An interaction-dominant perspective on reading fluency and dyslexia

The background noise of response times is often overlooked in scientific inquiries of cognitive performances. However, it is becoming widely acknowledged in psychology, medicine, physiology, physics, and beyond that temporal patterns of variability constitute a rich source of information. Here, we introduce two complexity measures (1/f scaling and recurrence quantification analysis) that employ background noise as metrics of reading fluency. These measures gauge the extent of interdependence across, rather than within, cognitive components. In this study, we investigated dyslexic and non-dyslexic word-naming performance in beginning readers and observed that these complexity metrics differentiate reliably between dyslexic and average response times and correlate strongly with the severity of the reading impairment. The direction of change in the introduced metrics suggests that developmental dyslexia resides from dynamical instabilities in the coordination among the many components necessary to read, which could explain why dyslexic readers score below average on so many distinct tasks and modalities.     

Integrating the entrepreneurial mindset into solar energy statistical analysis and performance modeling

Statistical knowledge is required for students in a range of disciplines. However, there are limited educator resources that exist for applying statistics to solve real-world problems. This investigation provides one approach to teaching statistics using entrepreneurial-minded learning (as a way to connect real-world applications and value creation with problem-solving and curiosity) in the context of solar energy. Both the ready-to-use teaching intervention and assessment of student learning details are provided for an undergraduate course on Introductory Statistics. The teaching intervention includes a series of seven lesson plans (and three extension projects) that educators can use in an introductory statistics course.     

Dyslexic and skilled reading dynamics are self-similar

The shape of a word pronunciation time distribution supplies information about the dynamic interactions that support reading performance. Speeded word-naming pronunciation and response time distributions were collected from 20 sixth grade Dutch students with dyslexia and 23 age-matched controls. The participants’ pronunciation times were modeled and contrasted with a lognormal inverse power-law mixture distribution. Identical contrasts were also conducted on the same participants’ response time distributions derived from flanker, color-naming, and arithmetic tasks. Results indicated that children with dyslexia yield slower, broader, and more variable pronunciation time distributions than their age-matched counterparts. This difference approximated a self-similar rescaling between the two group’s aggregate pronunciation time distributions. Moreover, children with dyslexia produced similar, but less prominent trends toward slower and more variable performance across the three non-reading tasks. The outcomes support a proportional continuum rather than a localized deficit account of dyslexia. The mixture distribution’s success at describing the participants’ pronunciation and response time distributions suggests that differences in proportional contingencies among low-level neurophysiological, perceptual, and cognitive processes likely play a prominent role in the etiology of dyslexia.     

Cognitive and Linguistic Precursors to Early Literacy Achievement in Children With Specific Language Impairment

This study investigated the role of cognitive and language skills as predictors of early literacy skills in children with Specific Language Impairment. A range of cognitive and linguistic skills were assessed in a sample of 137 eight-year-old children with SLI at the beginning of the school year, and 6 months later on word decoding and reading comprehension. The cognitive and linguistic measures revealed four factors that were called language, speech, short-term memory, and phonological awareness. Structural equation modeling showed word decoding to be predicted by speech, short-term memory, and phonological awareness, whereas reading comprehension was predicted by word decoding skills and short-term memory. It can be concluded that in children with SLI variations in early word decoding are mostly determined by speech abilities and short-term memory, and to a lesser extent by phonological awareness. Moreover, reading comprehension turns out to be highly dependent on word decoding and short-term memory.     

Spelling feedback in an ICT-learning environment: Issues of proficiency, training efficiency, and transfer

This study was designed to compare the effectiveness of two different forms of feedback on spelling performance of Dutch Grade-2 students, that is, knowledge-of-results and informational feedback. In the knowledge-of-results feedback condition, the speller is told that the word is spelled incorrectly, whereas in the informational feedback condition, the speller is told what is spelled incorrectly. Three main questions were investigated. One, to what extent does the nature of feedback affect students with good and poor spelling skills differently? Two, does the nature of feedback affect various forms of spelling difficulties differently? Three, is training efficiency differentially affected by the nature of feedback?The results showed that both feedback conditions were equally effective in teaching students the spelling of words, irrespective of spelling level and spelling difficulty. Both feedback conditions led to a similar level of transfer to a set of new words, the effect being stronger in good than in poor spellers. Transfer was best on analogy spellings, followed by rule-based, and worst on idiosyncratic spellings. The poor spellers learned the spelling of words more efficiently in the informational-feedback condition than in the knowledge-of-results condition, whereas for the group of good spellers efficiency was equally large in both conditions.     

An experimental approach to the concept of density

A teaching project dealing with an experimental introduction to the concept of density, planned for science courses at the lower secondary school level, is described. A group of teachers was introduced with the project during a training course; in the following year they adopted it in their classes (6th, 7th, 8th grades), for a total of 389 pupils.

The approach followed in the project is based on presenting the pupils with a range of solid objects (rods, balls, blocks) made in different sizes and materials. These are weighed and their volumes measured by dipping them into a graduated vessel and reading the rise of water level. Graphs of mass versus volume for objects of the same material are found to be linear, with the slope of each plot being a characteristic of a particular material, viz. its density.     

Benefits of Systematic Phonics Instruction

Systematic-phonics instruction appears to be more effective than nonsystematic phonics instruction for teaching reading (Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, & Willows, 2001 Ehri, L. C., Nunes, S. R., Stahl, S. A. and Willows, D. M. 2001. Systematic phonics instruction helps students learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panels meta-analysis.. Review of Educational Research, 71: 393–447. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In the present study, a systematic phonics approach was directly compared with a nonsystematic phonics approach for kindergarten children. Both approaches were delivered using computer programs teaching the same Dutch grapheme–phoneme correspondences. Both phonics-trained groups progressed to the same extent on productive letter-sound knowledge compared to the control group. However, on measures of phonemic awareness, spelling, and reading, the systematic phonics group made more progress than the nonsystematic phonics group and the control group.     

Differential trust between parents and teachers of children from low-income and immigrant backgrounds

This study was designed to investigate the trust relationship between parents and teachers in first grade. Additional research questions were whether trust was related to ethnicity and reading performance. The five facets of trust; benevolence, reliability, competence, honesty and openness, were measured on a 4-point Likert scale. Reading performance was measured by the three-minute test. Parents were found to have more trust in the reliability, competence and honesty of teachers than teachers in parents. Native-Dutch and immigrant parents have the same trust level towards their children’s teacher. However, teachers reported lower trust levels on all five facets of trust for immigrant parents. Our findings indicated that ethnicity has no influence on parents trust in teachers, but ethnicity may explain teachers’ trust in parents. Some support was found for the assumption that teachers’ trust plays a role in reading performance. Children were found to have higher reading performance when teachers reported higher trust in the benevolence and openness of parents.     

Improving Spelling Performance and Spelling Consciousness

This study examined the immediate and sustained effects of three training conditions on both spelling performance and spelling consciousness of 72 third-grade low- and high-skilled spellers. Spellers were assigned to a strategy-instruction, self-correction, or no-correction condition. The role of spelling ability and word characteristic were also taken into account. Regarding the immediate effects, the strategy-instruction condition was more effective for spelling performance, and more effective for spelling consciousness pertaining to loan words than the no-correction condition. Regarding the sustained effects on spelling performance and spelling consciousness, the positive effect of the strategy-instruction condition faded out after training. The four training sessions were insufficient for establishing long-lasting effects.     

Stability of repeated student evaluations of teaching in the second preclinical year of a medical curriculum

The second preclinical year of the medical curriculum at the Medical Faculty of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland includes nine multidisciplinary organ-system-oriented modules consisting of lectures and problem-based-learning tutorials. This study reports the experience accumulated with the evaluation of lectures during the academic years 1998–1999 and 1999–2000. The ratings of the different modules were highly variable, indicating the ability of students to have a critical view on the teaching and the teachers. There was a close to very close correlation between the ratings obtained during the two study years. The high discriminative capacity of students in evaluating the teaching and the teachers was also supported by their critical point of view expressed in free comments. Our observations stress therefore the reliability of teaching evaluations systematically performed by medical students.