Search

Effective teaching requires skill in implementing challenging and inviting curricular activities. It also involves evaluating children's learning in order to extend their development through the school year. Being able to implement and evaluate at the same time is at the heart of good teaching. Written for PreK-3 educators, this book blends curriculum planning, implementation, and assessment into one process, providing a practical, performance-based approach to early childhood assessment. Encouraging teachers to assess both what (content) and how (process) children learn, the authors have developed 15 activities across five curricular areas--language arts and literacy, visual arts, mathematics, science, and performing arts--with guidelines for implementing, interpreting, and "bridging" observations of children to classroom teaching practices. The book provides ways to: (1) Identify children's current status in content area learning and development; (2) Determine which children are ready to learn in upcoming weeks and months and (3) Make informed instructional adaptations to meet developmental needs. With a built-in facilitator guide for designing and leading preservice and inservice professional development, this resource offers an instructional framework for those committed to aligning sound early childhood curriculum with national learning standards. Following a foreword (Samuel J. Meisels), preface, acknowledgments and authors' information. the book is divided into two sections. Section 1, A Guide for Teachers, includes: (1) Introduction to the Process of Bridging; (2) Assessing the Content of Children's Learning; (3) Assessing the Process of Children's Learning; (4) Activity as the Unit of Analysis in Bridging Assessment; (5) Task Parameters in Bridging Assessment and (6) Teacher Roles in Bridging Assessment. Section 2, Implementation of Assessment Activities, continues with Chapter 7, Implementing Bridging and five activity sections: (1) Language Arts and Literacy; (2) Visual Arts; (3) Mathematics; (4) Sciences and (5) Performing Arts. The book concludes with References and Recommended Readings and Facilitator's Guide to Bridging and Teacher Development. An index and a list of tables and figures is included.

Radiofrequency radiation (RFR) is a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with frequencies of 3 kHz-300 GHz. RFR is produced by many man-made sources, including mobile phones and base stations, television and radio broadcasting facilities, radar, medical equipment, microwave ovens, radiofrequency heaters as well as a diverse variety of other electronic devices within our living and working environments. Owing to ongoing public concern and the increasing prevalence of RFR-emitting devices, a great deal of research has been conducted over the past 50 years to evaluate the biological and/or health effects of thermalizing and non-thermalizing RFR exposures. In the absence of decisive epidemiological evidence to support or refute an association between RFR exposure and cancer risk, laboratory studies of possible mechanisms of carcinogenesis by RFR are important. The scientific literature on this subject is full of conflicting results and the question of whether RFR exposure can contribute to cancer risk remains unresolved. This chapter contains a literature review of the evidence for RFR-induced cytogenetic effects, but also a critique of the literature, highlighting deficiencies in the design of some studies that should be taken into account when assessing the health risk of RFR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

JHU/APL continued to explore the use of knowledge-light methods for multilingual retrieval during the CLEF 2004 evaluation. We relied on the language-neutral techniques of character n-gram tokenization, pre-translation query expansion, statistical translation using aligned parallel corpora, fusion from disparate retrievals, and reliance on language similarity when resources are scarce. We participated in the monolingual and bilingual evaluations. Our results support the claims that n-gram based retrieval is highly effective; that fusion of multiple retrievals is helpful in bilingual retrieval; and, that reliance on language similarity in lieu of translation can outperform a high performing system using abundant translation resources and a less similar query language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]