According to a report by W. Steven Barnett, although preschool programs are highly variable in their quality, there is good reason to support policies that make preschool available to young children, especially preschool programs that employ effective practices. The report, “Preschool Education and Its Lasting Effects: Research and Policy Implications,” was released today by the Education and the Public Interest Center (University of Colorado at Boulder) and the Education Policy Research Unit (Arizona State University).
Amid a contentious debate over the benefit of preschool programs, a new policy brief, Preschool Education and Its Lasting Effects: Research and Policy Implications examines what researchers currently know about the potential of those programs to bring about positive change. It finds that preschool can strongly benefit children’s learning and development. But the brief also finds that the quality of programs varies dramatically and that increased public investment in preschool education should be focused on program designs that have been demonstrated to be highly effective.
Link to a pdf of Preschool Education and Its Lasting Effects: Research and Policy Implications.
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Folks, your not-so-trustworthy administrator failed to update one of the side programs for this blog when he updated the basic software. So, the polls haven’t worked right recently. Thanks to those who let me know (through public and private channels). I’ve updated the polling software and I think it’s right now.
Please revisit What is Critical Thinking and cast a vote. If you voted earlier and now cannot vote again, please let me know.
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Thanks to the top referrers for Teach Effectively!
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O.K. Maybe there are only five visitors to Teach Effectively! At least, that’s the total number of votes on the current pole about roles. So, I’m moving the voting booth over here…putting it in plain sight.
Continue reading ‘Visitors’
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For a long time I had no problems with spammers who ran scripts that sign-up bogus users for my blogs. But recently, there’s been a spate of them. Yesterday, I eliminated these accounts:
ID #51: barsikjak, ID #52: barsikjal, ID #55: beepbeek, ID #54: beepbeet, ID #58: derisgun, ID #50: barsikjan, ID #48: chuchundra, ID #49: chuchundrra, ID #44: Delmarbbq, ID #47: goorooro, ID #42: JacomoR, ID #46: ritalinB, ID #63: bortycuz, ID #60: gortusbig, ID #61: grofvuri, ID #59: trusaerus,
I also activated a software resource (”plug-in”) that will trap most of them at the time of requesting an account, so I shouldn’t have to hassle as much with this.
Anyone else seen an increase in such activity recently?
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Folks, I don’t use a fancy stats package and, even if I did, I’d only have a passing idea of who visits Teach Effectively. So, I’m running a poll for the next week or so in which I’m asksing visitors to indicate their connection to education in general and Teach Effectively specifically. Please click on the page marked “polls” and explain yourselves (both of you, please).
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Feed readers, please update your subscriptions. If you’re using Feedfetcher, Bloglines, Slurp, Technorati, PlanetPlanet, or another means of accessing this blog, your subscription may still be requesting it from it’s old source (johnl.edschool.viriginia.edu) rather than this source. Please discard that old subscription and set your aggregator to grab the feed from the here.
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Spamdammit
As P. Z. Myers noted in a recent post, one of the plagues of blogging is handling the comment spam; not that Teach Effectively is anywhere nearly as popular as Professor Myers’ Pharyngula, but Teach Effectively does get hit with a lot of spam. People send robots to add comments to post for nefarious reasons such as less-than-honest advertising. Fortunately, there are ways to automate rejection of spam comments. In the year plus that I’ve been using it, a wonderful piece of software that I employ, Akismet, has protected the Teach Effectively from 61,654 spam comments (for the current number, check the total in the left sidebar).
When I compare the number of legitimate and spam comments, I get a signal to noise ratio of 0.0023193953. That makes Akismet a pretty valuable product.
Another valuable one is Bad Behavior. Whereas Akismet blocks comment spam, Bad Behavior stops robots from registering as users and, sometimes, from even reading the blog.
These are things worth employing.
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