Subgrouping poor readers on the basis of individual differences in reading-related abilities

The present study investigated the use of the Reading Component Model to subgroup poor readers. A large sample of poor readers was identified in second grade and subgrouped on the basis of relative strengths and weaknesses in word recognition and listening comprehension. Although homogeneous subgroups were not identified, poor readers could be classified into four subgroups that differed significantly in reading-related abilities. Further analyses showed that poor readers' strengths and weaknesses in listening comprehension, and to a lesser extent in word recognition, were foreshadowed by their abilities on related kindergarten measures. Follow-up testing in the fourth grade indicated that poor readers' individual differences in word recognition and listening comprehension were consistent and that subgroups were moderately stable. The implications of these results for the assessment and remediation of reading disabilities are discussed.     

Maltreatment's wake: the relationship of maltreatment dimensions to child outcomes

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this exploratory study was to examine the extent to which, in combination, the best constructions of basic dimensions of maltreatment, identified in other papers from LONGSCAN, predict child outcomes. METHOD: Maltreatment records of a sample of 203 children were used to define dimensions of maltreatment related to Type, Severity, Chronicity, and Age at First Report. The definitions were based upon findings presented in other papers in this special issue. Children's behavioral and emotional functioning was examined at age 8 using standardized measures of problem behaviors, socialization and adaptation, and trauma symptomatology. Backward elimination regression was used to screen for interactions among the dimensions; regression models including dimensions and significant interactions were then run for each child outcome. Stratified partial correlations were utilized to explicate significant interactions. RESULTS: Individual maltreatment dimensions were found to have distinct effects on child functioning. Additionally, dimensions of maltreatment were interrelated and interacted in determining outcomes. Type of maltreatment (as indicated by the maximum severity rating of each type) was the most consistent predictor across outcomes, albeit different types predicted different outcomes. Various dimensional interactions were significant predictors of different outcomes. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that a comprehensive assessment of a child's maltreatment experience, including type and severity, when the maltreatment began and the pattern of maltreatment across the life span, is important to understanding the effects of maltreatment on children's growth and development.     

The dimensions of maltreatment: introduction

This special issue includes an introduction and seven papers exploring dimensions of maltreatment including type, severity, chronicity, and substantiation status of referrals to CPS, utilizing a subsample of the LONGSCAN studies. Each paper examines one of the dimensions of maltreatment from various perspectives to determine if different conceptualizations of a dimension, examined in isolation, account for different amounts of variation in child outcomes. A final paper assesses the relationship of the combined maltreatment dimensions, including interactions, on a single sample of maltreated children from the LONGSCAN study. This final paper explores the individual contribution of the "best" conceptualizations of the maltreatment dimensions in relation to each other, and to the 10 child outcomes of interest. Implications of the findings from these papers for future research on dimensions of child maltreatment are discussed in two independent commentaries.     

Conflicting needs and interests of researchers and service providers in child sexual abuse cases

A child sexual abuse research project was designed which was dependent on referrals from local departments of social services. Significant differences in needs and goals existed between the referral sources and the research team. Modifications of project designs were necessary in the areas of subject recruitment, allocation of project resources, design and measurement, and analysis and reporting. These modifications resulted in a beneficial blend of service and research and produced a useful service in the setting of competent research.     

Developing university teaching: A strategy for revitalisation

Institutional policies and practices aimed at developing university teaching are analysed according to various theoretical perspectives which seek to explain why some innovations are successful and others are not. Within this framework the role of academic staff employed on a full- or part-time basis to support such development is also examined. Following from this analysis a coherent strategy to facilitate the improvement of university teaching is proposed.     

Virtue, Vice and Vacancy in Educational Policy and Practice

The incessancy of the educational reforms of recent decades in Western countries, and their prominent association with conceptions of quality drawn from industry and commerce, tend to becloud the lack of educational substance at the heart of many of the more influential of the reform patterns. This lack betokens something of a sophisticated renaissance of the late nineteenth-century mentality of payment-by-results. Exploration of the reforms also reveals a preoccupation with performance which bypasses the central concerns of education itself. Quality, in short, becomes redefined by a privative rationality, which then furnishes the conceptual arena and the predominant language for decision-making in matters educational.
Writings of two influential contemporary thinkers – MacIntyre and Lyotard – are reviewed to illustrate the nature and significance of what the reforms have neglected. These thinkers' contrasting analyses reveal how intricate the contexts of educational policy and practice have become in the pluralist circumstances of late modernity. Where MacIntyre adopts a largely traditionalist stance and Lyotard a largely dismissive one in the face of the competing inheritances which battle for the minds and hearts of learners, this paper suggests not a middle way, but a different way. This pursues a kind of thinking which is itself educational more than political, self-critical more than adversarial. Declining the path of self-assured advocacy it concentrates instead on opening up an educational issue which is more often overlooked, or busily bypassed, than understood: What actually befalls the experience of teachers and learners in the practical conduct of education? How can that experience benefit best as teaching and learning are defensibly practised? A range of communicative rather than combative virtues is identified in this connection and their promising import is briefly explored.