Should the Simple View of Reading Include a Fluency Component?

The Simple View of Reading states that reading comprehension is the product of word recognition and listening comprehension. Whereas much research has focused on word recognition accuracy, recent attention has been directed toward word recognition fluency. The current study investigated whether a separate fluency component should be added to the Simple View of Reading. A battery of reading and language measures was administered to 604 children in second, fourth, and eighth grades. Approximately half these children had language and/or nonverbal cognitive impairments in kindergarten, but weighting procedures were used to reduce the potential bias this sampling characteristic may have entailed. Structural equation modeling was used to determine whether fluency accounted for unique variance in reading comprehension after controlling for word recognition accuracy and listening comprehension. Individual profile analyses were conducted to determine the number of individual participants who␣had poor fluency in the spite of good word recognition accuracy and listening comprehension. Results showed that fluency did not account for unique variance in reading␣comprehension and that few individuals had problems in fluency separate from word recognition accuracy or listening comprehension. Thus, it does not appear that a separate fluency component should be added to the Simple View of Reading.     

动态在线讨论：交互式学习环境中的深层学习

本文阐述了在远程教育中进行面向深层学习的动态在线讨论的一个框架。该框架建立在信息、方法和认知等三个普遍性过程的基础上。在本框架中进行动态讨论的结构包括三种在线讨论的类型,即灵活的同伴、结构化的主题和协作性任务讨论。该框架在一门有关教学多媒体设计的在线研究生课程中使用过两个学期。创建动态讨论的策略是为了促进不同学习者之间的在线交互,并有助于设计能实现有效交互的任务。学生通过设计的任务产生了接受性学习,在此基础上促进了适应性学习,并且激发了他们促进深层学习的认知能力。该框架及动态讨论的策略提供了一个在线学习环境,在这样的环境中学生的学习超越了既定的课程目标。     

Activity frames and complexity thinking: Honoring both public and personal agendas in an emergent curriculum

This article which is largely conceptual in nature, explores the possibilities provided by embracing complexity thinking that are attentive to, but not confined by, externally imposed curriculum mandates while simultaneously honoring the interests and needs of individual students and the classroom collective. From this perspective, the ideas of negotiating authority, adopting a holistic view, engaging in participatory democratic practices, and using a project-based approach to learning are examined. In doing so, the concept of ‘activity frames’ is introduced and developed as a useful way of responding to curriculum mandates while being responsive to and respectful of individual and collective student learning agendas.     

The Relation Between Preschoolers’ Vocabulary Development and Their Ability to Predict and Recognize Words

By age 2, children are developing foundational language processing skills, such as quickly recognizing words and predicting words before they occur. How do these skills relate to children’s structural knowledge of vocabulary? Multiple aspects of language processing were simultaneously measured in a sample of 2-to-5-year-olds (N = 215): While older children were more fluent at recognizing words, at predicting words in a graded fashion, and at revising incorrect predictions, only revision was associated with concurrent vocabulary knowledge once age was accounted for. However, an exploratory longitudinal follow-up (N = 55) then found that word recognition and prediction skills were associated with rate of subsequent vocabulary development, but revision skills were not. We argue that prediction skills may facilitate language learning through enhancing processing speed.     

Killing off the Competition

In August 1929, James W. Upton, Editor of the republican newspaper, Honesty, discovered that that Seán Lemass and Gerald Boland, the Secretaries of the Fianna Fáil party, had issued a circular to their members that blackballed Honesty and promoted the sales of The Nation, a publication that Fianna Fáil's leader, Éamon de Valera, had recently brought under his control. The event that triggered this action was Upton's decision to publish an article critical of the Fianna Fáil leadership, something Upton did in the interest of freedom of speech. Upton, who was sympathetic to the Fianna Fáil cause, dubbed Lemass and Boland, ‘the Dublin Junta’ and accused them of launching an underhand attack to further their own careers and party ambitions. Fianna Fáil retaliated in the pages of The Nation, declaring that Honesty was no longer a republican journal and thereby destroying Honesty's readership. An exploration of these events reveals political duplicity and a fundamental misfit between the views of a republican idealist and hardheaded professional politicians. Upton believed that republicanism without journalistic freedom was no republicanism at all, whilst Lemass and Boland focused on building a disciplined party machine intent on suppressing dissent, within and without of its ranks.     

Pedagogy of the Spirit: Comparing Evangelical and Latter-day Saint Youth Self-Reported In-Class Spiritual Experiences

This study statistically analyzes data from 756 evangelical and Latter-day Saint youth regarding their perceived in-class spiritual experiences of twenty items related to Christian theology. The data indicates similar spiritual outcomes between the two groups, with no statistically significant differences between eleven of the twenty spiritual experience items. However, evangelical participants most highly reported affective spiritual outcomes and least commonly reported action-oriented spiritual outcomes, while Latter-day Saint youth most highly reported action-oriented spiritual outcomes and least commonly reported cognitive spiritual outcomes. Action-oriented spiritual outcomes constitute the greatest difference between the two groups. We explore how the differences between evangelical and Latter-day Saint pedagogy and theology might account for these differences.