Researchers, policy makers, and practitioners share a sincere interest in improving the human condition. Academics may be tempted to fault irrationality, ideology, or ignorance for the failure of research to inform policy and practice more powerfully, but policy makers and practitioners want academics to tell them "what works" in order to find a…

Reading instruction for middle- and high-school students is focused on vocabulary and comprehension, yet research suggests that comprehension skills among these students are alarmingly low. Small-group reading interventions are becoming more prevalent in schools, but there are few studies regarding small-group reading comprehension interventions.…

This study examined the barriers to inclusion in one primary school in the north of England. Qualitative data were collected from teachers and teaching assistants through the use of a focus group. The evidence suggested that practices within the school were varied and ranged from highly inclusive to highly exclusive. Some teachers worked in good…

Background: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterised by social and communication difficulties in day-to-day life, including problems in recognising emotions. However, experimental investigations of emotion recognition ability in ASD have been equivocal, hampered by small sample sizes, narrow IQ range and over-focus on the visual modality.…

We argue that this is a crucial time for educational psychology as a field to refocus its attention on the evidence base for its contribution to teacher education. In revisiting the recommendations of the APA Division 15 committee charged with examining the role of educational psychology in teacher education (Anderson et al., 1995), we note…

Sex-related differences have been reported for performance and neural substrates on some working memory measures that carry a high cognitive load, including the popular n-back neuroimaging paradigm. Despite some evidence of a sex effect on the task, the influence of sex on performance represents a potential confound in neuroimaging research. The…

Numerous studies have focused on the distinction between categorical and coordinate spatial relations. Categorical relations are propositional and abstract, and often related to a left hemisphere advantage. Coordinate relations specify the metric information of the relative locations of objects, and can be linked to right hemisphere processing.…

Semantic errors in aphasia (e.g., naming a horse as "dog") frequently arise from faulty mapping of concepts onto lexical items. A recent study by our group used voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) methods with 64 patients with chronic aphasia to identify voxels that carry an association with semantic errors. The strongest associations were…

How can we help pupils learn to read historically? Gary Howells explores this question by explaining how he builds reading challenges into the course of his pupils' post-16 studies and by describing some of the tasks that pupils are set and the principles that underpin them. Howells argues that over time and through stepped and scaffolded tasks,…

This article presents an "evidence-based" program improvement effort that sought to strengthen student teachers' implementation of subject-specific pedagogy for teaching mathematics in a K-8 multiple subject teacher education program. The authors report the process of how they used a research-based approach to gather evidence about "status quo" of…

Objective: To examine changes in observed communication after therapy termination in distressed couples from a randomized clinical trial. Method: A total of 134 distressed couples were randomly assigned to either traditional behavioral couple therapy (TBCT; Jacobson & Margolin, 1979) or integrative behavioral couple therapy (IBCT; Jacobson &…

We conducted a systematic analysis of studies that involved the treatment of rumination and operant vomiting in individuals with developmental disabilities. A total of 21 studies involving a combined 32 participants were identified and analyzed in terms of (a) participant characteristics, (b) dependent variables, (c) intervention procedures, (d)…

It is possible that many benefits may be found for all concerned in education and child development in understanding how knowledge of the brain and its development can inform early years practice. This article, written by Brenda Peters and Chris Forlin, both from the Hong Kong Institute of Education, reviews literature based on neuroscience to…

The "Assurance of Learning for Graduate Employability" framework is a quality assurance model for curriculum enhancement for graduate employability, enabling graduates to achieve "the skills, understandings and personal attributes that make [them] more likely to secure employment and be successful in their chosen occupations to the…

Research Findings: Parental expressivity, child physiological regulation (indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia suppression), child behavioral regulation, and child adjustment outcomes were examined in 45 children (M age = 4.32 years, SD = 1.30) and their parents. With the exception of child adjustment (i.e., internalizing and externalizing…