The Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education final report challenged institutions to reform their biology courses to focus on process skills and student active learning, among other recommendations. A large southeastern university implemented curricular changes to its majors' introductory biology sequence in alignment with these recommendations. Discussion sections focused on develo...

Literacy is an increasingly important factor as schools focus on improving student achievement. Literacy skills in reading and writing are critical components needed for both access to the general curriculum and for successful academic achievement. A key component of reading and writing is word identification, a skill deficit for many adolescent students with learning disabilities. This article...

PURPOSE The potential benefit that a low-cost scripted language and literacy supplemental curriculum titled Read It Again! (RIA; L. M. Justice, A. S. McGinty, A. R. Beckman, & C. R. Kilday, 2006) may have on preschool-age children's skills was explored. RIA was developed to meet the needs of preschool educators who may not have access to current commercially available high-cost language and lit...

PURPOSE This study investigated the relationship between uncorrected astigmatism and early academic readiness in at-risk preschool-aged children. METHODS A vision screening and academic records review were performed on 122 three- to five-year-old children enrolled in the Philadelphia Head Start program. Vision screening results were related to two measures of early academic readiness, the tea...

Introduction Academic libraries are behind the curve in leveraging the advantages of peer learning dynamics for basic information literacy instruction.1 With a handful of documented exceptions, librarians have chosen to cling jealously to the lectern instead of seizing optimal pedagogical opportunities of letting peers teach peers. This, in spite of decades of research on the cognitive and affe...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a new knowledge scale for patients with type 2 diabetes and poor literacy: the Spoken Knowledge in Low Literacy patients with Diabetes (SKILLD). METHODS The authors evaluated the 10-item SKILLD among 217 patients with type 2 diabetes and poor glycemic control at an academic general medicine clinic. Internal reliability was measured...

Young children with learning disabilities typically encounter difficulty with academic tasks requiring intentional effort and effective use of metacognitive skills--qualities that competent readers and writers possess. In response to these difficulties, special educators often modify literacy instruction, isolating the "basic skills" of literacy (such as decoding and penmanship) from meaningful...

This study investigated predictive relations between preschoolers' (N=310) behavioral regulation and emergent literacy, vocabulary, and math skills. Behavioral regulation was assessed using a direct measure called the Head-to-Toes Task, which taps inhibitory control, attention, and working memory, and requires children to perform the opposite of what is instructed verbally. Hierarchical linear ...

After articulating 12 concepts for the reasoning component of citizen-level science literacy and restating these as assessable student learning outcomes (SLOs), we developed a valid and reliable assessment instrument for addressing the outcomes with a brief 25-item science literacy concept inventory (SLCI). In this paper, we report the results that we obtained from assessing the citizen-level s...