Phonological awareness and morphological awareness: differential associations to regular and irregular word recognition in early Korean Hangul readers

A large battery of reading related skills were orally administered to 111 4-year old and 118 5-year old Korean kindergartners, who were also tested on reading of regular and irregular Korean Hangul words. In regression equations, speeded naming was uniquely associated with reading of both regular and irregular words. In contrast, only the three measures of phonological awareness at the levels of phoneme onset, coda, and syllable uniquely explained Hangul regular word recognition, whereas only morphological awareness consistently explained irregular word recognition. Results suggest somewhat different cognitive demands for reading of regular and irregular words, based on the dual-route model, in Korean Hangul.     

When Modern Physics Meets Nature of Science

Science & Education - The social reaction to the recent detection of the Higgs boson and gravitational waves provided evidence that public interest in modern physics has reached a high point....     

Thinking Counterfactually Supports Children’s Evidence Evaluation in Causal Learning

Often, the evidence we observe is consistent with more than one explanation. How do learners discriminate among candidate causes? The current studies examine whether counterfactuals help 5-year olds (N = 120) select between competing hypotheses and compares the effectiveness of these prompts to a related scaffold. In Experiment 1, counterfactuals support evidence evaluation, leading children to privilege and extend the cause that accounted for more data. In Experiment 2, the hypothesis that accounted for the most evidence was pitted against children’s prior beliefs. Children who considered alternative outcomes privileged the hypothesis that accounted for more observations, whereas those who explained relied on prior beliefs. Findings demonstrate that counterfactuals recruit attention to disambiguating evidence and outperform explanation when data contrast with existing beliefs.     

App-Based Manipulatives and Explicit Instruction to Support Division with Remainders

ABSTRACT

In theory, both virtual manipulatives and explicit instruction are viable options to support students with disabilities as they learn mathematics. This study explored the effect of a treatment package—an app-based virtual manipulative (Cuisenaire® Rods) in conjunction with explicit instruction—on students’ acquisition and generalization of solving problems involving division of whole numbers with remainders. Three middle school students with disabilities participated in this multiple baseline, multiple probe across participants single case design study. Each of the students acquired the mathematical behavior of being able to solve division with remainders problems. In other words, a functional relation existed between the intervention package of explicit instruction and the Cuisenaire® Rods app-based manipulative and students’ accuracy in solving division with remainders problems. Yet, two students failed to generalize the skill without the explicit instruction and use of the app-based manipulative.     

The Politics of Emotions in ELT: Structure of Feeling and Anxiety of Korean English Teachers

ABSTRACT

Using the notion of structure of feeling by Raymond Williams, this article seeks to illuminate an ideological understanding of Korean English teachers’ anxiety and deep sense of insecurity in English language teaching (ELT). Through a discussion of how their anxiety is grounded deeply within unequal social relations and how they reframe their anxiety through critical reflection on the cultural and ideological bias of their own anxiety, it points out the intricate relationship between ideology and emotion; teachers’ emotions are shaped by dominant ideologies that constitute the social structures constraining their position as teachers, while their engagement with those emotions also enables their self-transformation towards gaining confidence as teachers. The results of the study emphasise the tension between social structure and agency in teachers’ emotional experiences and discuss implications for teacher education and development.     

Finite element modeling for analysis of cracked cylindrical pipes

The characteristic properties of shell element with similar shapes are used to generate a so-called super element for the analysis of the crack problems for cylindrical pressure vessels. The formulation is processed by matrix condensation without the involvement of special treatment. This method can deal with various singularity problems and it also presents excellent results to crack problems for cylindrical shell. Especially,the knowledge of the kind of singular order is not necessary in super element generation; it is very economical in terms of computer memory and programming. This method also exhibits versatility to solve the problem of kinked crack at cylindrical shell.     

The roles of cognitive and language abilities in predicting decoding and reading comprehension: comparisons of dyslexia and specific language impairment

This study aimed to (a) explore the roles of cognitive and language variables in predicting reading abilities of two groups of individuals with reading disabilities (i.e., dyslexia and specific language impairment) and (b) examine which variable(s) is the most predictive in differentiating two groups. Inclusion/exclusion criteria applied to categorize the two groups yielded a total of 63 participants (n = 44 for the dyslexia; n = 19 for the specific language impairment). A stepwise multiple regression approach was conducted to examine which cognitive and/or language variables made the largest contribution to reading abilities (i.e., Phonetic Decoding Efficiency, Word Attack, Sight Word Efficiency, and Passage Comprehension). Results revealed that there were significant differences in which measures of cognitive and language ability predicted individuals with dyslexia and speech and language impairments reading ability, showing that the cognitive and language variables underlying their difficulty with reading abilities were not the same across the two groups. A discriminant function analysis showed that a measure of Verbal Comprehension, Phonological Awareness, and Phonetic Decoding Efficiency can be used to differentiate the two groups. These findings support the tenet that dyslexia and specific language impairment are two subgroups of reading disabilities and that thorough diagnostic evaluations are needed to differentiate between these two subgroups. Distinctions of this nature are central to determining the type and intensity of language-based interventions.     

Examining Word Factors and Child Factors for Acquisition of Conditional Sound-Spelling Consistencies: A Longitudinal Study

It has been suggested that children acquire spelling by picking up conditional sound-spelling consistencies. To examine this hypothesis, we investigated how variation in word characteristics (words that vary systematically in terms of phoneme-grapheme correspondences) and child factors (individual differences in the ability to extract phonological, morphological, and orthographic information) simultaneously relates to spelling accuracy. A total of 143 Korean-speaking children were assessed on spelling 4 times from prekindergarten to kindergarten. Words in the spelling task systematically varied in orthographic transparency stemming from phonological shifts. At Time 1 they were also assessed on emergent literacy or linguistic awareness skills (e.g., phonological awareness, morphological awareness, letter-name knowledge). Explanatory item response model revealed that (a) growth trajectories of spelling differed as a function of orthographic transparency, and (b) the effect of emergent literacy skills on words of varying transparency differed as a function of children’s emergent literacy skill levels and time.     

Effects of embedding a problem-posing-based learning guiding strategy into interactive e-books on students’ learning performance and higher order thinking tendency

Owing to the popularity of tablet computers and smart phones, e-books have become an important medium for both formal and informal learning. However, conventional e-books are mainly designed to provide information in the form of multimedia, implying that students spend most of their time memorizing and comprehending what they read from e-books, while seldom engaging in higher order thinking. In this study, a problem-posing framework is proposed for developing an interactive e-book for guiding students to observe and pose questions. An experiment on an elementary school natural science course was conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The participants were 46 fourth-grade students. From the experimental results, it was found that the problem-posing-guiding interactive e-book can significantly improve the students’ learning achievements, critical thinking tendency, and deep motive. It was also found that the proposed approach did not increase the students’ cognitive load owing to the provision of proper supports during the problem-posing process, which has generally been identified as a challenging task.