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Reading, however fundamental the task may seem to everyday life, is a complex process that takes years to master. Yet, learning to read in the early stages is not an overwhelming problem for most children, especially when their classroom learning is coupled with a nurturing home environment in which reading is cherished, and pencil and paper are always available and fun to use. In fact, studies have shown that children score higher in reading if their parents support and encourage them at home. Unfortunately, though many parents want to involve themselves actively in their children's education, very few know just what to do. Now Dr. Harvey S. Wiener, author of the classic Any Child Can Write, provides an indispensable guide for parents who want to help their children enter the magic realm of words. In Any Child Can Read Better, Second Edition, Dr. Wiener offers practical advice on how to help children make their way through the maze of assignments and exercises related to classroom reading. In this essential book, parents learn how to be "reading helpers" without replacing or superseding the teacher--by supporting a child's reading habits and sharing the pleasures of fiction, poetry, and prose. Home learning parents also will find a wealth of information here. Through comfortable conversation and enjoyable exercises that tap children's native abilities, parents can help their child practice the critical thinking and reading skills that guarantee success in the classroom and beyond. For example, Dr. Wiener explains how exercises such as prereading warm-ups like creating word maps (a visual scheme that represents words and ideas as shapes and connects them) will allow youngsters to create a visual format and context before they begin reading. He shows how pictures from a birthday party can be used to create patterns of meaning by arranging them chronologically to allow the party's "story" to emerge, or how they might by arranged by order of importance--a picture of Beth standing at the door waiting for her friends to arrive could be displayed first, Beth blowing out the birthday cake placed toward the middle of the arrangement, and the pictures of Beth opening her gifts, especially the skates she's been begging for all year, would surely go toward the end of the sequence. Dr. Wiener shows how these activities, and many others, such as writing games, categorizing toys or clothes or favorite foods, and reading journals, will help children draw meaning out of written material. This second edition includes a new chapter describing the benefits of encouraging children to keep a journal of their personal reactions to books, the value of writing in the books they own (underlining, writing in the margins, and making a personal index) and a variety of reading activities to help children interact with writers and their books. Dr. Wiener has also expanded and updated his fascinating discussion of recommended books for children of all ages, complete with plot summaries. Written in simple, accessible prose, Any Child Can Read Better offers sensible advice for busy parents concerned with their children's education.

The call for science curriculum reform has been made over and over again for much of the twentieth century. Arguments have been made that the content of the curriculum is not appropriate for meeting the individual and social needs of people living in the modern world; that the curriculum has become overstuffed with topics and does not serve students especially well; and above all, that the curriculum does not generate the student learning it is expected to produce. The latest volume in a continuing series of publications from the AAAS designed to reform science education, Designs for Science Literacy presupposes that curriculum reform must be considerably more extensive and fundamental than the tinkering with individual courses and subjects that has been going on for decades. Designs deals with the critical issues involved in assembling sound instructional materials into a new, coherent K-12 whole. The book pays special attention to the need to link science-oriented studies to the arts and humanities, and also proposes how to align the curriculum with an established set of learning goals while preserving the American tradition of local responsibility for the curriculum itself. If fundamental curriculum reform is ever to occur, a new process for creating alternatives will have to be developed. Designs for Science Literacy provides the groundwork for such a process.

How do children acquire the vast array of concepts, strategies, and skills that distinguish the thinking of infants and toddlers from that of preschoolers, older children, and adolescents? In this new book, Robert Siegler addresses these and other fundamental questions about children’s thinking. Previous theories have tended to depict cognitive development much like a staircase. At an early age, children think in one way; as they get older, they step up to increasingly higher ways of thinking. Siegler proposes that viewing the development within an evolutionary framework is more useful than a staircase model. The evolution of species depends on mechanisms for generating variability, for choosing adaptively among the variants, and for preserving the lessons of past experience so that successful variants become increasingly prevalent. The development of children’s thinking appears to depend on mechanisms to fulfill these same functions. Siegler’s theory is consistent with a great deal of evidence. It unifies phenomena from such areas as problem solving, reasoning, and memory, and reveals commonalities in the thinking of people of all ages. Most important, it leads to valuable insights regarding a basic question about children’s thinking asked by cognitive, developmental, and educational psychologists: How does change occur?

With a view to deepening our understanding of sources of hatred and prejudice, this book uses a developmental and evolutionary perspective to explore and explain the process by which our beliefs are conveyed to the youngest members of society. Discussing the psychological obstacles to peaceful relations between groups, the authors focus on the developmental processes by which we can work to diminish ethnocentrism, prejudice, and hatred, which children learn from a very early age. Until now, scholarship and practice in international relations have gravely neglected crucial psychological aspects of these terrible problems and have not yet explored the educational opportunities related to them. Addressing these promising lines of inquiry and innovation, this book fosters a more humane and less violent development in childhood and adolescence. Educators, religious leaders, developmental and social psychologists, will find this a valuable resource, as will a socially concerned segment of the public who are looking for practical ways to work for peace.

This book advances the theoretical account that Barbara Rogoff presented in her highly acclaimed book, Apprenticeship in Thinking. Here, Rogoff collaborates with two master teachers from an innovative school in Salt Lake City, Utah, to examine how students, parents, and teachers learn by being engaged together in a community of learners. Building on observations by participants in this school, this book reveals how children and adults learn through participation in activities of mutual interest. The insights will speak to all those interested in how people learn collaboratively and how schools can improve.

Making Education Work for the Poor identifies wealth inequality as the gravest threat to the endangered American Dream. Though studies have clearly illustrated that education is the primary path to upward mobility, today, educational outcomes are more directly determined by wealth than innate ability and exerted effort. This accounting directly contradicts Americans' understanding of the promise the American Dream is supposed to offer: a level playing field and a path towards a more profitable future. In this book, the authors share their own stories of their journeys through the unequal U.S. education system. One started from relative privilege and had her way to prosperity paved and her individual efforts augmented by institutional and structural support. The other grew up in poverty and had to fight against currents to complete higher education, only to find his ability to profit from that degree compromised by student debt. To directly counter wealth inequality and make education the 'great equalizer' that Americans believe it to be, this book calls for a revolution in financial aid policy, from debt dependence to asset empowerment. The book examines the evidence base supporting Children's Savings Accounts, including CSAs' demonstrated potential to improve children's outcomes all along the 'opportunity pipeline': early education, school achievement, college access and completion, and post-college financial health. It then outlines a policy that builds on CSAs to incorporate a sizable, progressive wealth transfer. This new policy, Opportunity Investment Accounts, is framed as the cornerstone of the wealth-building agenda the nation needs in order to salvage the American Dream. Written by leading CSA researchers, the book includes overviews of the major children's savings legislation proposed in Congress and the key features of prominent CSA programs in operation around the country today, as well as new qualitative and quantitative CSA research. The book ultimately presents a critical development of the theories that, together, explain how universal, progressive, asset-based education financing could make education work equitably for all American children.

When Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males appeared in 1998, it was hailed as "a crucial book" (Baltimore Sun) and "undoubtedly one of the most important tools the African American parent can possess" (Kweisi Mfume, President NAACP). Now, in response to enormous demand, the authors turn their attention to African American young women. Statistics indicate that African American females, as a group, fare poorly in the United States. Many live in single-parent households-either as the single-parent mother or as the daughter. Many face severe economic hurdles. Yet despite these obstacles, some are performing at exceptional levels academically. Based on interviews with many of these successful young women and their families, Overcoming the Odds provides a wealth of information about how and why they have succeeded--what motivates them, how their backgrounds and family relationships have shaped them, even how it feels to be a high academic achiever. They also discuss the challenges of moving into African American womanhood, from maintaining self-esteem to making the right choices about their professional and personal lives. Most important, the book offers specific and inspiring examples of the practices, attitudes, and parenting strategies that have enabled these women to persevere and triumph. For parents, educators, policy makers, and indeed all those concerned about the education of young African American women, Overcoming the Odds is an invaluable guidebook on creating the conditions that lead to academic-and lifelong-success.

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. For the Internet and digitial generation, the most basic human right is the freedom to read. The Web has indeed brought about a rapid and far-reaching revolution in reading, making a limitless global pool of literature and information available to anyone with a computer. At the same time, however, the threats of censorship, surveillance, and mass manipulation through the media have grown apace. Some of the most important political battles of the twenty-first century have been fought--and will be fought--over the right to read. Will it be adequately protected by constitutional guarantees and freedom of information laws? Or will it be restricted by very wealthy individuals and very powerful institutions? And given increasingly sophisticated methods of publicity and propaganda, how much of what we read can we believe? This book surveys the history of independent sceptical reading, from antiquity to the present. It tells the stories of heroic efforts at self-education by disadvantaged people in all parts of the world. It analyzes successful reading promotion campaigns throughout history (concluding with Oprah Winfrey) and explains why they succeeded. It also explores some disturbing current trends, such as the reported decay of attentive reading, the disappearance of investigative journalism, 'fake news', the growth of censorship, and the pervasive influence of advertisers and publicists on the media--even on scientific publishing. For anyone who uses libraries and Internet to find out what the hell is going on, this book is a guide, an inspiration, and a warning.

In Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, Pinchevski reveals the technical operations that inform the conception and experience of traumatic impact and memory. He offers a bold thesis about the deep association of media and trauma: media bear witness to the human failure to bear witness, making the traumatic technologically transmissible and reproducible. Taking up a number of case studies--the radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial; the videotaping of Holocaust testimonies; recent psychiatric debates about trauma through media following the 9/11 attacks; current controversy surrounding drone operators' post-trauma; and digital platforms of algorithmic-holographic witnessing and virtual reality exposure therapy for PTSD--Pinchevski demonstrates how the technological mediation of trauma feeds into the traumatic condition itself. The result is a novel understanding of media as constituting the material conditions for trauma to appear as something that cannot be fully approached and yet somehow must be. While drawing on contemporary materialist media theory, especially the work of Friedrich Kittler and his followers, Pinchevski goes beyond the anti-humanistic tendency characterizing the materialist approach, discovering media as bearing out the human vulnerability epitomized in trauma, and finding therein a basis for moral concern in the face of violence and atrocity. Transmitted Wounds unfolds the ethical and political stakes involved in the technological transmission of mental wounds across clinical, literary, and cultural contexts.

Research polls, media interviews, and everyday conversations reveal an unsettling truth: citizens, while well-meaning and even passionate about current affairs, appear to know very little about politics. Hundreds of surveys document vast numbers of citizens answering even basic questions about government incorrectly. Given this unfortunate state of affairs, it is not surprising that more knowledgeable people often deride the public for its ignorance. Some experts even think that less informed citizens should stay out of politics altogether. As Arthur Lupia shows in Uninformed, this is not constructive. At root, critics of public ignorance fundamentally misunderstand the problem. Many experts believe that simply providing people with more facts will make them more competent voters. However, these experts fail to understand how most people learn, and hence don't really know what types of information are even relevant to voters. Feeding them information they don't find relevant does not address the problem. In other words, before educating the public, we need to educate the educators. Lupia offers not just a critique, though; he also has solutions. Drawing from a variety of areas of research on topics like attention span and political psychology, he shows how we can actually increase issue competence among voters in areas ranging from gun regulation to climate change. To attack the problem, he develops an arsenal of techniques to effectively convey to people information they actually care about. Citizens sometimes lack the knowledge that they need to make competent political choices, and it is undeniable that greater knowledge can improve decision making. But we need to understand that voters either don't care about or pay attention to much of the information that experts think is important. Uninformed provides the keys to improving political knowledge and civic competence: understanding what information is important to and knowing how to best convey it to them.