The development of proficient communication skills in infants and toddlers is an important component to child development. A popular trend gaining national media attention is teaching sign language to babies with normal hearing whose parents also have normal hearing. Thirty-three websites were identified that advocate sign language for hearing children as a way of promoting better developmental outcomes. These sites make several claims about the positive benefits of teaching hearing infants and toddlers to sign, such as earlier communication, improved language development, increased IQ, reduced tantrums, higher self-esteem, and improved parent-child bonding. Without endorsing or disparaging these claims, the purpose of this article was to evaluate the strength of evidence cited on websites that promote products to teach young children to use sign language. Cumulatively, 82 pieces of evidence were cited by the websites as supporting research. However, over 90% of these citations were opinion articles without any supporting data or descriptions of products and only eight were empirical research studies relevant to the benefits of teaching sign language to young children with normal hearing. Unfortunately, there is not enough high-quality evidence cited on these websites to draw research-based conclusions about whether teaching sign language to young children with normal hearing results in better developmental outcomes.

Introductory psychology is a course that covers an extensive amount of content and often has a larger enrollment at universities that include it in their general education requirements, which can cause it to be a challenging course for many students (Homa, Teaching of Psychology, 2013, 40, p. 169). Research indicates that students need to engage in effective test-taking strategies and assess their deficiencies to be successful on exams (Fleming, Teaching of Psychology, 2002, 29, p. 115). One potential solution for overcoming these challenges, examined in the proposed article, is for instructors of introductory psychology to collaborate with cocurricular resources such as academic support services to provide individualized exam wrapper activities. The current study explores an example of this type of pedagogy, a technique referred to as Reflective Exam Analysis (REA). Participants in the archival data set included 895 university students who had taken introductory psychology over the last 3 years. The data compared students that participated in the REA intervention to those that did not. Four chi-squared tests of independence were conducted to compare proportions of student gains/losses from each exam to the next exam from within the introductory psychology course-comparing students who participated in the REA intervention to those that did not. Three of the tests demonstrated statistically significant differences. Results indicate students who took part in the REA intervention had significantly greater gains on exam scores than nonparticipants. These findings are discussed in terms of how this model could be utilized across large enrollment courses including other sections of introductory psychology or other discipline areas at various institutions to support student success.

Degree-seeking distance students, who often are from dis-advantaged demographics, are becoming increasingly common. Degrees earned through distance learning can be viewed as less acceptable by graduate schools and employers, yet undergraduate research can aid in employment and graduate or professional school applications. Therefore, it is important to offer distance research labs to distance-learning students. This article discusses a framework for social science distance labs based on a successful undergraduate distance lab. The framework is built on three principles: (1) identifying values, which can be used to guide decisions on lab direction; (2) overcoming obstacles based on identified values; and (3) playing to the online medium by gearing the lab toward research that can be conducted virtually.

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