Impact of severity of autism and intervention time‐input on child outcomes: comparison across several early interventions

In this article, written by Phil Reed and Lisa Osborne, both from Swansea University, the impact of severity of autism, and the time‐input of the treatment programme, on the outcome effectiveness for four early interventions for individuals on the autism spectrum was explored. The four interventions studied were applied behaviour analysis (ABA), special nursery, an adapted portage intervention, and a local authority approach. Sixty‐six children (aged from two years six months to four years) were studied over nine months, in terms of their intellectual, educational and adaptive behavioural functioning. Children undergoing the ABA approach demonstrated greater gains in functioning (especially in educational functioning). There were differences in the way that autism severity and intervention time‐input impacted on the different early intervention programmes. For special nursery, portage and local authority approaches, the gains made by the children were inversely related to the severity of their autism and directly related to time‐input. In contrast, the converse was true for the ABA approach. These data are discussed with respect to their implications for choosing an intervention strategy for a child on the autism spectrum.     

The role of word decoding,vocabulary knowledge and meta‐cognitive knowledge in monolingual and bilingual low‐achieving adolescents' reading comprehension

In this study, we analysed the relationships between word decoding, vocabulary knowledge, meta‐cognitive knowledge and reading comprehension in low‐achieving adolescents and examined whether the strength of these relationships differed between Grade 7 and 9 students and between monolingual and bilingual students. Tests were administered to 328 students in Dutch prevocational education. Multilevel analyses showed positive effects of vocabulary and meta‐cognitive knowledge on reading comprehension that were consistent across grades and across monolinguals and bilinguals. Additionally, we found a positive effect of word decoding for seventh graders, but no effect for ninth graders. There was also a positive effect of bilingualism on reading comprehension when vocabulary differences were controlled. This finding suggests that for bilingual students, reading comprehension is hampered by limited second‐language vocabulary knowledge and that these students will profit more from an increase in vocabulary knowledge than their monolingual peers. The results underline the importance of vocabulary and meta‐cognitive instruction for low‐achieving adolescents.     

Giving account of our (mobile) selves: embodied and relational notions of academic privilege in the international classroom

ABSTRACT

Contemporary models of academic work reflect a process of compression given that busy (time compression), jet setting (space compression) scholars constitute the norm of academic success. Valuable reflections from mobile academics are available, and yet, such narratives are often confined to individual voices and perspectives. In this paper, we endeavor to present a collaborative analysis of our shared experience as short-term foreign experts at a Chinese Normal University, simultaneously embracing and being troubled by our institutional and individual desires to become global. Throughout our analysis, we focus on the contrasts of our national, racial and class identities of origin and those we enacted while teaching in China. In doing so, we pay attention to the literal and metaphorical meaning of mobility. Our project explores ways in which mobility is(n’t) always privileged, as well as whether and how we experience time – space compression contrasting our class, race, nationality and sexual orientation differences.     

Families that read: A time‐diary analysis of young people's and parents' reading

Parents can play an important role in assisting their children to learn to read, and can act as good role models in promoting reading behaviour. While there has been a raft of research on the impact of parents as teachers, there has been little empirical analysis on the impact of parents in modelling reading. Addressing this gap in the literature with time‐diary data, this paper presents a study of the association between parents' and young people's reading in the United Kingdom. The paper finds a strong association between parents' and young people's reading concentrated in households where parents are observed to read for more than 30 minutes per day. In addition, mothers' reading is associated primarily with girls' reading (especially in lone‐mother households), while fathers' reading is strongly associated with boys' reading. Some implications for campaigns to encourage young people's reading through increased parental reading are discussed.     

Ideational border crossings: rethinking the politics of knowledge within and across disciplines

This article explores the merits, possibilities and difficulties of making intra and trans-disciplinary ‘border crossings’ essentially of an ideational kind. Drawing ideas from complexity literature, the article lauds the potential of ‘concept studies’ as means of making such crossings and addressing enduring issues (e.g., of equity and health) within education, Physical Education (PE) and Health. The article suggests, however, that the culture of neoliberalism and extant power relations may prohibit rather than nurture and encourage any willing exchange of ideas or sharing of resource, presaging border closure rather than ‘border crossing’. Talk of the latter in periods of austerity may become shorthand for ‘rationalisation’, offering new language for a newly invigorated politics of erasure, rather than announcing desire to nurture and actualise new voices and new ways of sharing ideas towards investigating and dismantling enduring social hierarchies and trends.     

Consultant's guide for the use of time‐out in the preschool and elementary classroom

During school‐based consultation, school psychologists must often help consultees learn how to implement various behavior change strategies. One of the most effective behavior change strategies for preschool and elementary children is time‐out. Although time‐out has been shown to be effective for reducing a variety of problem behaviors, lack of knowledge regarding the parameters and procedures of time‐out has led to its ineffective use in the classroom and low ratings of acceptability by teachers. This article provides information on the time‐out research in hopes of enabling school psychologists to use, and train others to use, time‐out more effectively when indicated by the data from a behavioral or functional assessment. The guide presented here may also serve as a heuristic for those wishing to conduct research on the use of time‐out in the classroom. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The reproduction of privilege: young women,the family and private education

The paper examines processes of cultural production and reproduction among members of the elite and upper-middle classes. Drawing on findings from a study of private education in England, it explores the utility of a conceptual framework to examine how practices in and across different sites may be reproductive of various forms of ‘privilege’. Three domains in particular – family, the school and individual young women’s projects of the self – together shape key meanings and orientations informing young women’s lives. These meanings and orientations in turn connect to ‘privileging practices’, both within each domain and beyond. The paper analyses data from three young women in one of the schools studied to illustrate how the framework may be used to examine privately educated young women’s different orientations to the present and the future. Findings point to some of the processes through which class and gender privilege may be variably reproduced.     

Academic vocabulary and reading comprehension: exploring the relationships across measures of vocabulary knowledge

Reading and Writing - This study examined the relationship between knowledge of academic vocabulary and reading comprehension in data contributed by 5855 middle school students. Each student...     

Measuring knowledge integration: Validation of four‐year assessments

Science education needs valid, authentic, and efficient assessments. Many typical science assessments primarily measure recall of isolated information. This paper reports on the validation of assessments that measure knowledge integration ability among middle school and high school students. The assessments were administered to 18,729 students in five states. Rasch analyses of the assessments demonstrated satisfactory item fit, item difficulty, test reliability, and person reliability. The study showed that, when appropriately designed, knowledge integration assessments can be balanced between validity and reliability, authenticity and generalizability, and instructional sensitivity and technical quality. Results also showed that, when paired with multiple‐choice items and scored with an effective scoring rubric, constructed‐response items can achieve high reliabilities. Analyses showed that English language learner status and computer use significantly impacted students' science knowledge integration abilities. Students who took the assessment online, which matched the format of content delivery, performed significantly better than students who took the paper‐and‐pencil version. Implications and future directions of research are noted, including refining curriculum materials to meet the needs of diverse students and expanding the range of topics measured by knowledge integration assessments. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 1079–1107, 2011     

Issues in the assessment of literacy‐related difficulties across language backgrounds: a cross‐linguistic comparison

This paper focused on the assessment of phonological skills amongst children with developmental dyslexia. Findings from assessments of English and Hungarian monolingual children with and without literacy deficits and bilingual Filipino children with and without literacy deficits in English indicated that performance on phonological‐based tasks often used in dyslexia assessment batteries was influenced by the language background. Monolingual English children with poor literacy skills showed characteristic deficits in most areas of phonological ability, whereas Hungarian counterparts showed little evidence of such difficulties. Bilingual Filipino children with poor English literacy skills showed equivalent profiles to their monolingual counterparts only when assessments in both English and Filipino were considered. The paper discusses difficulties of generalising assessment procedures from one language context to another.     

Teaching within and against the circle of privilege: reforming teachers,reforming schools

Three decades of neo-liberal education in western countries, particularly English-speaking countries, have not served most children well. The evidence is mounting that the neo-liberal experiment has been a failure on many grounds, not least because of its deprofessionalizing effect on teachers. The disciplinary effects of neo-liberal policy frameworks on education remain powerful, but there are numerous teachers and schools who have resisted the regime of managerialism and accountability. This paper celebrates such activists. It argues that the internal focus on the delivery of instruction and test-taking inside schools ignores the point that the major influences on the school performance of children exist outside rather than inside the school. The paper argues that young people who have been ‘othered’ and put at a disadvantage by the neo-liberal education system deserve to be treated in a more dignified, engaged and respectful manner than seems to be the case within the ideology of accountability and top-down managerialism.     

Development of the International Ocean Literacy Survey: measuring knowledge across the world.

The Ocean Literacy movement began in the U.S. in the early 2000s, and has recently become an international effort. The focus on marine environmental issues and marine education is increasing, and yet it has been difficult to show progress of the ocean literacy movement, in part, because no widely adopted measurement tool exists. The International Ocean Literacy Survey (IOLS) aims to serve as a community-based measurement tool that allows the comparison of levels of ocean knowledge across time and location. The IOLS has already been subjected to two rounds of field testing. The results from the second testing, presented in this paper, provide evidence that the IOLS is psychometrically valid and reliable, and has a single factor structure across 17 languages and 24 countries. The analyses have also guided the construction of a third improved version that will be further tested in 2018.     

Measuring knowledge of natural selection: A comparison of the CINS,an open‐response instrument,and an oral interview

Growing recognition of the central importance of fostering an in‐depth understanding of natural selection has, surprisingly, failed to stimulate work on the development and rigorous evaluation of instruments that measure knowledge of it. We used three different methodological tools, the Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection (CINS), a modified version of Bishop and Anderson's (Bishop and Anderson [1990] Journal of Research in Science Teaching 27: 415–427) open‐response test that we call the Open Response Instrument (ORI), and an oral interview derived from both instruments, to measure biology majors' understanding of and alternative conceptions about natural selection. We explored how these instruments differentially inform science educators about the knowledge and alternative conceptions their students harbor. Overall, both the CINS and ORI provided excellent replacements for the time‐consuming process of oral interviews and produced comparable measures of key concept diversity and, to a lesser extent, key concept frequency. In contrast, the ORI and CINS produced significantly different measures of both alternative conception diversity and frequency, with the ORI results completely concordant with oral interview results. Our study indicated that revisions of both the CINS and ORI are necessary because of numerous instrument items characterized by low discriminability, high and/or overlapping difficulty, and mismatches with the sample. While our results revealed that both instruments are valid and generally reliable measures of knowledge and alternative conceptions about natural selection, a test combining particular components of both instruments—a modified version of the CINS to test for key concepts, and a modified version of the ORI to assess student alternative conceptions—should be used until a more approprite instrument is developed and rigorously evaluated. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 1131–1160, 2008     

Community,culture and identity: geography,the National Curriculum and Wales

ABSTRACT

The 1988 Education Reform Act legislated for a National Curriculum not for one nation but for two, Wales and England. This article reviews the way in which attempts to develop a distinctive curriculum in Wales for one subject, geography, were thwarted by the dominance among key policy‐makers in England of views about the study of place which were unsympathetic to the idea of the school curriculum being a vehicle for the development of a sense of community and national identity. Drawing on evidence from a survey of secondary school geography teachers in Wales, it considers the extent to which the teaching of geography is seen by teachers as a means of achieving such educational goals.     

Predicting growth of nonword reading and letter‐sound knowledge following rime‐ and phoneme‐based teaching

The present study sought to extend a recent study by Savage, Carless and Stuart , by looking at the pre‐test phonological skills that predicted improvements in letter‐sound knowledge and nonword reading. Results showed overall that phoneme manipulation predicted improvements in nonword reading and letter‐sound knowledge even when pre‐test scores on the respective dependent variables were controlled. Pre‐test letter‐sound knowledge was an independent predictor of nonsense word reading. Overall, onset‐rime manipulation did not add to the prediction of outcome. Onset‐rime manipulation predicted decoding improvements in a subgroup where children were exposed to both rime and phoneme‐based teaching.