Reading and spelling difficulties in high school students: Causes and consequences

Basic skills in reading and spelling and supporting metalinguistic abilities were assessed in ninth and tenth grade students in two school settings. Students attending a private high school for the learning disabled comprised one group and the other comprised low to middle range students from a public high school. Both the LD students and the regular high school students displayed deficiencies in spelling and in decoding, a factor in reading difficulty that is commonly supposed to dwindle in importance after the elementary school years. Treating the overlapping groups as a single sample, multiple regression analysis was used to investigate the contribution of nonword decoding skill and phonological and morphological awareness to spelling ability. The analysis revealed that decoding was the major component, predicting about half of the variance in spelling. The effect of phonological awareness was largely hidden by its high correlation with decoding, but was a significant predictor of spelling in its own right. Morphological awareness predicted spelling skill when the words to be spelled were morphologically complex. An additional study showed that differences in decoding and spelling ability were associated with differences in comprehension after controlling for reading experience and vocabulary. Even among experienced readers individual differences in comprehension of text reflect efficiency of phonological processing at the word level.     

Maternal intrusiveness, maternal warmth, and mother-toddler relationship outcomes: variations across low-income ethnic and acculturation groups

The present study investigated the extent to which maternal intrusiveness and warmth during play, observed in 579 European American, 412 African American, and 110 more and 131 less acculturated Mexican American low-income families when children were approximately 15 months old, predicted 3 dimensions of the mother-toddler relationship 10 months later. Intrusiveness predicted increases in later child negativity in all 4 groups. Among African Americans only, this association was moderated by maternal warmth. Intrusiveness predicted negative change in child engagement with mothers only in European American families. Finally, near-significant trends suggested that intrusiveness predicted later decreased dyadic mutuality in European American and more acculturated Mexican American families, but not in African American or less acculturated Mexican American families.     

The influence of collaborative language learning on cognitive control in unbalanced multilingual migrant children

In this study, (N62) 5- to 6-year-old English monolingual and unbalanced multilingual children attending public primary school education in Scotland became involved in collaborative Narrative Format (Taeschner, 2005) modern language activities in Spanish, both at school and at home. These activities were redesigned and adapted to serve as a quasi-experimental tool to provide a highly structured and intense linguistic input. The main purpose was to explore whether cognitive advantages previously found in balanced bilinguals and second-language-learning monolingual children involved in language immersion programmes could be extended to different types of beginning language learners in a non-immersion context. Depending on the monolingual vs bilingual ratios of children in the classroom, we distinguished between homogeneous groups (characterised by a ratio of 95% of first-language English-language monolinguals) and heterogeneous groups (children from both Scottish and migrant homes in roughly equal proportions). Using a standard task of early cognitive control, we found not only that unbalanced multilinguals perform above chance but also that there was a developing trend of enhanced performance for monolinguals learning languages in the heterogeneous groups. This suggests that not only the length of exposure and intensity of input but also the social classroom environment where children develop their language skills may also play an important role in the effects of bilingualism on executive functions.

     

Towards a Metaphysics of Complexity

In this paper I combine aspects of process philosophy and elements from philosophies of difference in order to give some indication of how we might begin to construct a metaphysics of contemporary science. I will focus on the work of Whitehead and Deleuze as representatives of each respective tradition and try to show how their work can be fruitfully articulated together in the context of complexity theory.     

Testing the Significance of Correlations

A simple problem of the sort often faced by elementary statistics students forms the basis for a discussion of several important hypothesis testing issues. These issues are often overlooked when moving from simple tests of means to bivariate inference problems.     

The effect of financial education on pupils’ financial knowledge and skills: Evidence from a Solomon four-group design

Abstract

The present study used a Solomon four-group quasi-experimental design to examine the short-term effect of a large-scale national financial education program on children’s knowledge and skills in responsible spending and performing transactions effectively. Our study included a representative sample of Dutch pupils in the fifth grade of primary school (N?=?2,650). Controlling for different children-specific characteristics, results showed that the program increased pupils’ knowledge and skills scores in performing transactions effectively, but not in responsible spending. The insights gained from the present study show how financial education programs that enable children to immediately apply what they learn in practice can improve children’s knowledge and skills regarding certain financial competencies.     

Picture Book Reading at Home: A Comparison of Head Start and Middle-class Preschoolers

This study was designed to assess the impact of taking a high quality picture book home from school daily on the at-home reading behaviors of young children and/or family members from middle and low SES backgrounds. Eighty children representing two study groups (treatment & no-treatment comparison) and two socioeconomic groups (Head Start & middle-class) composed the study sample. Treatment children selected picture books at school daily to take home over a 12-week period. Child and family picture book reading behaviors were assessed by weekly random telephone surveys. Findings indicate that taking a picture book home daily more than doubled the number of books read at home for both middle-class and Head Start treatment children over their no-treatment comparison counterparts and significantly increased the amount of time Head Start treatment children were involved in reading each day. The practicality of making high quality picture books available for preschool children to take home and the implications of increased at-home reading behaviors are discussed.     

Manipulation of logical structure of chemistry problems and its effect on student performance

It has been shown previously that manipulation of the M demand (amount of information needed for processing) of chemistry problems affects student performance, which suggests that manipulation of logical structure of chemistry problems could also lead to significant changes in performance. The objective of this study is to investigate the following: Given the opportunity for training, what is the effect of increasing (manipulation) the complexity of logical structure of chemistry problems on student performance, and to what extent can cognitive variables explain changes in performance. Results obtained show that (a) even a small increase in the logical structure of a problem can change the role of cognitive variables (mental capacity and formal reasoning) to the extent that increase in logical complexity outweighs the advantage students may have gained through training on a similar problem; (b) the use of algorithms and training on particular types of chemistry problems could lead to a situation in which formal reasoning is the only cognitive variable that explains variance in performance significantly; and (c) after having solved very similar problems on two different occasions with improving performance, the improvement is not retained if the logical structure of a third problem increases considerably. It is concluded that when dealing with significant changes in logical complexity of chemistry problems, developmental level of students is the most consistent predictor of success. A model for the qualitative analysis of logical complexity of chemistry problems is presented.     

Conceptualizing Student Affect for Science and Technology at the Middle School Level: Development and Implementation of a Measure of Affect in Science and Technology (MAST)

We describe the development of the Measure of Affect in Science and Technology (MAST), and study its usefulness for measuring science affect in middle school students via both classical and Rasch measurement perspectives. We then proceed to utilize the measurement structure of the MAST to understand how middle school students at varying levels of affect express their interest and attitudes toward science and technology and gender differences in how students express their affect. We found that affect in science and technology comprises a main dimension, science interest, and four peripheral dimensions: interest in careers in science and technology, attitudes toward science, and interest in attending science class. Of these, careers in science and technology carry the highest affective demand. While males showed higher levels of personal and situational interest in science, a greater interest in careers in science and technology was the biggest contributor to males’ higher affect toward science and technology. We argue that whether the MAST is used as a measure of a single construct or multiple subconstructs depends upon specific research or evaluation goals; however, both uses of the MAST yield measures which produce valid inferences for student affect.