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This study conducted with French-speaking students living near Montréal, Canada, assess if teaching the shared knowledge between reading and writing of informative texts improves reading comprehension in fourth grade (9-10 years old) to a greater extent than teaching that separates reading and writing. Teachers participating in the experiment received teaching material and training during 1 year prior to data collection. The teaching approach involved three steps and included activities that were spread over 20 weeks and lasted approximately 2 h per week. Teachers from the non-experimental condition teach reading comprehension and writing strategies in a dissociated way. Students (n = 248) were tested with a reading comprehension assessment in September and May. Results show a significant interaction between time and groups, suggesting a moderate effect size. The experimental group started the experiment slightly behind in reading comprehension and ended up significantly better than the control group. Teaching how to articulate knowledge in reading and writing might favor reading comprehension of informative texts better than teaching strategies in a dissociated way. However, the introduction of such an approach required continuous training and robust teacher support.

The ever-increasing problem of antibiotic resistance makes routine use of antibiotics in animal production no longer considered as a reasonable and viable practice. The Chicken Farmers of Canada have developed and are implementing an Antimicrobial Use Reduction Strategy, which has the ultimate goal of eliminating the preventive use of medically important antibiotics in broiler chicken and turkey production. However, very little is known about the real overall impact of an antibiotic use reduction strategy in complex ecosystems, such as the bird intestine or the commercial broiler chicken farm. The main objectives of the present study were to compare the abundance of antibiotic resistance-encoding genes, characterize the intestinal microbiota composition, and evaluate the presence of Clostridium perfringens, in six commercial poultry farms adopting short-term antibiotic withdrawal and long-term judicious use strategy. Implementing an antibiotic-free program over a 15-months period did not reduce the abundance of many antibiotic resistance-encoding genes, whereas the judicious use of antibiotics over 6 years was found effective. The short-term antibiotic withdrawal and the long-term judicious use strategy altered the intestinal microbiota composition, with the Ruminococcaceae and Lachnospiraceae families being negatively impacted. These findings are in agreement with the lower production performance and with the increased C. perfringens populations observed for farms phasing out the use of antibiotics. Adopting a conventional rearing program on commercial broiler chicken farms selected for specific antibiotic resistance-encoding genes in many barns. This study highlights the potential impacts of different rearing programs in poultry production and will help guide future policies in order to reduce the use of antibiotics while maintaining production performance.

This study was conducted in the province of Québec, Canada, among Frenchspeaking Grade 6 students (n = 175) in the context of a school curriculum that does not clearly address text structure and main idea instruction. It aims to understand whether these students can identify informative text structures and main ideas in isolated paragraphs, comprehend main ideas and text structure in an informative text, and write a short structured informative text. It also describes relationships between these knowledge and skills coming from different reading and writing tasks. Three assessments relative to informative text structures were administered: a multiple-choice test on text structure knowledge and identification of main ideas, a reading comprehension test, and a short writing task. Results revealed that students performed better in the multiple-choice assessment compared to other assessments. Correlations between variables stemming from the three assessments were significant but their effect sizes were low to moderate. A hypothesized model was investigated via a path analysis suggesting that structure knowledge and main idea identification influence reading comprehension, which then influence writing.