson’s chief strategist in implementing an arsenal of antipoverty programs as part of the War on Poverty. His idea for a school readiness program for children of the poor focused on breaking the cycle of poverty. Shriver reasoned that if poor children could begin school on an equal footing with wealthier classmates, they would have a better of chance of succeeding in school and avoiding poverty in adulthood. He appointed a planning committee of 13 professionals in physical and mental health, early education, social work, and developmental psychology. Their work helped shape what is now known as the federal Head Start program.

The three developmental psychologists in the group were Urie Bronfenbrenner, Mamie Clark, and Edward Zigler. Bronfenbrenner convinced the other members that intervention would be most effective if it involved not just the child but the family and community that comprise the child-rearing environment. Parent involvement in school operations and administration were unheard of at the time, but it became a cornerstone of Head Start and proved to be a major contributor to its success. Zigler had been trained as a scientist and was distressed that the new program was not going to be field-tested before its nationwide launch. Arguing that it was not wise to base such a massive, innovative program on good ideas and concepts but little empirical evidence, he insisted that research and evaluation be part of Head Start. When he later became the federal official responsible for administering the program, Zigler (often referred to as the “father of Head Start”) worked to cast Head Start as a national laboratory for the design of effective early childhood services.

Although it is difficult to summarize the hundreds of empirical studies of Head Start outcomes, Head Start does seem to produce a variety of benefits for most children who participate. Although some studies have suggested that the intellectual advantages gained from participation in Head Start gradually disappear as children progress through elementary school, some of these same studies have shown more lasting benefits in the areas of school achievement and adjustment.
Practical Application

Head Start began as a great experiment that over the years has yielded prolific results. Some 20 million children and families have participated in Head Start since the summer of 1965; current enrollment approaches one million annually, including those in the new Early Head Start that serves families with children from birth to age 3. Psychological research on early intervention has proliferated, creating an expansive literature and sound knowledge base. Many research ideas designed and tested in the Head Start laboratory have been adapted in a variety of service delivery programs. These include family support services, home visiting, a credentialing process for early childhood workers, and education for parenthood. Head Start’s efforts in preschool education spotlighted the value of school readiness and helped spur today’s movement toward universal preschool.

Family-Like Environment Better for Troubled Children and Teens

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The Teaching-Family Model changes bad behavior through straight talk and loving relationships.
Findings

In the late 1960′s, psychologists Elaine Phillips, Elery Phillips, Dean Fixsen, and Montrose Wolf developed an empirically tested treatment program to help troubled children and juvenile offenders who had been assigned to residential group homes. These researchers combined the successful components of their studies into the Teaching-Family Model, which offers a structured treatment regimen in a family-like environment. The model is built around a married couple (teaching-parents) that lives with children in a group home and teaches them essential interpersonal and living skills. Not only have teaching parents’ behaviors and techniques been assessed for their effectiveness, but they have also been empirically tested for whether children like them. Teaching-parents also work with the children’s parents, teachers, employers, and peers to ensure support for the children’s positive changes. Although more research is needed, preliminary results suggest that, compared to children in other residential treatment programs, children in Teaching-Family Model centers have fewer contacts with police and courts, lower dropout rates, and improved school grades and attendance.

Couples are selected to be teaching-parents based on their ability to provide individualized and affirming care. Teaching-parents then undergo an intensive year-long training process. In order to maintain their certification, teaching-parents and Teaching-Family Model organizations are evaluated every year, and must meet the rigorous standards set by the Teaching-Family Association.
Significance
The Teaching-Family Model is one of the few evidence-based residential treatment programs for troubled children. In the past, many treatment programs viewed delinquency as an illness, and therefore placed children in institutions for medical treatment. The Teaching-Family Model, in contrast, views children’s behavior problems as stemming from their lack of essential interpersonal relationships and skills. Accordingly, the Teaching-Family Model provides children with these relationships and teaches them these skills, using empirically validated methods. With its novel view of problem behavior and its carefully tested and disseminated treatment program, the Teaching-Family Model has helped to transform the treatment of behavioral problems from impersonal interventions at large institutions to caring relationships in home and community settings. The Teaching-Family Model has also demonstrated how well-researched treatment programs can be implemented on a large scale. Most importantly, the Teaching-Family Model has given hope that young people with even the most difficult problems or behaviors can improve the quality of their lives and make contributions to society.
Practical Application
In recent years, the Teaching-Family Model has been expanded to include foster care facilities, home treatment settings, and even schools. The Teaching-Family Model has also been adapted to accommodate the needs of physically, emotionally, and sexually abused children; emotionally disturbed and autistic children and adults; medically fragile children; and adults with disabilities. Successful centers that have been active for over 30 years include the Bringing it All Back Home Study Center in North Carolina, the Houston Achievement Place in Texas, and the Girls and Boys Town in Nebraska. Other Teaching-Family Model organizations are in Alberta (Canada), Arkansas, Hawaii, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Believing You Can Get Smarter Makes You Smarter

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Thinking about intelligence as changeable and malleable, rather than stable and fixed, results in greater academic achievement, especially for people whose groups bear the burden of negative stereotypes about their intelligence.
Findings

Can people get smarter? Are some racial or social groups smarter than others? Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, many people believe that intelligence is fixed, and, moreover, that some racial and social groups are inherently smarter than others. Merely evoking these stereotypes about the intellectual inferiority of these groups (such as women and Blacks) is enough to harm the academic perfomance of members of these groups. Social psychologist Claude Steele and his collaborators (2002) have called this phenomenon “stereotype threat.”

Yet social psychologists Aronson, Fried, and Good (2001) have developed a possible antidote to stereotype threat. They taught African American and European American college students to think of intelligence as changeable, rather than fixed – a lesson that many psychological studies suggests is true. Students in a control group did not receive this message. Those students who learned about IQ’s malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group. Even more exciting was the finding that Black students benefited more from learning about the malleable nature of intelligence than did White students, showing that this intervention may successfully counteract stereotype threat.
Significance

This research showed a relatively easy way to narrow the Black-White academic achievement gap. Realizing that one’s intelligence may be improved may actually improve one’s intelligence, especially for those whose groups are targets of stereotypes alleging limited intelligence (e.g., Blacks, Latinos, and women in math domains.)
Practical Application

Blackwell, Dweck, and Trzesniewski (2002) recently replicated and applied this research with seventh-grade students in New York City. During the first eight weeks of the spring term, these students learned about the malleability of intelligence by reading and discussing a science-based article that described how intelligence develops. A control group of seventh-grade students did not learn about intelligence’s changeability, and instead learned about memory and mnemonic strategies. As compared to the control group, students who learned about intelligence’s malleability had higher academic motivation, better academic behavior, and better grades in mathematics. Indeed, students who were members of vulnerable groups (e.g., those who previously thought that intelligence cannot change, those who had low prior mathematics achievement, and female students) had higher mathematics grades following the intelligence-is-malleable intervention, while the grades of similar students in the control group declined. In fact, girls who received the intervention matched and even slightly exceeded the boys in math grades, whereas girls in the control group performed well below the boys.

These findings are especially important because the actual instruction time for the intervention totaled just three hours. Therefore, this is a very cost-effective method for improving students’ academic motivation and achievement.
Cited Research

Aronson, J., Fried, C. B., & Good, C. (2001). Reducing the effects of stereotype threat on African American college students by shaping theories of intelligence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1-13.

Steele, C. M., Spencer, S. J., & Aronson, J. (2002), Contending with group image: The psychology of stereotype and social identity threat. In Mark P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 34, pp. 379-440. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, Inc.
Additional Sources

Blackwell, L., Dweck, C., & Trzesniewski, K. (2002). Achievement across the adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Manuscript in preparation.

Dweck, C., & Leggett, E. (1988). A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality. Psychological Review, 95, 256-273.

Photography’s Place in the Art World

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I am an artist and a photographer. My work is posted on various art and photography websites for sale and has been for several years. Day after day, I log into these websites to see how many visitors I’ve had, to read new comments, and check on sales. My work attracts a lot of visitors which always delights me, and I adore it when my work has moved someone enough to comment, yet I’m invariably disheartened and frustrated that all this attention results in minimal sales.One of the websites where my work lives offers continual member-sponsored contests designed to help artists get their work seen. I enter them even though it seems this particular artist community holds a certain prejudice toward photographs, evidenced by entry rules that state “NO PHOTOS”, “paintings only”, “all mediums accepted and photographs”, and “all media including photography”. (The last two suggesting photographs are not art or something of an afterthought.)Another of these websites offers artists an opportunity to be a featured artist. I submitted my application over a year ago which to date hasn’t been acknowledged, and it saddens me to say that every artist that is featured is a painter, not a photographer.Truth is, I’m not only frustrated but angry as well, and I’ve been silent on this for far too long! There needs to be a shift in perception on what is constituted as art and where photography stands in the art world.The generally perceived wisdom, it seems, is that photography is easy and painting is hard or more skillful. Consequently, the thinking is that culturally painting is generally more valued than photography, even though there are a lot of bad paintings with little or no value. The same can be said about some photography, but the notion that photography is easy and not as skillful as painting is simply wrong thinking. To think that this is so is to invalidate world-renowned photographers like Ansel Adams, Annie Leibovitz, and Dorthea Lange whose works hang in places like the Guggenheim, and who in general, made more money as photographic artists than painters and didn’t have to die to become wealthy or noticed. The only true difference between painting and photography is that one is in a different medium than the other.I use digital photography to capture something amazing that I see and for raw material for my art. To capture what I see is often a lengthy process because of technical limitations. The limitations of digital cameras are due to the state of the technology, which is in its infancy, and not to the skill of the photographer. These technological challenges are particularly evident in outdoor shots taken in bright sunlight. Moreover, certain corrections for perspective, lighting, color, tonal range, and composition might have to be made, which I make on my computer in Adobe Photoshop. On average, I think I spend 40 hours (5 eight-hour days) or more per picture. Making corrections like these requires learned skills and talents, which in essence is no different than skills and talents needed to create a painting masterpiece.To me, art is the expression of ones self and how it is portrayed by the artist regardless of medium. On one hand, I’m happy to share my love of the visual world through simple photographs (notwithstanding subjective alterations or enhancements). On the other, some of my art I create to look like paintings not only because I like the overall effect, but because I’m concerned about the term “photo” and its’ often negative or cheap connotations. I hate that I sold out to that idea, but I felt I had to in order to be competitive (not that it has helped sales). Now that I have, I find, in attempting to submit my photo paintings to various contests, rules such as, “must not be digitally altered in any way” and “no photographs or digitally altered art”.This is preposterous! Throughout history new materials and techniques have evolved at different times and in different parts of the world. Artists have progressively had an increasing range of options to choose from. Up until the last 140 years there was only paint to be used. Much of what was attempted in the past was to reproduce reality as much as possible. There is, in fact, a debate whether Da Vinci and Michelangelo used concave mirrors to create their paintings, wherein the real life image wishing to be painted stands outside, while its image projects onto the canvas. Devices like the camera obscura (from the sixteenth century onwards) and the camera lucida (early to mid nineteenth century) were employed by the likes of Caneletto and Vermeer to help them achieve that faithful reproduction objective. The old master’s for the most part were just taking snapshots of reality using the tools available to them at the time. Had Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Caneletto, or Vermeer had access to digital photography, I’m sure they would have used it, as all were creative visionaries.But it’s not the tool that makes the art. In the creative process, it’s the responsibility of the artist to do the best they can in terms of materials, knowledge, and techniques. This means using any means that will help them produce better work, including computer software.I understand that it is frustrating to all you painters that you had to learn and practice to get it right and then along comes artists that can do what you do (perhaps even better) with a click of a button. But keep in mind that photography, good photography, is an art form that is learned and practiced to get right too, and to correct, enhance, or alter that photography requires even more learning and practice.According to Weston Naef, senior curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, photography underlies almost all the visual culture of the 20th century. He states that at his museum the exhibit recognizes once and for all that photography is no longer a stepchild of the art world. So please painters, get off your high horses and accept that photography is an important part of society. Painting is no better than photography and beauty is, after all, in the eyes of the beholder. Granted, not all photography is art, but then not all paintings are either.

VoIP Technology – Changing The Dynamics Of Telecommunications Industry

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VoIP technology has changed the way telecommunications industry functioned. Voice signals are converted into digital IP packets which are sent over the Internet to the destination. Call Agent, Media Gateway and Billing System are integral part of the VoIP system.The telecommunications industry has moved miles in the last decade. Introduction of VoIP technology was a significant development in the industry which altered industry dynamics a lot. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a method of converting voice signals into digital IP packets and sending it via the Internet to the destination. The technology has become popular as it is a cost effective method of communication.Softswitch is in the center of VoIP mechanism. A centrally located device within a telephone network, it is supported by a specialized software. The device links calls from one telephone line to the other. Before the device came into being, physical switches were used for call routing. The softswitch separates the hardware and software of a circuit switched network. The device handles IP-to-IP phone calls. A softswitch is used to control connections at the junction point between circuit and packet networks. A single device containing the switching fabric as well as the switching logic can be used for the purpose.Modern technology has decomposed the device into a Call Agent and a Media Gateway. Functions like billing, call routing, signaling, call services are enabled by the call agent. Media Gateway links various types of digital media streams together to create an end-to-end path for the data. The system has interfaces to link to PSTN networks as well as ATM and IP networks.The Billing System of VoIP services is integrated within the service. From service creation and classification to internal provisioning, an integrated VoIP system does the needful. Current VoIP billing systems are designed for Class 4 or Class 5 services, including hosted PBXs. Custom turnkey solutions are available which integrate into the existing telephony infrastructure. A robust billing system has adequate authentication and rating capabilities, providing service providers with efficient fraud management capabilities. It is designed to provide flexible solutions to the complexities of the VoIP switching world.The system provides detailed analysis, reporting and bill generation capabilities. It can flawlessly handle millions of CDR’s, support complex business requirements and payment mechanism. It must also seamlessly integrate with most accounting applications. It keeps track of customers, rating, billing, prices, services, provisioning, customer care and technical support. Equipped with advanced automated capability, the billing software provides reliable data in an array of customizable forms.Essential features of an efficient VoIP billing software are Cross Browser Compatibility & Web 2.0 Application, Standard and Advanced VoIP Billing Functionality, Call Legs Selection, Real-time Monitoring and Alerts, Multiple Authentication Methods, Carrier Grade Reliability, Modular Architecture, Elaborate Reporting, Virtual Server Partitioning, High Call Capacity and Interoperability with a range of switching platforms. So, before you finalize your software, just make sure that it is compatible.The system must satisfy the basic requirements of VoIP service providers who want their VoIP billing system to be compatible enough when it comes to scalability, reliability and safety. The customers must benefit from the compatibility and flexibility of the VoIP system as much the providers. A robust VoIP system ensures that requirements are met at both the ends.