Use of behavior modification with academically gifted students: A review of the research

This article responds to attitudes about giftedness in M. Sapon‐Shevin's article, “Explaining Giftedness to Parents: Why it Matters What Professionals Say.” Giftedness is not a reward or a privilege, but an aspect of a child's individuality that should be understood and taken into account by the educational system. Gifted children's needs are not solely academic, and it is parents who are responsible for meeting those needs. They need information from as many sources as possible. They are also excellent sources of information themselves, so the relationship between professionals and parents should be reciprocal. This article also responds to some of Sapon‐Shevin's objections to the book Guiding the Gifted Child, (Webb, Meckstroth, Tolan, 1982). In the preparation of this article, the writer worked closely with coauthors James T. Webb and Elizabeth Meckstroth, whose pioneering work with the SENG Project at Wright State University provided the basis of Guiding the Gifted Child.     

Mnemonic-strategy reduction of prose-learning interference

One hundred and sixty college students read three fictitious biographical passages according to either imagery-mnemonic or no-strategy control instructions. In one mnemonic condition, subjects formed separate images involving each biographical name and its associated facts: in another mnemonic condition, the biographical name and its associated facts were integrated within a single composite image. Relative to an interference-control condition, integrated mnemonic subjects recalled more factual information, whereas separate mnemonic subjects did not. In addition, the recall of integrated mnemonic subjects was statistically no different from that of a noninterference control condition, whereas the recall of separate mnemonic subjects was lower. Both theoretical and educational implications of the results are discussed. The first author’s contribution to this work was supported by an Organized Research Grant from the Graduate School of Illinois State University. The second author’s contribution was supported by the National Institute of Education under Grant No. NIE-G-81-0009 to the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and was facilitated by a Romnes Faculty Fellowship from the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.     

A tale of three campuses: Unearthing theories of residential life that shape the student learning experience

Frank Shushok Jr., T. Laine Scales, Rishi Sriram, and Vera Kidd share some initial thoughts about responses to their Campus Residential Experience Survey. Do you recognize your institution?     

A partitioning technique for defining instructional groups

A technique is presented for partitioning N students into K groups of fixed sizes using a given measure of proximity for all student pairs. The measure of proximity is typically calculated from a set of variables, such as completed curriculum units or learning style, and constitutes the data needed for a criterion of partition fit. This latter index is explicitly defined by the sum of within-group proximities and when used in conjunction with the optimization procedure discussed, homogeneous groups can be obtained that satisfy externally imposed size requirements. Finally, a simple generalization is suggested for the related task of grouping students to meet upper limit size constraints only.     

Learning from the Professions: Examining How,Why, and When Engineers Read and Write

With the advent of the Next Generation Science Standards in engineering (NGSS, 2013), teachers of multiple subject areas are being asked to do more than ever before—not only to teach engineering content in the K-12 classroom but also to engage students in authentic disciplinary reading and writing as part of content learning. These standards sound good, but they beg several questions; namely, what do we know about how, why, and when do engineers read and write as they do their work every day? What do teachers charged with engineering education know about the daily practices of engineers, let alone the literacy practices? In short, little is known about the literacy practices of engineers in the course of their daily work. This article draws on participant observation, interviews, and document analysis of one research engineering laboratory to illustrate the literacy practices of one group of engineers and begins to draw implications from this work for teacher practice in achieving the NGSS engineering education standards.     

Word stress production in three‐year‐old children at risk of dyslexia

We investigated Dutch word stress acquisition in 3‐year‐old children at risk of dyslexia (children with at least one parent or older sibling with reading difficulties) and normally developing children, in order to shed light on language acquisition delays in children at risk of dyslexia, as well as to investigate further phonological deficits in dyslexia. The children had to repeat non‐words with stress patterns varying in regularity. Both the at‐risk and control children performed better on imitation of regular stress targets and worse on irregular and prohibited stress patterns. However, the at‐risk children showed more difficulty imitating irregular and prohibited patterns, and had lower percentages phonemes correct than the control group. The results can be interpreted as a delay in word stress acquisition in the at‐risk group. The findings thus point towards a phonological deficit early in language development.