AN INVESTIGATION OF RELATIONS AMONG ACADEMIC ENABLERS AND READING OUTCOMES

The current study examined the link between academic enablers and different types of reading achievement measures. Academic enablers are skills and behaviors that support, or enable, students to perform well academically, such as engagement, interpersonal skills, motivation, and study skills. The sample in this study consisted of 61 third‐, fourth‐, and fifth‐grade students (54% male). Academic enablers were rated by classroom teachers via the Academic Competence Evaluation Scales (ACES; DiPerna & Elliott, 2000 ). Four different measures of reading achievement were included: classroom grades, global ratings of reading skills, standardized test scores, and Reading CBM scores. Results indicated that academic enablers were significantly related to each type of reading outcome. Academic enablers accounted for the greatest amount of variance for classroom grades (45%) and the least amount of variance in standardized test scores (11%). Results suggest that academic enablers are an important part of academic success in reading, particularly classroom grades, but when considering the variance accounted for by academic enablers, they alone are not likely to improve Reading CBM scores or standardized test scores.     

Educational concerns of Arabic speaking migrants from Sudan and Iraq to Melbourne: Expectations on migrant parents in Australia

Families immigrating to Australia face many challenges integrating into the educational system, including language barriers and interrupted schooling. We have qualitatively evaluated the educational concerns of Arabic migrants from Sudan and Iraq to Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, a city that receives a high percentage of Australia's immigrants. Using an interactive paradigm incorporating focus group discussions for thematic analysis, we concluded that the parents’ frame of reference for education was a more didactic style of learning. Parents viewed education as an essential part of the way forward for their children in Australia. However, it was stressful for them to try to cope with a new host nation's expectation of their involvement in their children's education while at the same time dealing with a language barrier. Professionals should look to empower parents with structural information about the key elements of the educational curriculum with minimal reliance on written technical language and match their expectations of parental involvement to the situation of the parents.     

Abandoning Either/Ors in Analyzing Shifts in Humanitarian Reporting

ABSTRACT

The shifting constitution of journalists as humanitarian actors has profound implications for changing forms of journalism practice, as well as for the normative models through which journalists understand and reflect on that practice. In an effort to develop a more empirically-grounded engagement with change, this article explores the interview testimonies of Australian journalists who cover international and humanitarian issues. It argues that frameworks reliant on stark oppositions (between past and present, optimism and pessimism, or moral agency and material structure) are both empirically and practically problematic, and seeks to move beyond these. Engagement with data from semi-structured interviews offers insight into how journalists’ perceptions of and responses to change are shaped by the historical and shifting institutional relations in which they are implicated.     

The Semiotics of Learning New Words

In several of his papers, Charles S. Peirce illustrates processes of interpreting and understanding signs by examples from second language vocabulary teaching and learning. The insights conveyed by means of these little pedagogical scenarios are not meant as contributions to the psychology of second language learning, but they aim at elucidating fundamental semiotic implications of knowledge acquisition in general. Peirce's semiotic premise that a well‐understood sign is one that represents an object and creates an interpretant is essential to the understanding of how new words and signs in general can be taught and learned. The article argues that Peirce's theory of the object of the sign, especially of the necessity of collateral experience of the object of a sign, can help to understand the riddle posed by of the Meno paradox of the impossibility of learning what we do not yet know. It examines the semiotic implications of the didactic methods of teaching and learning through translation, ostension, mental and real images, as well as metacognition, and it shows how icons, indices, and symbols are essential to learning new words.     

University Admissions and the Prediction of Degree Performance: an Analysis in the Light of Changes to the English Schools’ Examination System

The United Kingdom's Department for Education has recently changed the nature of the AS‐level examinations normally taken by students aspiring to enter higher education degree courses one year into their post‐compulsory education. In the face of protests from universities and other institutions that this would both harm students’ progression towards the A‐level qualifications, on which entry to English universities is normally based, and make it difficult for universities determining which of their applicants were best placed to benefit from their degree courses, the Department conducted research which it claimed showed that degree outcome could be predicted as well from the results of GCSE examinations taken one year before AS‐levels as from AS‐levels themselves. This paper critiques those analyses and their conclusions showing, through a re‐analysis and extended interpretation of the Department's data, that AS‐levels provide a more reliable predictor of degree performance in 2011 than GCSEs and that many students who performed better at AS‐level than at GCSE gained a place, and performed well, at a university with high entrance standards.