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Literature reviews generally analyse and synthesis the evidence (or lack thereof) in a particular topic area and they are an increasingly popular form of scholarly activity. The scoping review is a popular literature review approach that has been adopted across the social and health sciences over the last fifteen years. With this upsurge in use, differences of opinion about how to analyse and report scoping reviews has also grown. Drawing on work carrying out a scoping review on oral health and child maltreatment, we put forward a structured approach to analysis and reporting of such reviews: the PAGER (Patterns, Advances, Gaps, Evidence for practice and Research recommendations) framework. In this article, we reflect on the strengths and limitations of the framework, drawing on examples, laying out the methodological processes, and making suggestions as to how it might improve reporting. The article makes a contribution to efforts that seek to improve the reporting and utility of scoping reviews in health and social research.

This paper is a systematic review of the UK Widening Participation (WP), Higher Education (HE) student demographic. It argues that the presence of traumatic emotional experiences in WP student populations connected to psychosocial and academic trust alienation theory contributes to engagement barriers in HE. Using PRISMA guidelines, 43 publications were screened based on inclusion/exclusion criteria. This paper identifies WP students' experiences of trauma and how this affects their HE educational engagement. Secondly, it encourages the HE community to consider commitment to the WP demographic. Thirdly it identifies support strategies for WP student success and improvements for HE Institutions (HEI's) commitment to meeting WP agendas. Additionally, educational and psychological links that have not previously been examined are presented acknowledging the complexities of the WP student demographics. Furthermore, reinforcement for HEI's commitment to social mobility from both a political and institutional standpoint aligning to the WP student demographic barriers to engagement is articulated.

Research into higher education has shown that for those who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans* and/or Queer (LGBTQ), universities are places where both direct and indirect discrimination is experienced. This paper reports the findings from a systematic search and review on gender and sexual diversity in professional practice placements. This was part of a broader project exploring the way that students were supported and educated to provide appropriate support for LGBTQ people using their services and whether students who identified as LGBTQ experienced specific issues regarding the (non)disclosure of their gender or sexual diversity in placement settings. Three primary themes were identified. Environment: which relates to the way that homophobic and transphobic discrimination is experienced in professional practice. Influence: the importance of faculty on the environment as both a positive and negative force. Interventions: how students support LGBTQ people who use their services and how educators intervene with students who identify as LGBTQ. Our review showed how students in all included disciplines report feeling under-prepared for the realities of working with LGBTQ people in practice. However there are examples of positive practices which can support LGBTQ students through navigating disclosure of their own identities, as well as enabling all students to act as advocates and allies for the LGBTQ service users and peers/colleagues that they will inevitably work with and alongside, throughout their careers.

Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are affected by chronic middle ear infection or otitis media from infancy that has a negative impact on development of listening and communication skills. Deficits in these skills are often not detected until school-age when the opportunity for early intervention is lost. Primary health and early childhood workers need screening tools to assist them with detecting the problem early, but there is a scarcity of tools. This study reports the development and validation of a screening tool for detecting communication problems in young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. The tool, called the Hearing and Talking Scale (HATS), relies on a systematic use of parent observations of communication behaviours of their children in everyday situations. Developed by using a co-design approach, the HATS is culturally and linguistically appropriate for use with parents/carers of young children by front-line workers not trained in speech-language pathology. We validated the HATS by comparing the HATS score of 68 children (46 Indigenous and 22 non-Indigenous children) with their performance in standardised assessments. The accuracy of the HATS was 80% and 81% when compared to the ASQ-TRAK and the Expressive Vocabulary Test respectively. The HATS takes 5 minutes to administer, and is easy to score and interpret. It can be used as part of a standard ear and hearing health check for young children to support early detection so that those with problems can be referred for specialist diagnosis and treatment at a young age.

This article surfaces issues about the often-used but widely under-reported practice of working with advisory fora. We critically reflect on our experiences working with an advisory network when co-designing a research study about a 'sensitive' subject. We discuss the following: (1) How the network evolved as a matter of ethical and pragmatic choices; (2) Potential issues when discussing sensitive issues 'outside' of the participatory or participant context; and (3) Practical and epistemic issues involved in (not) 'taking' advice. We suggest that although sensitive research is more conventionally aligned with more 'radical' forms of participatory practice, advisory networks can present a useful and sometimes more appropriate form of inclusion and engagement for some advisors and for some types of research study. The article should, therefore, be of interest to a wide range of academic and practice-based health and social care staff and, in particular, those who plan to use advisory fora in their work.

Children often substitute one object for another during play. They may substitute a stick for a sword or a box for a car, often favouring substitutes that are shaped like the needed object. The current study looked at the roles of shape and specificity, the degree to which a possible substitute resembles something else, in children's object substitutions. We asked whether children would favour generic, similarly shaped substitutes (those with low specificity) over specific ones and whether generic objects would elicit a great variety of potential substitutes than their specific counterparts. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N = 66) saw objects that varied by shape (round versus rectangular) and by specificity (generic versus specific) and were asked to help a story character find a series of objects. Children were also given an object and asked to generate a list of possible things for which the object could be substituted. Overall, children, especially 5-year-olds, strongly favoured the generic, same-shaped substitutes over other objects and regularly used them for multiple substitutions. Children did not generate a longer list of potential substitutes when given a generic object. Findings suggest that children may pass over specific objects in favour generic ones when making object substitutions during play.

The provision of instrumental lessons in certain areas of England can be hampered by the geographical position of some schools that are rural in nature, with teachers needing to travel long distances between schools. Internet-based technologies have been successfully used elsewhere to deliver instrumental lessons. A collaboration between the authors, North Yorkshire Music Action Zone and YouCanPlay allowed the delivery of instrumental lessons using Skype in combination with a Roland VR-3EX, an AV Mixer which offers 3 camera angles and good quality sound. Our aim was to repurpose existing technology to provide instrumental lessons in remote rural communities. The study was conducted in two-phases: a pilot study in North Yorkshire; and a further roll-out of the lessons in four additional areas (Cornwall; Cumbria; Durham/Darlington; and East Riding of Yorkshire). We wished to investigate the technical challenges and pedagogical aspects of the delivery, and also compare digitally-delivered and face-to-face instrumental lessons to explore the differences in behaviour. Data collected included pre- and post-project interviews with teachers, recordings of the teachers' first and last lessons, and post-project questionnaires from pupils and their parents. Results suggested that there were technical challenges relating to sound, video and connection quality, and the physical environment of the lessons, some of which were alleviated by the Roland VR-3EX. Some concerns expressed by teachers in the initial interviews failed to materialise; others were overcome to some extent. Pupils concentrated well, were motivated to practice, and made good progress. Further analysis of the video data has allowed the comparison of face-to-face and digitally-delivered lessons. All teachers found the digital teaching more challenging than their usual face-to-face teaching; however, all reported that they would undertake similar teaching again. This paper focuses upon the exploring the behaviour of participants observed in the lessons. Digital delivery has the potential to provide greater access to instrumental lessons for children in rural communities.

Literature reviews are an important and popular part of synthesising evidence across a range of disciplines. There are numerous approaches, each with their distinctive features and purposes. The aim of this article is to advance the science of literature reviewing by describing a new form of review: The 'Focused Mapping Review and Synthesis' (FMRS). We critique the approach and highlight its similarities and differences in relation to existing review methodologies. There are four key features of FMRS. It: 1) focuses on a defined field of knowledge rather than a body of evidence; 2) creates a descriptive map or topography of key features of research within the field rather than a synthesis of findings; 3) comments on the overall approach to knowledge production rather than the state of the evidence; 4) examines this within a broader epistemological context. The FMRS can be used to answer questions that might not be appropriate for other review types and potentially offers a useful addition to the methodological toolkit of social researchers from multiple disciplines.

Current reports of literacy rates in Australia indicate an ongoing gap in literacy skills between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian adults, at a time when the literacy demands of work and life are increasing. There are many perspectives on what are the literacy needs of Indigenous adults, from the perspectives of community members themselves to the relatively under-researched perspective of literacy practitioners. This paper provides the insights, experiences and recommendations from adult literacy practitioners who work with adult Indigenous learners in communities across Australia. Focus group interviews, using an online synchronous platform, were used to elicit views about the literacy needs of Indigenous adults in communities and the successes in and barriers to meeting those needs. The practitioners also shared their views on the use of technology in literacy learning. Together, these views can inform future directions in curriculum design and teaching approaches for community-based Indigenous adult literacy education.

Pluralism and creativity are inherent and important parts of the qualitative endeavour. The multiplicity of approaches and methods can, however, be confusing. We undertook a focused mapping review and synthesis to obtain a snap-shot profile of the state of qualitative research in health and social science literature. We retrieved 102 qualitative articles published between January and March 2015 from six leading health and social science journals. Articles were scrutinised for alignment between researchers' reported orientation (methodological or philosophical positioning) and the techniques used (methods). In the sampled articles level of alignment was generally high, with considerable mastery of qualitative approaches evident. However, the complexity of the qualitative landscape highlighted in our review, led us to develop a diagrammatic representation: The Qualitative Research Level of Alignment Wheel™. This educational resource/teaching aid is designed to assist qualitative researchers (particularly those more novice) and research students to locate the orientation and techniques of their studies. As an important contribution to the international field of qualitative inquiry, it will assist in understanding and accounting for points at which techniques are melded and orientations blended. In turn this will lead to the individual and collective qualitative endeavour as being a coherent one.

This paper explores the process of policy formulation and implementation in relation to children commonly described as having "special educational needs" and disability (SEND), in Cyprus and in England. Drawing on qualitative research evidence from key primary documentary sources including legislation, statutory and non-statutory guidance and reports, it provides a comparative analysis of the content and the spirit of policy in both countries over the cycle of a century. The findings indicate that Cypriot policymakers have engaged in a process of "policy snatching" from England, following four phases: charitable segregation and categorisation; enlightened legitimisation and categorisation; integration, "special educational needs" and categorisation; inclusion, SEND and categorisation. Using the analogy of Aesop's well-known fable "The Hare and the Tortoise", the paper concludes that England, symbolically characterised as the hare, appears, overtly at least, to have moved ahead; while Cyprus, characterised as the tortoise, has been following slowly behind. However, progress has been slow in both countries, and the hare may well have fallen asleep. It is argued that whilst some common ground exists between the two countries, there is an inherent danger in transplanting selected elements of policy texts from one socio-cultural historical context to another.

Participatory approaches have become "de rigueur" in social research involving children. A growing trend is research "by" children where researchers engage (or employ) children as co-researchers or primary researchers. In this paper, we critique the ethical, methodological and practical issues associated with this participatory approach. The discussion is framed around six challenges: (1) Children lack research competence; (2) A comprehensive training programme is required; (3) Insider/outsider perspectives are difficult to balance; (4) Remuneration is complex; (5) Power differentials need to be overcome; and (6) Children need to be protected. For each challenge we propose a counter-challenge. Additionally, we offer pragmatic solutions to the issues raised, so that the paper holds practical utility to social researchers who utilise this type of participatory approach. Overall we argue that despite the approach's inherent challenges, children as researchers are a powerful conduit for other children's voices.

Segmental variation in maternal speech to children changes over time. This study investigated variation in non-citation speech processes in a longitudinal, 26-hour corpus of maternal northern Australian English. Recordings were naturalistic parent-child interactions when children (N = 4) were 1;6, 2;0, and 2;6. The mothers' speech was phonetically transcribed and analyzed. Based on previous sociophonetic research showing proportional changes in speech variants in maternal speech as children get older, it was predicted that deletion of word-initial /h/ and word-final /v/, processes common in non-citation speech, would increase over time. Instead results showed a non-linear change in deletion within a stable set of lexical items. Deletion proportionately increased between 1;6 and 2;0 and decreased between 2;0 and 2;6. Further analysis indicated increased deletion was not accounted for by changes in speech rate, which only marginally increased over time. Findings suggest mothers fine-tune differentially over time as children's receptive and productive language knowledge develops.

Acquisition of language concepts by pre-service teachers (PSTs) is likely influenced by university coursework and field experiences, but little research has examined how. Knowledge of phonics and phonological awareness and confidence to teach reading were surveyed among primary PSTs at one New South Wales university, most in second year following completion of language concepts course (N = 150), others (N = 74) in third year following the first major field experience, when literacy-related experiences on field experience were also surveyed. Overall, PSTs' scores for knowledge of phonological constructs were similar to or higher than in previous research, and PSTs performed better on ability-based than on knowledge-based items. Phonological construct scores were positively related to confidence to teach sound--letter relationships. Phonological construct scores were unrelated to experience teaching the first two grades, or having in their supervising teacher a positive model for teaching code-related skills, but were positively related to exposure to a commercial phonics package, and negatively related to exposure to Reading Recovery.

Objective: Insufficient and poor quality sleep is prevalent in children, and is a significant public health concern due to the negative consequences for health. Certain sleep-related behaviours are associated with improved sleep, and sleep behaviours are amenable to efforts targeted towards behaviour change. Parental educational interventions have been successful at improving parents' knowledge and children's health outcomes in some areas of health, but no population-based educational interventions have been designed to improve parents' knowledge of healthy children's sleep. This study aimed to design and test an educational tool to increase caregivers' knowledge of healthy children's sleep in a primary care setting. Setting: A hospital-based pediatric primary care clinic where children attend for well-child and sick visits. Method: Parents of 95 children aged three months to 12 years completed two surveys, one prior to and one after receiving the intervention. The surveys assessed children's sleep habits (pre-intervention) and parental sleep beliefs and sleep knowledge (pre- and post-intervention). The intervention was a short, informational brochure. Results: Following the intervention there was a significant increase in parents' knowledge regarding children's healthy sleep, and in the number of parents who planned to make positive behaviour changes regarding their child's sleep practices. Conclusion: Simple written educational interventions may be effective tools with which to increase parents' knowledge and promote healthy sleep behaviours in children.

The DAPPLE (Dynamic Assessment of Preschoolers' Proficiency in Learning English) is currently being developed in response to a clinical need. Children exposed to English as an additional language may be referred to speech and language therapy because their proficiency in English is not the same as their monolingual peers. Some, but not all, of these children are likely to have a core language learning difficulty. Clinicians need to be able to distinguish disorder from difference due to a child's language learning context. The assessment used a test-teach-test format to examine children's ability to learn vocabulary, sentence structure and phonology. The assessment, which takes less than 60 minutes to administer, was given to 26 children who were bilingual: 12 currently on a speech and language therapy caseload and 14 children matched for age and socio-economic status who had never been referred to speech and language therapy. The DAPPLE data clearly discriminated the two groups. The caseload group required a greater amount of prompting to identify targeted words in the receptive vocabulary assessment and performed less well in the post-teaching expressive component. For sentence structure, the caseload group required more cues to acquire the targeted clause elements in the teaching phase. The caseload group made more phoneme errors at the initial and final assessments than the controls, and the type of errors made differed. Teaching resulted in greater positive change in percent phonemes correct for the caseload participants. Qualitative analyses of individual children's performance on the DAPPLE suggested that it has the potential to discriminate core language deficits from difference due to a bilingual language learning context. Future directions for development of the test are considered. (Contains 7 tables.)

Distributional learning is a proposal for how infants might learn early speech sound categories from acoustic input before they know many words. When categories in the input differ greatly in relative frequency and overlap in acoustic space, research in bilingual development suggests that this affects the course of development. In the present study we describe the nature and extent of vowel variation in nearly 900 vowel tokens in maternal speech in Gurindji Kriol, a mixed language of northern Australia, which, like bilingual input, has differences in the relative frequency of adjacent, overlapping vowel categories. In Analysis 1, we provide the first systematic account of vowel variation and phone frequency in maternal speech in Gurindji Kriol. In Analysis 2, cluster analysis was applied to the vowel formant and duration data, to see what categories might emerge from acoustic data alone. The results suggest that, were infants to base their initial vowel categories solely on the clusters emerging in acoustic space, they might likely set up relatively few vowel categories. We discuss implications for how infants may learn Gurindji Kriol and for distributional learning. (Contains 1 note, 1 table and 4 figures.)

This article explores four adolescent novels published between 1999 and 2010 specifically for the intersections of Christian faith and lesbian and gay sexual identities. Using cultural, queer, and ideological theories, the piece makes distinctions between progressive and traditional depictions of both Christianity and LGBTQ teen protagonists in Nancy Garden's "The Year They Burned the Books" ("1999"), Laura Torres's "November Ever After" ("1999"), Alex Sanchez's "The God Box" ("2007"), and Mark Hardy's "Nothing Pink" ("2008").

Television captioning has great potential to provide deaf children with access to the audio track of programmes. However, use of captions may be limited by the lower English literacy skills of the deaf population compared to the general population. Here, we investigate how the rate of caption delivery affects the comprehension of educational programmes by better- and poorer-reading deaf school children. Participants watched three short documentaries, with captions presented at 90, 120, or 180 words per minute (wpm). Across both reading levels, comprehension was uniformly higher at 90 and 120 wpm than at 180 wpm. Independent of caption rate, better readers scored higher overall than poorer readers. These results suggest that the rate of captions in children's television programmes can safely use 120 wpm as a slowest speed. Future research should seek to pinpoint the optimal rate, which appears to lie between 120 and 180 wpm. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure, and 1 footnote.)

Recent research into signed languages indicates that signs may share some properties with gesture, especially in the use of space in classifier constructions. A prediction of this proposal is that there will be similarities in the representation of motion events by sign-naive gesturers and by native signers of unrelated signed languages. This prediction is tested for deaf native signers of Australian Sign Language (Auslan), deaf signers of Taiwan Sign Language (TSL), and hearing nonsigners using the Verbs of Motion Production task from the Test Battery for American Sign Language (ASL) Morphology and Syntax. Results indicate that differences between the responses of nonsigners, Auslan signers, and TSL signers and the expected ASL responses are greatest with handshape units; movement and location units appear to be very similar. Although not definitive, these data are consistent with the claim that classifier constructions are blends of linguistic and gestural elements. (Contains 9 notes.)