Was grenzt das Kompetenzkonzept von etablierten Kategorien wie Fähigkeit,Fertigkeit oder Intelligenz ab?

Following a specification of the concept “competence” as it is applied in the context of the priority program we place recent efforts on competence assessment within established distinctions. Besides Cronbach’s differentiation of typical behavior and maximal effort and Cattell’s demarcation of test and questionnaire data additional discriminations against broader terms such as “ability”, “skill”, “talent” but also “intelligence” are desirable and necessary. The utility of the concept of competence relative to established terms needs to be demonstrated unequivocally in the future.     

Lectura y coherencia textual (análisis de un texto narrativo)

Los autores proponen la Lingüística Textual para un reenfoque de las actividades de análisis de texto en la enseñanza. Como modelo de aplicación de esa propuesta se expone un caso de análisis textual de una nanación en el que se localizan los mecanismos de coherencia y se generan preguntas de control y ejercicios para que el alumno desarrolle estrategias de lectura.     

The Interplay of Intimations and Implementations: Generating New Discourse With New Symbolic Tools

The analysis of the Batteries and AIDS episodes presented in this article is guided by the assumption that thinking can be conceptualized as an activity of communication, and learning can be regarded as modifying and extending one's discursive ways. Within this framework, 1 of the aims of mathematical learning is to become skillful in the discursive use of designated symbolic artifacts supposed to mediate solving certain types of problems. My analysis of the learning episodes is aimed at uncovering the ways in which the discursive uses of such new symbolic tools were interactively constructed by the students. I argue that the construction process is extremely complex because of a certain inherent circularity of this process. The analysis reveals that this difficulty may be overcome by the gradual dialectic adjustment of former discursive habits to new contexts. The adjustment happens gradually, through cycles of intimations about the applicability of the old habits followed by implementations in which this applicability is examined. This intricate interplay of intimations and implementations is found in both the Batteries and the AIDS episodes and is presented in detail in the article. I also show that, with time, students significantly increased their mastery of this particular discursive mechanism.     

Rapid Response Skills Training

Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College's (MGCCC) long-term commitment to providing workforce training in a post-Katrina environment became a catalyst for designing short-term flexible educational opportunities. Providing nationally recognized skills training for the recovery/rebuilding of communities challenged the college to develop innovative, rapid response programs for the construction and health care industries.     

Dutch Dyslexia in Adulthood: Core Features and Variety

This study aimed to explore how alphabetic readers learn to read Chinese. First-year Chinese beginning learners who are skilled English readers were tested for their sensitivity to the visual-orthographic structures of Chinese characters. The study also explored the effect of the frequency of the characters in their curriculum on performance of a lexical decision and naming task. The students' linguistic knowledge about the characters was also tested. Results showed that the beginning learners were sensitive to the structural complexity of characters, they accepted simple characters more quickly and more accurately than compound characters, and they responded faster and more accurately to high-frequency than to low-frequency characters. Sensitivity to the structural composition of the character was also revealed: The learners rejected noncharacters containing illegal radical forms faster and more accurately than those containing legal radical forms in illegal positions, which in turn were rejected faster and more accurately than those containing legal radical forms in legal positions. A significant frequency effect was also found in the naming task, though the effect of structural complexity was not significant. These results suggest that perceptual learning plays an important role in early nonalphabetic learning by alphabetic readers. Both cross-writing system differences and second-language status may have an impact on such learning.