Digital Graffiti Wall: Technology Meets Street Art

Is a digital graffiti wall the billboard for the new millennium? It certainly sounds like it can be: creating graffiti art using a computer vision system is quickly gaining popularity. The system that allows art similar to traditional graffiti to be created on a large screen was inspired by the New York laser graffiti movement, and made possible by technology advances.What exactly is a digital graffiti wall and how does it work? Digital graffiti wall is an interactive tool for creating digital graffiti on a large screen, using digital spray paint cans. These are specially adapted to emit IR (infrared) light when the cap is pressed – instead of regular paint. As it moves across the screen, the light is tracked by a computer vision system to recreate the “sprayed” images onto the wall using a projector.Just like with the traditional graffiti, your art will appear on the wall wherever the can is prayed. You can choose between a wide palette of paint colors. There are also different spray patterns, such as animated stars or swirls, paint effects, and custom stencils available. They will make your creations look like authentic graffiti art. You can also have your guests stand in front of a screen projector in order to have their picture taken, and then projected onto the digital graffiti wall – where they can “artistically” enhance the photograph.Interface graphics and backgrounds are fully customizable: you can, for example, add your logo and product images to the wall, or make the photo of your company headquarters the background. Designs can be saved in a standard jpeg format and uploaded to social media, emailed, or used in digital printing. The event can be a part of your social media campaign: during the event, you can upload pictures to your Facebook page, and ask your guests to “like” them.You can even give your guests souvenirs such as t-shirts, mugs, stickers or postcards with their artwork printed on them. A digital graffiti wall will surely turn any event into an experience, and this will additionally prompt your guest not to forget your event.Sounds fun and intriguing? Digital graffiti walls can be bought or hired for the event. What a great way to entertain – and engage – your guests at your next corporate event or a party! You can have an authentic graffiti experience with a digital twist: all this without the mess and toxic fumes.

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E-Commerce Internet Solutions – How Does it Benefit the Buyer & the Seller?

Nowadays, there is an abundance of retail shopping sites online. Whether you are looking for apparel, shoes, household items, kitchen appliances or gift baskets, there are general shopping and specialty shop sites that you can visit to buy the items that you need.The good thing about such online transactions which are conducted with the help of e-commerce Internet solution products is that it provides benefits both to the buyer and the seller.The Advantages of E-commerce Internet Solution from a Buyer’s Perspective With the help of e-commerce, buyers can take advantage of the following benefits:- More convenient shopping.
With the help of e-commerce Internet solution products, retail companies have the option of offering you the convenience of shopping right in the comfort of your own home. Time, money for travel and the ultimate convenience are all of the benefits that you can get to enjoy as a buyer.- More time to decide on the items that you want to buy.
With e-commerce Internet solution products, you can visit one site and if you are not satisfied with the products that you see, you can easily switch to another site. This is especially helpful for finicky buyers who want to get the most out of their shopping money.- Lesser errors in the order-taking process.
With e-commerce Internet solution products, there is less human intervention. For example, if you will go to the -Shopping Cart- portion of a retail shopping site and you decide that there are items that you do not actually want to buy, you can easily go back and delete or uncheck the products that you do not need.As a buyer, you will process the order yourself – and the rest of the transaction is automated so there is lesser room for errors.- Bigger discounts.
E-commerce Internet solution products allow the order-taking process to be fully automated. As a result, the company where you are buying the products from can afford to offer bigger discounts because less manpower is needed.The Advantages of E-commerce Internet Solution from a Seller’s Perspective E-commerce Internet solution products offer a host of advantages to you as a seller.First, once the system has been set up, there is no need to hire individuals who will manually process the orders so lesser operational costs are required. The same thing applies to:- Document preparation
- Error detection for the order-taking process
- Error correction for the order-taking process
- Data entry
- Expenses for supervision
- Marketing tasks
- Sending product information to customers through mailersMore importantly, e-commerce will help run your business more efficiently.From the order processing, marketing, inventory, cataloging to web content management – a good e-commerce Internet solution provider should be able to provide you with these features and any other functionalities that you need so that you can manage your business more efficiently.

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Defining the Audience For Your Health Care Online Marketing Campaigns

Many health care organizations make a simple, but costly, mistake with their health care online marketing campaigns — failing to define a target audience. It’s just as important to define your audience with an online campaign as it is with print or direct mail marketing. Online advertising that attempts to reach everyone is a costly way to produce little results.Luckily, there is an easy fix. With just a little planning, your health care organization can build incredibly successful marketing campaigns online by first simply determining the exact people you want to reach. This article looks at ways to zone in on a defined target audience to increase the success of your next campaign.Geographical LocationAre you a chiropractor in Seattle? Then marketing your chiropractic clinic to someone in Miami is a waste of your valuable resources. The first step to defining your audience is determining whether geographical location matters. For example, location does matter for our Seattle chiropractor, but would geographically targeting an audience be important for a pharmaceutical company promoting a new diabetes medication? Probably not. Determine whether geographical location matters to your specific situation before creating your online health care marketing campaigns.Visualize Your AudienceTake a moment to get a mental picture of your audience. By visualizing them, you make them real instead of just being scribbled notes on a notepad. An easy way to picture your ideal audience is to look at your past and current customers, considering who you enjoyed or benefited from working with most. Once you have a good mental picture, start making a list of their characteristics.Establish Problems, Needs, And WantsWhat are the problems, needs, and wants of your target audience? Knowing these three things can help you refine your ideal target audience. For example, if you’re a hospital emergency room, your target audience is people in dire need of fast, expert medical attention, so considering this information when deciding where and how to advertise can lead to achieving the best results. Make a list of the top ten problems, needs, and wants of your target audience and where they actively look to resolve them.Consider DemographicsConsider the demographics of your audience, including age, gender, marital status, education, job, income, family size, lifestyle, and interests. This offers another great way to zone in with your health care marketing campaigns. For example, your target could be 25 to 35 year old couples with small children and tight budgets or affluent seniors age 65 and older that enjoy an active lifestyle.Take A Look At Your OfferingsOnce you have really narrowed down your target audience, look at your offerings before creating your health care online marketing campaigns. Can you modify your services or products to better suit your audience? Would additional features be helpful to your audience? Address how you can make your offerings better for your target audience to best attract their attention.Now that you have your target audience and you’ve really refined your health care offerings, you’re in a great position to launch health care online marketing campaigns that effectively build your brand and increase your ROI and customer base.

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Some Important Facts About Commercial Loans

Commercial loans are a loan type that includes those loans needed to fund a business and also loans to purchase or finance the construction of a property for a commercial business. Therefore, commercial loans are not personal loans and it is the business or the business project that needs to qualify and prove reliability and feasibility in order to be eligible for commercial financing.Following are some facts about commercial loans that need to be taken into account and that though they should be common knowledge, people usually ignore them. In order to clarify these issues, we are going to contrast common and erroneous beliefs with the actual facts about commercial loans:Commercial Loan Approval Can Take Six Months Or More?This is not necessary true. You may take six months or more to meet the requirements for applying but within less than two weeks, banks or financial institutions can approve commercial loans without further hassles. There is some documentation required that does not vary that much between lenders. Therefore, you should act wisely and find out what you will be asked for prior to actually applying. That way, you will save yourself a lot of time.Do I Need Business Counseling Before Applying? Is It Costly?Business counseling is not a prerequisite for a commercial loan approval and even if it were, most lenders provide that service for free. Therefore, you should not worry about this issue. You need to have in hand as much information about your business as possible so when you contact the lenders, they can analyze your situation and come up with a financial solution that suits your commercial needs.Can I Get Cheaper Rates If My Business is Small?There are really no differences or promotions for small businesses as opposed to big ones. Actually, interest rates are negotiable and therefore, chances are that big companies have more negotiating power and skills to get reduced rates. However, since rates are the result of an agreement between the lender and the borrower, other loan terms can be negotiated so as to obtain a lower rate (shorter repayment schedule, co-signing, security, etc. )Is it Harder To Get Small Amount Commercial Loans?No. Moreover, the opposite is true: by spreading the overall money lent by a lending institution into many borrowers, the risks are reduced. It is harder for 100 borrowers owing $50,000 to default all at the same time than for a single borrower owing $5,000,000 to default. The overall amount is the same, but the risk is significantly smaller. Therefore, it is a lot easier to get approved for small amount loans because lenders are eager to do business with this kind of commercial loans.There Are Not Many Commercial Loans Out There. Are they?Indeed, there are all kinds of commercial loans available like guaranteed loans, loans for veterans, handicapped and all kind of assistance loans for those in need or underprivileged. There are also loans and Lines of Credit for Importing and Exporting, small business loans, constructor loans, etc. There is surely a commercial loan suit for your needs.

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Online Education – Why Get One?

Everything is moving online. Shop, order food, watch television shows, stream music, and get an education while you are online. You may have heard about online courses but never taken the time to see what they are about. Many people are realizing how easy it is to get higher education online, such as bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and many are signing up.What are the advantages of going online with education? Well, for one, it’s much cheaper than being on campus because it reduces fees you pay while on a university campus. Also, most universities offer online classes at a lower rate and will become cheaper as they become more popular and spots fill. Also, the other great advantage of online classes is being able to do course work from wherever you are. If you have a laptop, then you can access your education from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection. It’s revolutionizing the speed at which people become educated.Convenience also translates to time and money. When education is convenient, it saves you time and hassle from finding a parking spot and attending class on a campus some where. Keep your valuable time by longing in to your class online and completing all necessary course work. When you save time, you save money. Not having to commute to school is a top reason to get an online education. Save money you would spend on transportation and use it to pay for the classes you take online. In every aspect, online classes save you time and money.Most professionals who pursue master’s degrees are in the work force and don’t have time to stop working, go back to school and work for a degree. They need to continue in their field but also acquire a higher education. The only way to make this possible and convenient is to take classes online. When you leave work for the day, you can relax and regain energy and knock out assignments for class, all from the comfort of your home. In no time you will have a master’s for your field and hopefully receive a higher position and salary.Are you starting to see the benefits of getting an online education? The numbers add up and they are all positive for you. Time, money and effort are all conserved and save for you to use in other areas of your life. Enjoy work and education at the same time.

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Training & Vocational Schools Provide Skills That Get Jobs

Training and vocational schools are educational institutions that provide practical and vocational skills and knowledge related to a specific competency, trade, occupation or profession. Training schools usually provide materials and equipment used in actual situations that an individual often faces at their workplace. This is similar to an on-the-job training that is done under normal working situations or a simulation of it. Vocational school, on the other hand, teaches students how to do a certain job and the skills needed for a given career.Training and vocational schools are often operated by different federal departments such as the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services. All of these government institutions provide these programs especially for welfare recipients, poor adults and youth, and workers who have lost their jobs. However, there are also private training and vocational school that are subsidized by private colleges and universities for students who cannot afford to study full-time or for workers who need additional skills for mastery of their craft, certification and licensure, or for promotion.Training schools have different programs to provide the skills and knowledge required to achieve certification or completion. There are two categories for training and these are on-the-job and off-the-job. On-the-job training places students within the normal working conditions while off-the-job training is done outside of the working area and in classrooms for students to concentrate more on the training itself. But there are some programs in training schools that require both practical and theoretical lessons to be provided simultaneously. These training schools usually have classrooms where an area is designed as a simulation of a “real time” working area. Training schools cater to various levels of students of different ages such as those that teach languages, arts, performing arts, sports, and sciences, as well as those that provide training for improving work skills for their jobs.Vocational schools are similar to training schools in that students are prepared for jobs using manuals and practical activities which are related to specific trade, occupation or vocation. However, these educational institutions are primarily provided at the secondary or post-secondary level which is similar to an apprenticeship. The programs are designed for students to immediately get jobs after attending vocational schools or to continue their education in colleges or universities. However, vocational schools do not belong to the higher education category.Examples of vocational school programs include:
Auto repair technician/mechanic
Bookkeeping
Carpentry
Child day care management
Computer programming
Cooking and catering
Criminal justice
Dental assistant
Electrician
Floral design
Medical transcription
PC repair and maintenance
Photography
Plumbing
Veterinary assistant or technician
Website design

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Increasing Student Success Through Instruction in Self-Determination

An enormous amount of research shows the importance of self-determination (i.e., autonomy) for students in elementary school through college for enhancing learning and improving important post-school outcomes.
Findings

Research by psychologists Richard Ryan, PhD, and Edward Deci, PhD, on Self-Determination Theory indicates that intrinsic motivation (doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable), and thus higher quality learning, flourishes in contexts that satisfy human needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Students experience competence when challenged and given prompt feedback. Students experience autonomy when they feel supported to explore, take initiative and develop and implement solutions for their problems. Students experience relatedness when they perceive others listening and responding to them. When these three needs are met, students are more intrinsically motivated and actively engaged in their learning.

Numerous studies have found that students who are more involved in setting educational goals are more likely to reach their goals. When students perceive that the primary focus of learning is to obtain external rewards, such as a grade on an exam, they often perform more poorly, think of themselves as less competent, and report greater anxiety than when they believe that exams are simply a way for them to monitor their own learning. Some studies have found that the use of external rewards actually decreased motivation for a task for which the student initially was motivated. In a 1999 examination of 128 studies that investigated the effects of external rewards on intrinsic motivations, Drs. Deci and Ryan, along with psychologist Richard Koestner, PhD, concluded that such rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation by undermining people’s taking responsibility for motivating or regulating themselves.

Self-determination research has also identified flaws in high stakes, test focused school reforms, which despite good intentions, has led teachers and administrators to engage in precisely the types of interventions that result in poor quality learning. Dr. Ryan and colleagues found that high stakes tests tend to constrain teachers’ choices about curriculum coverage and curtail teachers’ ability to respond to students’ interests (Ryan & La Guardia, 1999). Also, psychologists Tim Urdan, PhD, and Scott Paris, PhD, found that such tests can decrease teacher enthusiasm for teaching, which has an adverse effect on students’ motivation (Urdan & Paris, 1994).

The processes described in self-determination theory may be particularly important for children with special educational needs. Researcher Michael Wehmeyer found that students with disabilities who are more self-determined are more likely to be employed and living independently in the community after completing high school than students who are less self-determined.

Research also shows that the educational benefits of self-determination principles don’t stop with high school graduation. Studies show how the orientation taken by college and medical school instructors (whether it is toward controlling students’ behavior or supporting the students’ autonomy) affects the students’ motivation and learning.
Significance

Self-determination theory has identified ways to better motivate students to learn at all educational levels, including those with disabilities.
Practical Application

Schools throughout the country are using self-determination instruction as a way to better motivate students and meet the growing need to teach children and youth ways to more fully accept responsibility for their lives by helping them to identify their needs and develop strategies to meet those needs.

Researchers have developed and evaluated instructional interventions and supports to encourage self-determination for all students, with many of these programs designed for use by students with disabilities. Many parents, researchers and policy makers have voiced concern about high rates of unemployment, under-employment and poverty experienced by students with disabilities after they complete their educational programs. Providing support for student self-determination in school settings is one way to enhance student learning and improve important post-school outcomes for students with disabilities. Schools have particularly emphasized the use of self-determination curricula with students with disabilities to meet federal mandates to actively involve students with disabilities in the Individualized Education Planning process.

Programs to promote self-determination help students acquire knowledge, skills and beliefs that meet their needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness (for example, see Steps to Self-determination by educational researchers Sharon Field and Alan Hoffman). Such programs also provide instruction aimed specifically at helping students play a more active role in educational planning (for example, see The Self-directed Individualized Education Plan by Jim Martin, Laura Huber Marshall, Laurie Maxson, & Patty Jerman).

Drs. Field and Hoffman developed a model designed to guide the development of self-determination instructional interventions. According to the model, instructional activities in areas such as increasing self-awareness; improving decision-making, goal-setting and goal-attainment skills; enhancing communication and relationship skills; and developing the ability to celebrate success and learn from reflecting on experiences lead to increased student self-determination. Self-determination instructional programs help students learn how to participate more actively in educational decision-making by helping them become familiar with the educational planning process, assisting them to identify information they would like to share at educational planning meetings, and supporting students to develop skills to effectively communicate their needs and wants. Examples of activities used in self-determination instructional programs include reflecting on daydreams to help students decide what is important to them; teaching students how to set goals that are important to them and then, with the support of peers, family members and teachers, taking steps to achieve those goals. Providing contextual supports and opportunities for students, such as coaching for problem-solving and offering opportunities for choice, are also critical elements that lead to meeting needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness and thus, increasing student self-determination.

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How to Build a Better Educational System: Jigsaw Classrooms

The jigsaw classroom technique can transform competitive classrooms in which many students are struggling into cooperative classrooms in which once-struggling students show dramatic academic and social improvements.
Findings

In the early 1970s, in the wake of the civil rights movement, educators were faced with a social dilemma that had no obvious solution. All over the country, well-intentioned efforts to desegregate America’s public schools were leading to serious problems. Ethnic minority children, most of whom had previously attended severely under-funded schools, found themselves in classrooms composed predominantly of more privileged White children. This created a situation in which students from affluent backgrounds often shone brilliantly while students from impoverished backgrounds often struggled. Of course, this difficult situation seemed to confirm age-old stereotypes: that Blacks and Latinos are stupid or lazy and that Whites are pushy and overly competitive. The end result was strained relations between children from different ethnic groups and widening gaps in the academic achievement of Whites and minorities.

Drawing on classic psychological research on how to reduce tensions between competing groups (e.g., see Allport, 1954; Sherif, 1958; see also Pettigrew, 1998), Elliot Aronson and colleagues realized that one of the major reasons for this problem was the competitive nature of the typical classroom. In a typical classroom, students work on assignments individually, and teachers often call on students to see who can publicly demonstrate his or her knowledge. Anyone who has ever been called to the board to solve a long division problem – only to get confused about dividends and divisors – knows that public failure can be devastating. The snide remarks that children often make when their peers fail do little to remedy this situation. But what if students could be taught to work together in the classroom – as cooperating members of a cohesive team? Could a cooperative learning environment turn things around for struggling students? When this is done properly, the answer appears to be a resounding yes.

In response to real educational dilemmas, Aronson and colleagues developed and implemented the jigsaw classroom technique in Austin, Texas, in 1971. The jigsaw technique is so named because each child in a jigsaw classroom has to become an expert on a single topic that is a crucial part of a larger academic puzzle. For example, if the children in a jigsaw classroom were working on a project about World War II, a classroom of 30 children might be broken down into five diverse groups of six children each. Within each group, a different child would be given the responsibility of researching and learning about a different specific topic: Khanh might learn about Hitler’s rise to power, Tracy might learn about the U.S. entry into the war, Mauricio might learn about the development of the atomic bomb, etc. To be sure that each group member learned his or her material well, the students from different groups who had the same assignment would be instructed to compare notes and share information. Then students would be brought together in their primary groups, and each student would present his or her “piece of the puzzle” to the other group members. Of course, teachers play the important role of keeping the students involved and derailing any tensions that may emerge. For example, suppose Mauricio struggled as he tried to present his information about the atomic bomb. If Tracy were to make fun of him, the teacher would quickly remind Tracy that while it may make her feel good to make fun of her teammate, she is hurting herself and her group – because everyone will be expected to know all about the atomic bomb on the upcoming quiz.
Significance
When properly carried out, the jigsaw classroom technique can transform competitive classrooms in which many students are struggling into cooperative classrooms in which once-struggling students show dramatic academic and social improvements (and in which students who were already doing well continue to shine). Students in jigsaw classrooms also come to like each other more, as students begin to form cross-ethnic friendships and discard ethnic and cultural stereotypes. Finally, jigsaw classrooms decrease absenteeism, and they even seem to increase children’s level of empathy (i.e., children’s ability to put themselves in other people’s shoes). The jigsaw technique thus has the potential to improve education dramatically in a multi-cultural world by revolutionizing the way children learn.
Practical Application

Since its demonstration in the 1970s, the jigsaw classroom has been used in hundreds of classrooms settings across the nation, ranging from the elementary schools where it was first developed to high school and college classrooms (e.g., see Aronson, Blaney, Stephan, Rosenfield, & Sikes, 1977; Perkins & Saris, 2001; Slavin, 1980). Researchers know that the technique is effective, incidentally, because it has been carefully studied using solid research techniques. For example, in many cases, students in different classrooms who are covering the same material are randomly assigned to receive either traditional instruction (no intervention) or instruction by means of the jigsaw technique. Studies in real classrooms have consistently revealed enhanced academic performance, reductions in stereotypes and prejudice, and improved social relations.

Aronson is not the only researcher to explore the merits of cooperative learning techniques. Shortly after Aronson and colleagues began to document the power of the jigsaw classroom, Robert Slavin, Elizabeth Cohen and others began to document the power of other kinds of cooperative learning programs (see Cohen & Lotan, 1995; Slavin, 1980; Slavin, Hurley, & Chamberlain, 2003). As of this writing, some kind of systematic cooperative learning technique had been applied in about 1500 schools across the country, and the technique appears to be picking up steam. Perhaps the only big question that remains about cooperative learning techniques such as the jigsaw classroom is why these techniques have not been implemented even more broadly than they already have.

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Have Your Children Had Their Anti-Smoking Shots?

Findings

In the early 1960s, social psychologist William McGuire published some classic papers showing that it is surprisingly easy to change people’s attitudes about things that we all wholeheartedly accept as true. For example, for speakers armed with a little knowledge of persuasion, it is remarkably easy to convince almost anyone that brushing one’s teeth is not such a great idea. McGuire’s insight into this curious phenomenon was that it is easy to change people’s minds about things that they have always taken for granted precisely because most people have little if any practice resisting attacks on attitudes that no one ever questions.

Taking this logic a little further, McGuire asked if it might be possible to train people to resist attacks on their beliefs by giving them practice at resisting arguments that they could easily refute. Specifically, McGuire drew an analogy between biological resistance to disease and psychological resistance to persuasion. Biological inoculation works by exposing people to a weakened version of an attacking agent such as a virus. People’s bodies produce antibodies that make them immune to the attacking agent, and when a full-blown version of the agent hits later in life, people win the biological battle against the full-blown disease. Would giving people a little practice fending off a weak attack on their attitudes make it easier for people to resist stronger attacks on their attitudes that come along later? The answer turns out to be yes. McGuire coined the phrase attitude inoculation to refer to the process of resisting strong persuasive arguments by getting practice fighting off weaker versions of the same arguments.
Significance

Once attitude inoculation had been demonstrated consistently in the laboratory, researchers decided to see if attitude inoculation could be used to help parents, teachers, and social service agents deal with a pressing social problem that kills about 440,000 people in the U.S. every year: cigarette smoking. Smoking seemed like an ideal problem to study because children below the age of 10 or 12 almost always report negative attitudes about smoking. However, in the face of peer pressure to be cool, many of these same children become smokers during middle to late adolescence.
Practical Application

Adolescents change their attitudes about smoking (and become smokers) because of the power of peer pressure. Researchers quickly realized that if they could inoculate children against pro-smoking arguments (by teaching them to resist pressure from their peers who believed that smoking is “cool”), they might be able to reduce the chances that children would become smokers. A series of field studies of attitude inoculation, conducted in junior high schools and high schools throughout the country, demonstrated that brief interventions using attitude inoculation dramatically reduced rates of teenage smoking. For instance, in an early study by Cheryl Perry and colleagues (1980), high school students inoculated junior high schools students against smoking by having the younger kids role-play the kind of situations they might actually face with a peer who pressured them to try a cigarette. For example, when a role-playing peer called a student “chicken” for not being willing to try an imaginary cigarette, the student practiced answers such as “I’d be a real chicken if I smoked just to impress you.” The kids who were inoculated in this way were about half as likely to become smokers as were kids in a very similar school who did not receive this special intervention.

Public service advertising campaigns have also made use of attitude inoculation theory by encouraging parents to help their children devise strategies for saying no when peers encourage them to smoke. Programs that have made whole or partial use of attitude inoculation programs have repeatedly documented the effectiveness of attitude inoculation to prevent teenage smoking, to curb illicit drug use, and to reduce teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. In comparison with old-fashioned interventions such as simple education about the risks of smoking or teenage pregnancy, attitude inoculation frequently reduces risky behaviors by 30-70% (see Botvin et al., 1995; Ellickson & Bell, 1990; Perry et al., 1980). As psychologist David Myers put it in his popular social psychology textbook, “Today any school district or teacher wishing to use the social psychological approach to smoking prevention can do so easily, inexpensively, and with the hope of significant reductions in future smoking rates and health costs.” So the next time you think about inoculating kids to keep them healthy, make sure you remember that one of the most important kinds of inoculation any kid can get is a psychological inoculation against tobacco.

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Early Intervention Can Improve Low-Income Children’s Cognitive Skills and Academic Achievement

National Head Start program conceptualized while psychologists were beginning to study preventive intervention for young children living in poverty.
Findings
As a group, children who live in poverty tend to perform worse in school than do children from more privileged backgrounds. For the first half of the 20th century, researchers attributed this difference to inherent cognitive deficits. At the time, the prevailing belief was that the course of child development was dictated by biology and maturation. By the early 1960s, this position gave way to the notion popularized by psychologists such as J. McVicker Hunt and Benjamin Bloom that intelligence could rather easily be shaped by the environment. There was very little research at the time to support these speculations but a few psychologists had begun to study whether environmental manipulation could prevent poor cognitive outcomes. Results of studies by psychologists Susan Gray and Rupert Klaus (1965), Martin Deutsch (1965) and Bettye Caldwell and former U.S. Surgeon General Julius Richmond (1968) supported the notion that early attention to physical and psychological development could improve cognitive ability.
Significance

These preliminary results caught the attention of Sargent Shriver, President Lyndon Johnson’s chief strategist in implementing an arsenal of antipoverty programs as part of the War on Poverty. His idea for a school readiness program for children of the poor focused on breaking the cycle of poverty. Shriver reasoned that if poor children could begin school on an equal footing with wealthier classmates, they would have a better of chance of succeeding in school and avoiding poverty in adulthood. He appointed a planning committee of 13 professionals in physical and mental health, early education, social work, and developmental psychology. Their work helped shape what is now known as the federal Head Start program.

The three developmental psychologists in the group were Urie Bronfenbrenner, Mamie Clark, and Edward Zigler. Bronfenbrenner convinced the other members that intervention would be most effective if it involved not just the child but the family and community that comprise the child-rearing environment. Parent involvement in school operations and administration were unheard of at the time, but it became a cornerstone of Head Start and proved to be a major contributor to its success. Zigler had been trained as a scientist and was distressed that the new program was not going to be field-tested before its nationwide launch. Arguing that it was not wise to base such a massive, innovative program on good ideas and concepts but little empirical evidence, he insisted that research and evaluation be part of Head Start. When he later became the federal official responsible for administering the program, Zigler (often referred to as the “father of Head Start”) worked to cast Head Start as a national laboratory for the design of effective early childhood services.

Although it is difficult to summarize the hundreds of empirical studies of Head Start outcomes, Head Start does seem to produce a variety of benefits for most children who participate. Although some studies have suggested that the intellectual advantages gained from participation in Head Start gradually disappear as children progress through elementary school, some of these same studies have shown more lasting benefits in the areas of school achievement and adjustment.
Practical Application

Head Start began as a great experiment that over the years has yielded prolific results. Some 20 million children and families have participated in Head Start since the summer of 1965; current enrollment approaches one million annually, including those in the new Early Head Start that serves families with children from birth to age 3. Psychological research on early intervention has proliferated, creating an expansive literature and sound knowledge base. Many research ideas designed and tested in the Head Start laboratory have been adapted in a variety of service delivery programs. These include family support services, home visiting, a credentialing process for early childhood workers, and education for parenthood. Head Start’s efforts in preschool education spotlighted the value of school readiness and helped spur today’s movement toward universal preschool.

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