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Can some black-white differences in reading achievement be traced to differences in language background? Many African American children speak a dialect that differs from the mainstream dialect emphasized in school. We examined how use of alternative dialects affects decoding, an important component of early reading and marker of reading development. Behavioral data show that use of the alternative pronunciations of words in different dialects affects reading aloud in developing readers, with larger effects for children who use more African American English (AAE). Mechanisms underlying this effect were explored with a computational model, investigating factors affecting reading acquisition. The results indicate that the achievement gap may be due in part to differences in task complexity: children whose home and school dialects differ are at greater risk for reading difficulties because tasks such as learning to decode are more complex for them.

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Abstract— A growing body of research suggests that the use of concrete materials is not a sure‐fire strategy for helping children succeed in the classroom. Instead, concrete materials can help or hinder learning, depending on a number of different factors. Taken together, the articles in this issue highlight the complexities involved in using concrete materials in the classroom and warn educators and researchers that students’ learning from concrete materials can be derailed in a number of ways, such as (a) choosing the wrong types of materials, (b) structuring the environment in ways that do not support learning from concrete materials, and (c) failing to connect concrete representations to abstract representations. Each of these problems is discussed and some potential solutions are offered.

Purpose This study was designed to examine the relationships among minority dialect use, language ability, and young AAE-speaking children’s understanding and awareness of MAE. Methods 83 4- to 8-year-old African American English-speaking children participated in two experimental tasks. One task evaluated their awareness of differences between Mainstream American English (MAE) and African American English (AAE), while the other evaluated their lexical comprehension of MAE in contexts that were ambiguous in AAE but unambiguous in MAE. Receptive and expressive vocabulary, receptive syntax, and dialect density were also assessed. Results The results of a series of mixed-effect models showed that children with larger expressive vocabularies performed better on both experimental tasks, relative to children with smaller expressive vocabularies. Dialect density was a significant predictor only of MAE lexical comprehension; children with higher levels of dialect density were less accurate on this task. Conclusions Both vocabulary size and dialect density independently influenced MAE lexical comprehension. The results suggest that children with high levels of non-mainstream dialect use have more difficulty understanding words in MAE, at least in challenging contexts and suggest directions for future research.

A growing body of literature on risk and resilience, school engagement, and positive psychology offers school psychologists new perspectives with which to consider students' progress through school. This literature emphasizes the importance of monitoring student internal and external assets. In this article, a framework is reviewed that highlights student strengths and contextual protective factors, moving beyond an exclusive focus on student deficits. It offers school psychologists a systematic set of empirically derived categories for thinking about, collecting, and presenting information about the strengths of students that (a) help to focus not only on risks but on protective factors, (b) facilitate a "developmental trajectory" perspective, and (c) recognize the role of important school, peer, and family contexts. The concepts reviewed in this article are intended to provide a template for use by school psychologists interested in thinking about student development and how schools can foster protective possibilities.

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This article argues that corporate management in the United States has expanded its scope beyond office walls and encompasses many aspects of workers' daily lives. One new element of corporate training is the micromanagement of sleep; self-help books, newspaper reports, magazine articles, and consulting firms currently advise workers and supervisors on optimizing productivity by cultivating certain sleep habits. Although consultants and self-help books make specific recommendations about sleep, most medical research is inconclusive about sleep's benefits for human performance. Using the ideas of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze as a philosophical backdrop, this article examines the complex and often contradictory links between self-help, medicine, and corporate governance.