Longitudinal Stability of Reading-Related Skills and Their Prediction of Reading Development

Individual differences in word recognition, spelling, and reading comprehension for 324 children at a mean age of 16 were predicted from their reading-related skills (phoneme awareness, phonological decoding, rapid naming, and IQ) at a mean age of 10 years, after controlling the predictors for the autoregressive effects of the correlated reading skills. There were significant and longitudinally stable individual differences for all four reading-related skills that were independent from each of the reading and spelling skills. Yet the only significant longitudinal prediction of reading skills was from IQ at mean age 10 for reading comprehension at mean age 16. The extremely high longitudinal latent-trait stability correlations for individual differences in word recognition (.98) and spelling (.95) left little independent outcome variance that could be predicted by the reading-related skills. We discuss the practical and theoretical importance of these results and why they differ from studies of younger children.     

The dance of educational innovation

Educational change often presents a challenge to the leadership. This paper presents an exercise aiming at raising awareness among teachers of the personal factors involved in introducing active learning. Experiences with the exercise in different settings are briefly discussed.     

Compulsory Higher Education Teacher Training in Sweden: Development of a national standards framework based on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Today visible proofs of excellence in teaching and learning are increasingly important aspects of institutional branding in higher education (HE). Teaching competence is brought forward as a central aspect of the quality of programmes. Still, the induction of new university teachers is managed in many different ways. Approaches may vary according to how teaching competence is perceived; as growing from practice only, requiring formal courses or, for instance, outlined in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) movement. In Sweden, the HE Ordinance from 2002 states that to get permanent positions, lecturers should have completed Compulsory HE Teacher Training (CHETT). The size and organisation of the courses were not regulated in the Ordinance and institutional practices varied. In a three‐year project intended learning outcomes for CHETT was suggested. These outcomes are based on SoTL and linked to an estimated work‐load of 10 weeks. Based on a national survey in 2006, institutional responses to the proposals are analysed.     

Conferring Resistance to Digital Disinformation: The Inoculating Influence of Procedural News Knowledge

Despite the pervasiveness of digital disinformation in society, little is known about the individual characteristics that make some users more susceptible to erroneous information uptake than others, effectively dividing the media audience into prone and resistant groups. This study identifies and tests procedural news knowledge as a consequential civic resource with the capacity to inoculate audiences from disinformation and close this “resistance gap.” Engaging the persuasion knowledge model, the study utilizes data from two national surveys to demonstrate that possessing working knowledge of how the news media operate aids in the identification and effects of fabricated news and native advertising.     

Research Methods

Klaus Krippendorf, CONTENT ANALYSIS: AN INTRODUCTION TO ITS METHODOLOGY (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1980---$16.00/$7.95)

Karl Erik Rosegren, ADVANCES IN CONTENT ANALYSIS (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1981---$25.00/$12.50)

Nick L. Smith, COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES IN EVALUATION: NEW PERSPECTIVES IN EVAUATION, VOLUME 3 (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982---$22.50)

Jerome Johnston and James Ettema, POSITIVE IMAGES: BREAKING STEREOTYPES WITH CHILDREN'S TELEVISION (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1982---$22.95/$10.95)     

A nordic archival tradition

This paper reviews the historical roots of the Danish-Norwegian and the Swedish-Finnish archival traditions, which form a basis for the cooperation between the archives in the Nordic countries. Reprinted from F. Daelemans (ed.),Miscellanea in honorem Caroli Kecskeméti (Bruxelles-Brussel 1998) (=Archives et bibliothèques de Belgique, numéro special 54) pp. 357–370.     

Digitalise and capitalise? Teachers’ self-understanding in 21st-century teaching contexts

The digitalisation of educational contexts has changed the practice of teaching and learning. In this, teachers have a key role in enacting digital technologies for this purpose and have different opportunities to do so. This article explores how digitalisation can affect teachers by focusing on: (a) how teachers manage to capitalise on digitalisation; and (b) how digitalisation can affect and reconstruct their self-understanding. Two teacher colleagues of English as a foreign language (EFL) in the same teaching team are interviewed and observed. Drawing on the interplay between self-image, self-esteem, job motivation, and task perception, it is shown how the teachers’ self-understanding is played out and changes due to the call for digitalisation. Whereas one of the teachers has been able to capitalise on digitalisation in a way that has been beneficial both professionally and personally, the other has felt pressurised by it. A conclusion is that a limited or extended use of digital technologies should not be taken as an indicator of teaching quality.     

Musculoskeletal injuries in physical education versus non-physical education teachers: a prospective study

Physical education (PE) teachers have a physically demanding job, putting them at a considerable risk for musculoskeletal injuries. To structurally develop tailored injury prevention programmes for PE teachers, a clear understanding of the extent, characteristics and underlying factors of their musculoskeletal injuries compared to referents is necessary. Therefore, the current study prospectively followed 103 PE teachers and 58 non-PE teachers, who registered musculoskeletal injuries and time of exposure to sports participation during one school year. Pearson χ²-tests and independent samples t-tests determined significant differences between PE and non-PE teachers regarding demographics and variables possibly related to injury occurrence. PE teachers had 1.23 and non-PE teachers 0.78 injuries/teacher/school year. This difference was significantly different after adjustment for hours spent weekly on intracurricular teaching during the career and for injury history during the preceding six months (P = 0.009; OR = 0.511; 95% CI = 0.308–0.846). PE teachers’ most affected body parts were the knee and the back. PE teachers had a more extensive injury history (P < 0.001), a higher work- (P < 0.001) and sport index (P < 0.001), practiced more sports (P < 0.002) and taught more extracurricular sports (P = 0.001). Future injury prevention programmes should take account for the great injury history and heavy physical load in PE teachers.     

Vocational identity of at-risk emerging adults and its relationship with individual characteristics

International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance - Vocational identity is a prerequisite for enhancing societal inclusion of at-risk emerging adults. School curricula and rebound...     

Bragg reflectors based on alternate RHTL-LHTL structures

INTRODUCTION Left-handed materials (LHMs) with negative permittivity and negative permeability, first theo- retically investigated by Veselago (1968), have at- tracted much interest in the past few years (Smith et al., 2000; Pendry, 2000). Such materials were first implemented using a structure which combined pe- riodic arrays of metallic lines and split ring resonators (SRRs) (Shelby et al., 2001). Since then much work has been dedicated to fabricating such materials. These new artif…