This work reports the results of an evaluation study to assess the efficacy of the Early HeartSmarts (EHS) program in schools of the Salt Lake City, Utah, School District. The EHS program is designed to guide teachers with methods that support young children (3–6 y old) in learning emotion self-regulation and key age-appropriate socioemotional competencies with the goal of facilitating their emotional, social, and cognitive development. The study was conducted over one school year using a quasiexperimental longitudinal field research design with 3 measurement points (baseline, preintervention, and postintervention) using The Creative Curriculum Assessment (TCCA), a teacher-scored, 50-item instrument measuring students growth in 4 areas of development: social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language development. Children in 19 preschool classrooms in the Salt Lake City School District were divided into intervention and control group samples (n = 66 and n = 309, respectively; mean age = 3.6 y). The intervention classes were specifically selected to target children of lower socioeconomic and ethnic minority backgrounds. Overall, there is compelling evidence of the efficacy of the EHS program in increasing total psychosocial development and each of the 4 development areas measured by the TCCA: the results of a series of analyses of covariance found a strong, consistent pattern of large, significant differences on the development measures favoring preschool children who received the EHS program over those in the control group.

here are multiple independent and interactive factors that may contribute to perceptions o r misperceptions concerning an administrator shortage in the T United States (US). These factors include the complexities of supply and demand data, inferential errors and over-generalisations, candidate quantity issues confounded by anecdotal accounts of candidate quality, administrator accounts of limited job desirability, and the 'invisibility' of women administrators as a viable candidate pool. Some researchers have begun to challenge the perception that there is an administrator or educator shortage crisis, but these voices are often readily dismissed. There are multiple reasons why portrayals of an educator shortage crisis may be widely accepted in spite of questionable evidence. Specifically there may be political and ideological reasons that misperceptions about an educator shortage may be perpetuated. This article explores reasons that may explain perceptions o r misperceptions of the shortage, including political forces that may encourage or perpetuate beliefs about the problem.

Abstract:Developed by the Institute of HeartMath (IHM), the Early HeartSmarts (EHS) program is designed to train teachers to guide and support young children (3-6 years old) in learning emotional self-regulation and key age-appropriate socioemotional competencies, with the goal of facilitating their emotional, social and cognitive development. This work reports the results of an evaluation study conducted to assess the efficacy of the EHS program in a pilot implementation carried out during the 2006-2007 academic year in schools of the Salt Lake City School District. The study was conducted using a quasiexperimental longitudinal field research design with three measurement moments (baseline and pre-and post-intervention panels) using The Creative Curriculum Assessment (TCCA) instrument, a teacher-scored, 50-item instrument measuring student growth in four areas of developmentsocial/emotional, physical, cognitive and language development. Children in nineteen preschool classrooms were divided into intervention and control group samples (N = 66 and 309, respectively; mean age = 3.6 years), in which classes in the former were specifically selected to target children of lower socioeconomic and ethnic minority family backgrounds. Overall, there is compelling evidence of the efficacy of the EHS program in increasing total psychosocial development and also in each of the four development areas measured by the TCCA: the results of a series of ANCOVAs found a strong, consistent pattern of significant differences on the development measures favoring preschool children who received the EHS program over those in the control group who did not.Recent advances in neuroscience are highlighting connections between emotion, social functioning and decision making that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the role of affect in education. In particular, the neurobiological evidence suggests that the aspects of cognition that we recruit most heavily in schools, namely learning, attention, memory, decision making and social functioning, are both profoundly affected by and subsumed within the processes of emotion … .

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