On our way to the European higher education space A proposal for a teaching guide for the management control course in the business management and administration degree

In order to adapt curricula to the new European system of credits, ECTS （European Credit Transfer System）, it is necessary to previously elaborate a teaching guide. The teaching guide clarifies the subject syllabus making it easier for learners to understand, sets objectives related to the competencies and skills to be acquired, plans activities that should be developed according to new objectives and analyzes the learner workload that involved in these activities. This paper proposes a teaching guide written by the lecturers of management control, a fifth year subject in the Business Management and Administration Degree. For its elaboration, we followed the guidelines in the White Book sponsored by the Spanish National Agency for the Evaluation of Quality and Accreditation, as well as the guidelines for specific curricula used in the institution, together with the lecturers＇ experience and knowledge in this field.     

The effect of a strategy training on reading comprehension in fourth-grade students

Previous studies have shown that instruction of reading strategies is an effective method for enhancing reading comprehension. However, many of the interventions in these studies focused on small groups of (poor) comprehenders and were provided by research assistants, making it time-consuming and relatively expensive. The authors implemented a strategy intervention to intact classrooms, consisting of reciprocal teaching and delivered by teachers. Participants were 510 typically developing fourth-grade students. A clustered randomized controlled trial was conducted with pretest, posttest, and follow-up measures to assess knowledge of reading strategies and reading comprehension. The results revealed that the intervention had an effect on knowledge of reading strategies at posttest and follow-up. However, the intervention did not affect reading comprehension performance. Together with the results of earlier studies, the present study raises the question whether strategy interventions are the most efficient to improve fourth-grade students' reading comprehension.     

Understanding turn commands in Logo: A cognitive perspective

When learning to program in Logo, many young children experience difficulties using the right and left turn commands. This paper looks at the spatial concepts required for the understanding and manipulation of these commands. We begin by providing an overview of research on children's Logo learning and point to specific problems children have with right and left commands and to related characteristics of standard Logo systems that seem to contribute to these problems. To shed further light on the source of these problems, the psychological-cognitive literature on the development of spatial concepts concerned with the use of frames of reference and obliques is reviewed. It is argued that in order for children to handle meaningful programming projects they need to master a set of prerequisite skills. These skills, involving the development of elaborated and explicated spatial concepts, include a distinction between right and left, the intentional reference to the Turtle as a frame of reference, the assignment of appropriate axes and the application of units of measurement for determining distance and angles. We conclude by suggesting that children need to be exposed to Logo programs designed to facilitate the development of spatial concepts which would enable the successful progression to more complex Turtle Geometry programming tasks.     

A Review of Children's,Teachers' and Parents' Influences on Children's Drawing Experience

In this article we argue that research into children's drawings should consider the context in which drawing occurs and that it is crucial to investigate the attitudes and practices of teachers, parents and children themselves that shape children's drawing experience and the drawings which they produce. We review the findings of seven empirical studies reporting data collected through direct observations, interviews and questionnaires from the three main players (teachers, parents and children) on the attitudes and practices shaping children's drawing. Issues covered include teachers' perceptions of the purposes and importance of drawing, support offered by teachers, parents and children for children's drawing endeavours, and possible factors that may lead to an age‐related decline in the amount of drawing children choose to do. We end the review by reporting some preliminary findings from our own large‐scale interview and survey study of 270 5–14 year old children, their parents and teachers, that provides a comprehensive assessment of attitudes and practices influencing children's drawing experience at home and at school. The findings provide further insight into the aforementioned issues, particularly children's, teachers' and parent's explanations of why children's drawing behaviour might decline with age. It is hoped that by reporting these preliminary findings some additional understanding of the context in which children produce their drawings can be gained and new areas for debate opened up.     

The Transition to Reaching: Mapping Intention and Intrinsic Dynamics

The onset of directed reaching demarks the emergence of a qualitatively new skill. In this study we asked how intentional reaching arises from infants' ongoing, intrinsic movement dynamics, and how first reaches become successively adapted to the task. We observed 4 infants weekly in a standard reaching task and identified the week of first arm-extended reach, and the 2 weeks before and after onset. The infants first reached at ages ranging from 12 to 22 weeks, and they used different strategies to get the toy. 2 infants, whose spontaneous movements were large and vigorous, damped down their fast, forceful movements. The 2 quieter infants generated faster and more energetic movements to lift their arms. The infants modulated reaches in task-appropriate ways in the weeks following onset. Reaching emerges when infants can intentionally adjust the force and compliance of the arm, often using muscle coactivation. These results suggest that the infant central nervous system does not contain programs that detail hand trajectory, joint coordination, and muscle activation patterns. Rather, these patterns are the consequences of the natural dynamics of the system and the active exploration of the match between those dynamics and the task.     

Measures of reading comprehension: do they measure different skills for children learning English as a second language?

The validity of two measures of English reading comprehension was examined across three different groups of English language learners (ELLs; 64 Portuguese, 66 Spanish and 65 Cantonese). All three groups were achieving within the average range in second grade. An exploratory principal components analysis of reading skills was carried out to determine which skills were related to two commonly used tests of reading comprehension, the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery??s test of Passage Comprehension (WLPB-PC; Woodcock, 1991) and the Gray Oral Reading Test-4 (GORT-4; Wiederholt & Bryant, 2001). The factor solutions were different for the three language groups but showed many similarities in that the GORT-4 and WLPB-R tests of reading comprehension fell on the same factor within each group. Hierarchical regression analyses examining relationships among vocabulary, decoding and reading comprehension showed that language group membership did not significantly predict performance on either measure of reading comprehension. Differences that arose are likely due to issues with task validity and not ELL status. Limitations and future research are discussed.