Correction to: The influence of SES,cognitive, and non-cognitive abilities on grades: cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence from two Swedish cohorts

It is well established that socioeconomic status, cognitive ability, and non-cognitive abilities such as self-efficacy are substantially associated with academic achievement. However, the specific relationships of these variables remain a relatively unexplored topic in regard to more recent and representative samples. The current study examined such relations by taking advantage of two cohorts (total N = 12,315) of Swedish students at the elementary (Grade 6) and lower-secondary school levels (Grade 8) in the compulsory school. The regression models showed that all three variables explained a substantial portion of grade variance, with cognitive ability having the strongest relationship, followed by non-cognitive abilities, and SES. Longitudinal associations, which accounted for previous academic achievement, showed that the three variables did still explain a substantial amount of grade variance.

     

Functional reading difficulties in Denmark

In this first Danish study of adult reading skills, 1124 adults between 18 and 67 years of age participated in an interview about reading habits and skills, and 445 were tested individually at home using six common texts. Great care was taken to ascertain that subjects were representative of the whole adult population and that the texts covered most types of everyday reading. Three percent of the participants were found to have severe functional reading difficulties and a further 9 percent to have moderate difficulties. Regression analyses found several unique predictors of reading difficulties: age (adults over 45 years reading more poorly than younger adults), limited basic education, no vocational training nor higher education, and a small amount of reading needed at work. The rate of poor readers was about four times higher among persons with low income than among others. Men and women read equally well although men tended to rate themselves lower as readers than women did. Methodological issues and some educational implications are discussed.     

‘Children’s clans’; social organisation and interpretive reconstruction as aspects on development of peer-groups in outdoor play

The focus of this article is children’s self-organisation of peer-groups through play. The play was initiated by encounters with the environment. The use of ethnographic methods in early childhood research has proved helpful to elucidate, interpret, and understand children’s experiences and the creation of meaning in their everyday lives. This inquiry draws on field notes, informal conversations with the children, and photos from a study of kindergarten children’s experiences of outdoor places and landscapes in Norway. Going out of doors together with the children regularly over a period of 10 months revealed aspects of how children’s interactions in play connect to their use of natural landscapes and its place in peer-group social organisation. The data are presented as ‘narrative maps’ and episodes written as ‘emplotted’ narratives.     

Child Readers and the Worlds of the Picture Book

Children as readers of picture books and the ways they respond to, and make meaning from, such texts are the focus of this article, which reports on a small-scale study undertaken in Norway and Wales, UK. The theoretical framing of the research draws on concepts of the multimodal ensemble in picture books and of the reading event as part of a social practice. The research design was developed from the team’s analysis of two texts, Pappa by Svein Nyhus (1998) and What does Daddy Do? by Rachel Bright (2009). Twenty-four children, who were 7 and 8 years old, took part in the study. This was built around two reading events for each book, staged as an immediate response and as a guided response. The data subsequently collected were analysed according to three overarching organisational principles, as book world, real world and play world. For both Daddy and Pappa, the first reading event showed the children’s responses were mainly directed towards exploring the book world. On the second reading event, references to the real world predominated for Daddy, while for Pappa the book world was again dominant. Across both reading events and for both books, the playworld revealed those occasions when the children expanded the meaning of the story, demonstrating an inventive ability to play with the text. Overall, the children’s responses moved fluidly across the three worlds, showing them to be energetically making connections between the reading, their experience of books and their own lives.     

Eye-movement parameters and reading speed

This study addressed the relationship between four eyemovement parameters and reading speed of 20twelve-year-old children during silent and oralreading. The results indicated that each of theparameters correlated significantly with speed ofsilent reading. In fact, reading speed could bepredicted by the following variables: recognitionspan, average fixation duration, and number ofregressive saccades. Moreover, the relationshipbetween silent and oral reading speed, on one hand,and between reading fluency and reading errors in oralreading speed, on the other, was examined. The resultsindicated that in terms of reading speed, significantinterrelationships existed between silent and oralreading. Furthermore, fluency and errors wereintercorrelated phenomena, but only fluency wassubstantially related to oral reading speed.     

Supercomplexity and the university: Ronald Barnett and the social philosophy of Higher Education

Ronald Barnett's modern classic Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity (published December 1999), has had a crucial impact internationally on the field of Higher Education research and development since the book was published now nearly 20 years ago. Bridging an academic oeuvre across almost 30 years with close to 30 published volumes, Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity plays an important role in the development and transformation of Barnett's social theory of Higher Education into a social philosophy of Higher Education. In the book Barnett performs an important move from a focus on knowledge and epistemology to a focus on being and ontology in relation to Higher Education practices. Barnett shifts his fundamental perspective and view on the relation between universities and the wider society from one of caution and worry to a perspective of hope and vision that fully embraces the future of Higher Education. This way, Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity has not only paved the way for Barnett's own development of a social philosophy of Higher Education, but also contributed invaluably to the rise and maturing of philosophy of Higher Education as a research field in its own right.     

Is the Simple View of Reading too Simple?

According to the Simple View of Reading (SVR), reading comprehension is the product of word decoding ability and linguistic comprehension (R = D × C). However, there is also evidence showing that an additive model (R = D + C) explains just as much or even more of the variance in reading comprehension than the product model. To further evaluate these models, 467 Norwegian students in grade 6 were administered measures of reading comprehension, decoding ability, listening comprehension, phonemic awareness, and rapid digit naming. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the explanatory power of each model, in addition to the influence of phonemic awareness and rapid naming. The preliminary hierarchical regression analyses were replicated among Swedish students. According to the present study, the additive model explained more of the variance in reading comprehension than the product model, and only rapid naming contributed significantly to explain variance in reading comprehension, above and beyond that explained by the SVR.     

DEN HERBARTSKE PEDAGOGIKKS INNFLYTELSE I NORGE

Gill, P. E. 1976. The Relationship Between Mental Ability and Eight Background Variables. Scand. J. educ. Res. 20, 135‐145. Multiple regression is seen as a search technique when applied to IQ. test data. The results from such a search are stochastic rather than deterministic. Because of this it is imperative that comprehensive samples be studied. The sample in this study (n = 3,695) was representative of the population of Irish 6‐ to 12‐year‐olds. The results are surprising in that the total variance explained by predictors such as SES, sex, family size, position in family, absenteeism and urbanity is never more than 8 %. Differences in how predictors behave with IQ and Vocabulary are noted. SES, family size and urbanity are the most significant predictors. When Vocabulary is the criterion, sex differences (in favour of girls) emerge consistently. It is contended that pupils of low intelligence go absent more often than their peers. The total variance explained was increased when homoscedasticity was reduced by stabilizing criterion variance (by reducing age span).     

Challenging the premises of international policy reviews: an introduction to the review symposium

In 2009, a think tank called the International Alliance of Leading Education Institutes (IALEI) announced the results of a study entitled Climate Change and Sustainable Development: The Response from Education. Intended for a policy audience, the study offered a glimpse into the status of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and an early look at the emergence of Climate Change Education (CCE), in 10 different nations. As with most international reports, the IALEI report provoked many questions, some of which are more broadly relevant to scholarship and practice. This paper introduces a review symposium that addresses three such questions: (1) How coherent is the concept of ESD across national contexts and what conceptual tensions continue to surround ESD and CCE? (2) Can nation-level analyses tell us anything useful about countries where education is not centrally governed? and (3) In light of the evolving relationship between educational research and policy, how should researchers engage with ongoing policy debates?