Lorraine E. Maxwell

Chronic Noise Exposure and Reading Deficits The Mediating Effects of Language Acquisition

First- and second-grade schoolchildren chronically exposed to aircraft noise have significant deficits in reading as indexed by a standardized reading test administered under quiet conditions. These findings indicate that the harmful effects of noise are related to chronic exposure rather than interference effects during the testing session itself. We also provide evidence that the adverse correlation of chronic noise with reading is partially attributable to deficits in language acquisition. Children chronically exposed to noise also suffer from impaired speech perception, which, in turn, partially mediates the noise-exposure-reading deficit link. All of these findings statistically controlled for mothers education. Furthermore, the children in this study were prescreened for normal hearing by a standard audiometric examination.

Parental Language and Verbal Responsiveness to Children in Crowded Homes

This article is a secondary data analysis of the University of Kansas Language Acquisition Project, which intensively studied, on a regular basis, parent and child language from age 6 months to 30 months. The association between residential density and parent-child speech was examined. Parents in crowded homes speak in less complex, sophisticated ways with their children compared with parents in uncrowded homes, and this association is mediated by parental responsiveness. Parents in more crowded homes are less verbally responsive to their children. This in turn accounts for their simpler, less sophisticated speech to their children. This mediational pathway is evident with statistical controls for socioeconomic status. This model may help explain prior findings showing a link between residential crowding and delayed cognitive development.

Multiple Effects of Home and Day Care Crowding

As an environmental psychologist, her research interests are childrens environments and environments for persons with special needs. She is currently doing research on the relationship between noise and preschool childrens acquisition of prereading skills, environmental factors in preschool inclusive classrooms, and childrens use of outdoorplay equipment. With a background in facility planning, she is also involved in architectural programming projects, of which a playground for both sighted and blind children is the most recent.

The Effect of Computer Workstation Design on Student Posture

AbstractAlthough the use of computers in the classroom is increasing, little attention has been paid by educators, furniture manufacturers, or researchers to the ergonomic design issues of educational furniture for computer use. Children in the sixth and eighth grades performed keyboarding and mousing tasks at two different computer workstations; one a traditional desktop arrangement, and the second a station that consisted of an adjustable keyboard. Overall student posture scores improved, as measured by the Rapid Upper Limb Assessment, at the adjustable workstation.

Competency in Child Care Settings The Role of the Physical Environment

A rating scale is developed for preschool classrooms to assess the physical environment’s role in children’s development of cognitive and social competency. The scale is tested in 98 classrooms, and children are assessed on two measures of competency in a subsample of these classrooms. Findings indicate that the physical environment is related to measures of competency, one of which is a self-perception measure. Younger children’s competency, those in the 3-year-olds’ classrooms as opposed to the 4-year-olds’ classrooms, is most affected by the physical environment. Assessment of quality child care must include thorough assessment of the physical environment.

Ergonomic Issues for Classroom Computing

The use of computers in schools and the classroom continues to grow. When schools invest in computers, they pay attention to the network infrastructure, the technology and software, but typically the ergonomic design of student workstations is ignored. The comfort and safety of adult computer users in workplace settings has received a great deal of attention in the past decade. Recent research indicates that the comfort and safety of child computer users may be at risk given the configuration of the majority of the workstations at which computers are used. The paper will review the latest research on ergonomics issues associated with classroom computer use, outline some of the potential risks and discuss the general issue of appropriate ergonomic design of computer workstations for school-aged children.

Museum Visits: Experiences of Special Education and Typically Developing Children

18 museum visits are a popular field trip for elementary school children, special education children those with reading, language, or cognitive delays may not visit museums as frequently as their typically developing peers. Teachers of special education classes indicate that the museum setting is often too anxiety-provoking for their students. In addition, teachers doubt that special education students will benefit from the educational aspects of museum visits.1 While many museums have made accommodations for persons with physical disabilities (motor, sight, and hearing), children with cognitive disabilities have not received the same attention. This is especially true for natural history and art museums where exhibits are not necessarily designed for children. Such museums rarely have hands-on exhibits. Poor language or reading skills make most exhibit labels inaccessible to children with such disabilities. Museums are also complex settings. There are numerous exhibits, other people, new spaces, various sounds, and variations in lighting. For some children this can be exciting. For those with cognitive delays who may have trouble processing a lot of information, these settings can be anxiety-provoking because there is too much to pay attention to and all of it is unfamiliar. Under these circumstances special education students may not retain much information about the content of the visit.

Computer Workstation Design Effects on Posture and Performance: Children Grades Six and Eight

The ability to correctly identify an operator’s functional state is essential to being able to provide an adaptive interface between the system and the operator. The main obstacle to successful implementation of aiding is acquiring accurate knowledge of the operator’s functional state. Nineteen channels of EEG were recorded while seven Air Force air traffic controllers performed a TRACON simulation task. Difficulty was manipulated by varying the total number of aircraft to be managed during 15 minutes. Four levels of difficulty were used. The most difficult condition, overload, was designed to cause the controllers to “lose the picture”. FFTs from overlapping ten second EEG epochs representing the middle five minutes of each condition were separated into five bands. Sixty percent of the epochs trained a linear discriminant classifier while the remainder were used to test classifier accuracy. Overall, the four difficulty levels could be correctly classified with 85% accuracy and the overload condition was correctly classified 94.5% of the time. These results demonstrate that psychophysiological measures can be used to accurately determine the level of mental workload experienced by an operator performing complex tasks. The high degree of accuracy for the most difficult condition is especially notable since mental overload detection is the primary goal of adaptive aiding systems. With knowledge about the operator’s functional state during high levels of mental demand, the operator and/or system could off-load lower priority tasks to the system thus enabling the operator to concentrate on the primary task. This should improve performance on the crucial components of the higher priority task. Once the period of high demand is passed the operator could resume the off-loaded tasks. These data suggest that nonintrusive and continuously monitored EEG can be used to accurately assess operator cognitive load.