UNIVERSITY‐BASED INITIATIVES IN FAVOUR OF ECOSYSTEM REHABILITATION FOR THE NORTH AMERICAN GREAT LAKES

On‐going attempts by governments to implement measures intended to eliminate environmental degradation in the nearshore waters of the Great Lakes have revealed a critical need for integrative understanding that transcends disciplinary and professional specialisms. Academics from universities in the United States and Canada began, ten years ago, to meet with government officials and with people from nongovernmental organizations to find solutions to the problems in question. Groups of academics followed up these meetings with policy oriented studies using systems and transdisciplinary perspectives. Results have been readily disseminated into a wider constituency of interests because of the participation of nonacademics in the guiding of the studies. Similar collaborative approaches have been used to design role playing exercises for students in environmental studies courses at universities, using various Great Lakes situations as examples. An action learning/research mode lies at the core of environmental education at university level which also has considerable potential for addressing other global issues at universities.     

Phonological processing and emergent literacy in younger and older preschool children

Phonological awareness, phonological memory, and phonological access to lexical storage play important roles in acquiring literacy. We examined the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of these phonological processing abilities (PPA) in 389 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the validity of each PPA as separate from general cognitive ability and separate from each other. Multigroup structural equation modeling (SEM) with mean structure demonstrated that older preschoolers have better developed latent PPA than younger preschoolers but that the structure of PPA is equivalent. RAN was found uniquely associated with letter knowledge and text discrimination in younger preschoolers, and PA was found uniquely associated with word reading skills in older preschoolers. Finally, general cognitive ability was only indirectly associated with emergent literacy via PPA. These results highlight the importance of PPA in the early literacy development of English-speaking preschool children.