Short-term memory,phonological processing,and reading ability

Verbal short-term memory deficits are a common characteristic of children with reading problems and may markedly increase the difficulty of learning to read. Previous work suggests that the basis of the short-term memory deficit may involve limitations in phonetic coding. In the present paper, a series of experiments are reviewed which examined the role of phonological processes in short-term memory. First, a developmental study is described in which a significant relationship was found between phonetic processes and verbal memory span, but not between phonetic processes and nonverbal memory. Second, additional studies are reviewed which collectively found that children with reading problems are less accurate at phonetic encoding than are good readers, and that performance on phonetic processing corresponds with verbal memory span. No reading group differences were obtained on nonverbal perception or memory tasks. These findings suggest that both developmental and individual differences in verbal memory span are related to the efficiency of phonological processes. Practical implications of current cognitive research are discussed. The research was supported by NIH Grant HD-01994 to Haskins Laboratories.     

Science, Worldviews, and Education

Whether science can reach conclusions with substantial worldview import, such as whether supernatural beings exist or the universe is purposeful, is a significant but unsettled aspect of science. For instance, various scientists, philosophers, and educators have explored the implications of science for a theistic worldview, with opinions spanning the spectrum from positive to neutral to negative. To delineate a mainstream perspective on science, seven key characterizations or “pillars” of science are adopted from position papers from the world’s largest scientific organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Based on those pillars and an examination of scientific method, I argue that the presuppositions and reasoning of science can and should be worldview independent, but empirical and public evidence from the sciences and humanities can support conclusions that are worldview distinctive. I also critique several problematic perspectives: asserting that science can say nothing about worldviews and the opposite extreme of insisting that science decisively supports one particular worldview; weakening science so severely that it lacks truth claims; and burdening science with unnecessary presuppositions. Worldview-distinctive conclusions based on empirical evidence are suitable for individual convictions and public discussions, but not for institutional endorsements and scientific literacy requirements.     

Detecting,understanding, and controlling for cheating on tests

Recent research and practice in detecting and controlling for cheating on objective tests are reviewed briefly, and results of a small survey of attitudes and practices concerning cheating are summarized. Two computer programs, Cheat-1 and Cheat-2, prepared by the writer to detect cheating by error-similarity analysis procedures, are described. The use of multiple answer-sheet forms and success with this method in controlling for cheating on classroom tests are described. Other matters concerned with cheating, such as cheating by teachers to improve students' scores, are also considered.     

“Fácilis descensus Averni” Mind,Brain, Education,and Ethics: Highway to Hell,Stairway to Heaven,or Passing Dead End?*

Are human beings born unequal when it comes to ethics? Or are ethical standards acquired? Or both nature and nurture? Neuroscience is on its way to discovering biological underpinnings of ethics in our brains. Whatever the upcoming findings on this front will be, our philosophical, political, and educational views, and even the way we look at ourselves as a species, could soon be radically challenged, if not altered. AENEIS, the special section of this journal dedicated to Educational Neuroscience and Ethics, seeks to shed light on the crucial and sometimes frightening questions and answers we are to be confronted with. Starting with Charles Lang (“Science, Education, and the Ideology of ‘How”’) and Zachary Stein (“On the Difference Between Designing Children and Raising Them: Ethics and the Use of Educationally Oriented Biotechnology”), we are embarking on a fascinating but dangerous learning journey. To navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, extreme caution is highly recommended.     

Effects of guidance,sequence, and attribute-treatment interactions on learning,retention, and transfer of hierarchically ordered skills

An investigation was made of the effects of amount of guidance, sequence of instruction, and attribute-treatment interactions on speed of learning, retention, and transfer of ten intellectual skills that form part of a learning hiererchy and which are commonly part of secondary school physics courses. Four clearly-defined instructional methods were used; the methods form a linear scale from least to most guidance. It was found that the numbers of errors made in reaching a criterion performance on the skills decreased as the amount of guidance was increased, but transfer and retention were unaffected. Two sequence styles were used, which were both consistent with the requirement that no skill should be taught before the skills that were subordinate to it in the learning hierarchy. Form of sequence had no effect on speed of learning, retention, or transfer, and there was no interaction between sequence and amount of guidance. A novel method was employed to search for the presence of any interaction between attributes of learners and the amount of guidance. None was found. It is concluded that a maximum of guidance can be used to teach intellectual skills to all learners with no negative effect on retention and transfer. It is suggested that variables other than amount of guidance or sequence are more likely to affect a learner's retention or transfer of a skill. Finally, patterns of retention of skills that are connected in the learning hierarchy were found to be contrary to an earlier result. The patterns suggest that a skill in a learning hierarchy cannot be recalled unless its relevant subordinate skills are also recalled.     

Choice, delay, probability, and conditioned reinforcement

The hyperbolic-decay model is a mathematical expression of the relation between delay and reinforcer value. The model has been used to predict choices in discrete-trial experiments on delay-amount tradeoffs, on preference for variable over fixed delays, and on probabilistic reinforcement. Experiments manipulating the presence or absence of conditioned reinforcers on trials that end without primary reinforcement have provided evidence that the hyperbolic-decay model actually predicts the strength of conditioned reinforcers rather than the strength of delayed primary reinforcers. The model states that the strength of a conditioned reinforcer is inversely related to the time spent in its presence before a primary reinforcer is delivered. A possible way to integrate the model with Grace’s (1994) contextual-choice model for concurrent-chain schedules is presented. Also discussed are unresolved difficulties in determining exactly when a stimulus will or will not serve as a conditioned reinforcer.     

Aptitude, instruction, and individual development

Education is viewed as an aptitude development program. Common vs. individual goals with respect to aptitude and achievement are contrasted and some educational myths about aptitude are rejected. The concept of aptitude is revised to represent individual differences in personsituation interaction in learning and development. Research on cognitive and motivational aptitudes in relation to instruction is then briefly reviewed, and suggestions for a unified developmental differential approach to educational research are offered.     

ORGANIZING,MANAGING, AND EVALUATING SERVICE-LEARNING PROJECTS

As educators work to develop methods to capture the attention of greater numbers of students, they are finding merit in some of the tried-and-true methods of the past. Service-learning is one of those methods with a sound reputation that is now enjoying a comeback. Previously known as experiential learning, service-learning expands on the best aspects of volunteerism and classical internships. Service-learning projects are beneficial for students, faculty members, site providers, and clients. Regardless of whether projects are loosely constructed with little oversight or highly prescribed and closely monitored, a systematic approach to organization, management, and evaluation is important. This article offers an adaptable framework for educators who wish to incorporate new or improve existing service-learning experiences within their gerontology programs.     

Technology Readiness, Learning Goals, and eLearning: Searching for Synergy

More and more business schools are offering classes online or classes using a mix of face‐to‐face and online elements. In this article, we focus on how technology readiness and learning‐goal orientation influence students' preference toward these mixed classes. We conducted a large‐scale survey to determine whether students who are technology ready would place higher utility on enrolling in mixed classes and/or whether there exists a participation bias such that students with low learning‐goal orientation place higher utility on enrolling in mixed classes. We found that overall students who are more technology ready do place higher utility on enrolling in mixed classes, but that learning‐goal orientation does not influence this decision. We conclude with implications and recommendations for business schools that are interested in offering mixed classes.     

Communities,families, and inclusion

Widespread interest in the concept of inclusion for young children with disabilities has been focused primarily on inclusion in day care and classroom settings. While these contexts provide important opportunities for inclusion, many other community contexts are also important. Interviews with families of children with and without disabilities were analyzed to identify factors that facilitated or served as barriers to children's inclusion in community settings. These factors are described in terms of their application to children with and without disabilities and the extent to which they were reflected in communities of varying size and various income levels. Results are interpreted with respect to an ecological model and are discussed in terms of their implications for intervention.     

Teacher Education in Italy, Germany, England, Sweden and Finland

This article presents a brief analysis of teacher education in five European countries: Italy, Germany, England, Sweden and Finland. In the post-industrial world, the sense of teaching has profoundly changed, influenced by a rapidly evolving socio-economic context.
The responses given by each country are different, but two tendencies emerge: on the one hand, the English model, which seeks to make a teacher a faithful executor with regard to centrally decided learning objectives; on the other, the Nordic model that conceives the teacher as a 'fully-fledged' professional.
From the point of view of the sustainability and of the safeguard of the educative mission of the school, the second model, though with all the difficulties that its efficacious realisation entails, presents some advantages when compared to the first. The article concludes with some considerations on the need to conceive the reform of teacher education from a systemic point of view, in the context of a global change of national school systems, where the autonomy of the single schools plays a role of paramount importance.     

Time,things, teacher,pupil: engaging with what matters

This article presents an empirical study of everyday life in school and a methodological attempt to emphasise children’s views and to find ways other than representation to analyse them. The empirical portion took place in a Finnish elementary school in which the author was the class teacher. The ten-year-olds in the class engaged in an unstructured classroom diary activity in which they freely wrote their observations, thoughts and stories. The study takes a relational materialist approach to the children’s writings focusing on various moments and gatherings in the classroom as assemblages and illustrates how time, things, teacher and pupils are co-produced in them. Temporality and materiality are also considered in relation to research methodologies. Research with children is reconceptualised based on the focus on mattering. The analysis is enacted as a non-linear and nomadic process through retelling and responding to the children’s texts. It highlights particular situations, unstabilities, ‘tiny’ things and the complexities of children’s lives in educational environments.     

Narratives, choices, alienation, and identity: learning from an elementary science teacher

As we contemplate on teacher identity research, there is a need to place a teacher’s narratives or story-lines at the center of that work. In this forum, in response to the insightful commentary from Stephen Ritchie and Maria Iñez Mafra Goulart and Eduardo Soares, I place a greater emphasis on understanding Daisy’s narratives from an existing social identity framework. Narratives tell us intricate and complex actions that a teacher has taken both personally and professionally. Additionally, narratives help us see implicit nature of identity explicitly. Therefore, a greater focus has to be placed on interactions and utterances of a teacher to make sense of who they are and what they do as expressed by their own words (identity and action). Finally, I join with Ritchie and Goulart and Soares to advocate that identity research needs to include participants as co-researchers and co-authors as identities are very personal and complex to be fully understood by the outsiders (researchers).     

Retrieval, automaticity, vocabulary elaboration, orthography (RAVE-O): a comprehensive, fluency-based reading intervention program

The most important implication of the double-deficit hypothesis (Wolf & Bowers, in this issue) concerns a new emphasis on fluency and automaticity in intervention for children with developmental reading disabilities. The RAVE-O (Retrieval, Automaticity, Vocabulary Elaboration, Orthography) program is an experimental, fluency-based approach to reading intervention that is designed to accompany a phonological analysis program. In an effort to address multiple possible sources of dysfluency in readers with disabilities, the program involves comprehensive emphases both on fluency in word attack, word identification, and comprehension and on automaticity in underlying componential processes (e.g., phonological, orthographic, semantic, and lexical retrieval skills). The goals, theoretical principles, and applied activities of the RAVE-O curriculum are described with particular stress on facilitating the development of rapid orthographic pattern recognition and on changing children's attitudes toward language.     

The unintended consequences of school inspection: the prevalence of inspection side-effects in Austria,the Czech Republic,England, Ireland,the Netherlands,Sweden, and Switzerland

It has been widely documented that accountability systems, including school inspections, bring with them unintended side effects. These unintended effects are often negative and have the potential to undo the intended positive effects. However the empirical evidence is limited. Through a European comparative study we have had the rare opportunity to collect empirical evidence and study the effects (both intended and unintended) of school inspections (a key system of accountability) in a systematic way, across seven countries. We present the findings of the unintended effects in this paper. Survey self-report responses from school principals in each country, with differing school inspection systems, are analysed to measure the prevalence of these unintended effects and to investigate the part played by pressure to do well in inspections. A key finding is that increasing pressure in school inspection systems is associated with the undesired effect of the narrowing and refocusing of the curriculum and instructional strategies. We also show that a proportion of school principals admit to misrepresenting the school in data sent to the inspectorate and show evidence for formalisation/proceduralisation (excessive focus on records) and ossification (fear of experimentation in teaching), although these factors are less related to changes in pressure.     

Tools for Knowledge Analysis, Synthesis, and Sharing

Change and complexity are creating a need for increasing levels of literacy in science and technology. Presently, we are beginning to provide students with clear contexts in which to learn, including clearly written text, visual displays and maps, and more effective instruction. We are also beginning to give students tools that promote their own literacy by helping them to interact with the learning context. These tools include peer-group skills as well as strategies to analyze text and to indicate comprehension by way of text summaries and concept maps. Even with these tools, more appears to be needed. Disparate backgrounds and languages interfere with the comprehension and the sharing of knowledge. To meet this need, two new tools are proposed. The first tool fractures language ontologically, giving all learners who use it a language to talk about what has, and what has not, been uttered in text or talk about the world. The second fractures language epistemologically, giving those involved in working with text or on the world around them a way to talk about what they have done and what remains to be done. Together, these tools operate as a two- tiered knowledge representation of knowledge. This representation promotes both an individual meta-cognitive and a social meta-cognitive approach to what is known and to what is not known, both ontologically and epistemologically. Two hypotheses guide the presentation: If the tools are taught during early childhood, children will be prepared to master science and technology content. If the tools are used by both students and those who design and deliver instruction, the learning of such content will be accelerated.     

Modeling,Praise, and Criticism in Teaching Empathic Responding

This study employs a factorial design to investigate the efficacy of all possible combinations of modeling, praise, and criticism as a means of teaching empathic responding to counselor trainees. Measures of empathy were taken on 64 female introductory psychology students at the beginning of an experimental session and following each of two training segments. Results indicate a significant effect for modeling and stage of training. There was a significant interaction between modeling and stage of training such that subjects in the modeling conditions were rated higher in empathy than those in the no-modeling condition at the mid- and postmeasure but not at the premeasure. Results are in agreement with one previously published study but are inconsistent with two others. Discussion focuses on the critical elements of effective feedback techniques.     

Ethnicity, ethics, and the deaf-world

This article is concerned with ethical aspects of the relations between language minorities using signed languages (called the Deaf-World) and the larger societies that engulf them. The article aims to show that such minorities have the properties of ethnic groups, and that an unsuitable construction of the Deaf-World as a disability group has led to programs of the majority that discourage Deaf children from acquiring the language and culture of the Deaf-World and that aim to reduce the number of Deaf births-programs that are unethical from an ethnic group perspective. Four reasons not to construe the Deaf-World as a disability group are advanced: Deaf people themselves do not believe they have a disability; the disability construction brings with it needless medical and surgical risks for the Deaf child; it also endangers the future of the Deaf-World; finally, the disability construction brings bad solutions to real problems because it is predicated on a misunderstanding.     

Advanced Education-Past, Present, and Future

A brief historical review of education beyond the baccalaureate with particular emphasis on graduate study in electrical engineering is followed by an examination of present trends. Consideration is given to such topics as admission requirements, programs of study, graduation requirements, and residence requirements as they affect students. Staff factors such as qualifications, load, compensation, research, and advancement are considered. The problems that must be examined to assure a healthy future are listed to stimulate continuing discussion.     

以言行事观念下的句法学、语义学和语用学

语力逻辑系统既包括本体层面,与真及成真条件有关,也包括认知层面,与以言行事的语力和行为有关.语力逻辑系统可以通过往标准的逻辑系统中添加施事性算子而得到.通过提供一个联系着以言行事的行为的理性承诺的解释,并且通过形成以施事性行为为前提和结论的自然演绎的推理系统,这类算子标示了以言行事的语力.本文利用一个简单的处理了断言、否定、假设的语力逻辑系统,证明经过恰当的考虑,对以言行事的语力和理性承诺的研究属于语义学,而不属于语用学.这一论证依赖于这样的事实,即表达式的赋值函项可被同时用于处理语力逻辑系统的本体和认知层面,在这两种情况下,这些函项都为建立恰当性和完全性的结果提供了基础.句法学研究的是表达式的结构,而语义学关心的则是语言使用者的意义,无论这些意义是不是习规上的意义.剩下的第三项研究,即所谓语用学,考察的是语言行为的意义是如何被说话者传达给听者的.