Educational Technology in Support of Elementary Students With Reading or Language-Based Disabilities: A Cluster Randomized Control Trial.

Experts laud the potential of educational technology (edtech) to promote reading among students with disabilities, but supporting evidence is lacking. This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Lexia® Core5® Reading edtech program (Core5) on the Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP) Growth Reading™ and easyCBM oral reading fluency performance of students with reading or language-based disabilities in Grades K to 5. Core5 systematically addresses multiple reading domains and previously was effective in general education. We hypothesized treatment students using Core5 would outperform controls on the reading assessments. This was a cluster randomized effectiveness evaluation, with condition assignment by school (three treatment and two business-as-usual control schools). Participating students in Grades K to 5 (N = 115; nTreatment = 65) were flagged by their Chicago-area district as needing reading intervention and had Individualized Education Program (IEP) designations of specific learning disability, speech or language impairment, or developmental delay. Treatment students used Core5 to supplement Tier 1 instruction for an average of 58.76 minutes weekly for 24.58 weeks. Regressions revealed treatment students outperformed controls on MAP (B = 3.85, CI = 0.57-7.13, p = .022, d = .24), but there were no differences for oral reading fluency. MAP findings confirm edtech can effectively supplement reading instruction for this population.

Getting a Read on Ready To Learn Media: A Meta-analytic Review of Effects on Literacy.

Most U.S. preschoolers have consumed media created with funding from the U.S. Department of Education's Ready To Learn (RTL) initiative, which was established to promote school readiness among children ages 2-8. Synthesizing data from 45 evaluations (N = 24,624 unique child participants), this meta-analysis examined the effects of RTL media exposure on young children's literacy skills. Results indicate positive effects of RTL media exposure on children's literacy outcomes, especially vocabulary and phonological concepts. These effects are equivalent to about one-and-a-half months of literacy learning above and beyond typical growth. Findings are robust across a variety of research designs and for exposure to both television and new media. These results are discussed in terms of accountability evidence for RTL and larger debates in scholarly understanding of educational media effects.

"When You're a Baby You Don't Have Puberty": Understanding of Puberty and Human Reproduction in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence.

Basic knowledge of human reproduction can help youth prepare for puberty and make later classes focused on advanced reproductive health topics manageable. With the intention of potentially informing the creation of learning materials, we conducted a needs assessment among children ages 7 to 12 in our suburban Chicago community to ascertain their current understanding of, and beliefs and misconceptions about, human reproduction, and to determine their needs for additional reproductive health education. We held qualitative focus group interviews with local children. Participants primarily reported learning about these topics from their parents prior to receiving school-based education in fifth grade. Their level of understanding was relatively low. They had little knowledge of internal sexual organs, expressed a range of beliefs about conception ranging from inaccurate to accurate but incomplete, and voiced concerns about transitioning into adolescence. This suggests a need for additional resources that provide comprehensible descriptions of reproductive health processes and mitigate puberty-related concerns.

Facilitating Development Research: Suggestions for Recruiting and Re-Recruiting Children and Families.

Recruiting children and families for research studies can be challenging, and re-recruiting former participants for longitudinal research can be even more difficult, especially when a study was not prospectively designed to encompass continuous data collection. In this article, we explain how researchers can set up initial studies to potentially facilitate later waves of data collection; locate former study participants using newer, often digital, tools; schedule families using recruitment phone/email/mail scripts that highlight the many benefits to continued study participation; and confirm appointments with other digital tools. We draw from prior methodological and longitudinal pieces to provide suggestions to others wishing to re-recruit families for longitudinal studies. In addition, we draw upon our own experience conducting a non-prospective longitudinal study 6 years after an educational intervention, in which we successfully re-located 122 (90%) and interviewed 101 of 136 (83% of the located sample and 74% of the full original sample) parents and their early adolescent children. Although the majority of participants were recruited via original contact information (especially phone numbers), using a range of strategies to recruit (e.g., search engines focused on contact information, social media) and motivate participation (e.g., multifaceted phone/email/mail scheduling scripts, flexibility in location and means of participation) yielded a more desirable sample size at relatively low costs.

Food Marketing to Children Online: A Content Analysis of Food Company Websites.

Since 2006, many U.S. food and beverage companies have pledged to market healthier foods to children to help combat the childhood obesity epidemic. Despite this, companies' expenditures on online advertising have increased of late. To explore this seemingly contradictory situation, the authors conducted a content analysis of approximately 100 food and beverage brand websites, examining a multitude of online marketing practices across a variety of different products, as well as the relationship between marketing techniques and the nutritional profile of promoted foods. This is the first study to examine if nutrition varied by marketing technique. Few brands maintained child-oriented websites, but the brands that did have child-oriented websites included a large number of games promoting particularly obesogenic food products. Somewhat surprisingly, games with many brand identifiers were paired with slightly less obesogenic foods. These findings present a mixed picture of the threat posed by online child-oriented food marketing.