Maternal Literacy Beliefs and the Quality of Mother-Child Book-reading Interactions: Assoications with Children's Early Literacy Development

This study examined the relation among mothers' literacy-related beliefs, the home literacy environment, the quality of mother-child book-reading interactions, and children's development of early literacy skills. The participants of this study were 60 mothers and their 4-year-old children. After controlling for mothers' educational attainment, mothers' literacy beliefs were positively related to the quality of home literacy environments and the instructional and affective quality of joint book-reading interactions. The quality of children's home literacy environments and mother-child joint book-reading interactions was related to children's development of early literacy skills. Findings are discussed in relation to the importance of understanding the connection between parents' literacy beliefs and behaviors in designing effective literacy interventions and creating school and family literacy connections.     

Restructuring reforms in Turkish teacher education: Modernisation and development in a dynamic environment

The paper examines the effectiveness of recent reforms in teacher education in Turkey, specifically the restructuring of programmes in university faculties of education. It first, briefly, sets the reforms of the 1990s in an historical context, prior to the 1997 Act which increased the length of compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years, and the 1998 restructuring of faculties of education. It considers the national need for the restructuring of teacher education and the issues involved. The thrust of the paper is a study of how teacher educators across the country perceive both the changes and their effect on the quality of teacher education, methodology as a discipline, school partnerships, and relationships with the Ministry of National Education.     

Accuracy of a Perspective Control Lens

Abstract

The contextual interference (CI) effect has been replicated many times since its first demonstration by Shea and Morgan (1979) in the motor learning domain (see Brady, 1998; Magill&;Hall, 1990). The CI effect is characterized by the observation that experiencing greater interference during acquisition is detrimental to immediate performance but enhances delayed performance as measured on retention or transfer tests. High CI is most often created by random practice in which the learning of multiple tasks occurs in a single training. In contrast, low CI is frequently created by using a blocked practice format in which all the practice trials of one task are completed before another task is introduced. One theoretical account that has been forwarded to account for the CI effect is labeled the action plan reconstruction hypothesis (Lee&;Magill, 1983, 1985). This position intimates that before a movement occurs an “action plan” must be prepared. In blocked practice, a previously prepared “action plan” is readily available from trial to trial, but it suffers from lack of attention on trials following initial retrieval from working memory. In random practice, however, each time a task must be executed a “reconstruction” of the action plan must be processed, because the interchange of information from trial to trial never allows the same information to remain in working memory for an extended amount of time. Presumably, the additional trial-to-trial preparation used by the random practice participant during practice results in a more resilient memory representation that better supports long-term recall efforts compared to their blocked practice counterparts.     

Launching the Virtual Academic Center: Issues and Challenges in Innovation

In October 2010, the University of Southern California School of Social Work entered the online education environment with the launch of the first national web-based MSW program. After an initial enrollment of 80 students, in just 3 years this state-of-the-art MSW, offered in a technology-advanced synchronous and asynchronous format, has generated an enrollment of 2,000 students residing in 38 states. The development and rapid growth of the Virtual Academic Center has not been without significant challenges, the most substantial of which has been the creation of a national field education program. This paper describes the MSW courses taught in the online environment, and pedagogical hurdles faced in order to maintain the educational quality that is the hallmark of the School's campus-based MSW program.     

Development of text reading in Japanese: an eye movement study

This study examined age-group differences in eye movements among third-grade, fifth-grade, and adult Japanese readers. In Experiment 1, Japanese children, but not adults, showed a longer fixation time on logographic kanji words than on phonologically transparent hiragana words. Further, an age-group difference was found in the first fixation duration on hiragana words but not on kanji words, suggesting character-type-dependent reading development in Japanese children. Examination of the distributions of saccade landing positions revealed that, like adults, both third and fifth graders fixated more on kanji than on hiragana characters, which suggests that even young children utilize the same oculomotor control strategy (the kanji targeting strategy) as Japanese adults. In Experiment 2, we examined whether the proportion of kanji characters in a text affected adult reading performance. Japanese adults made more refixations and regressions in texts with a high proportion of hiragana characters. The results of both experiments suggest that differences between kanji and kana affect the reading efficiency of school-age children and that maturation of reading skills allows adults to optimize their strategy in reading kanji and kana mixed texts.     

‘Pink Tea and Sissy Boys’: Digitized Fragments of Male Homosexuality,Non-Heteronormativity and Homophobia in the Australian Sporting Press, 1845–1954

Researching the gay sporting past is difficult because of the dearth of written evidence. This article employs digital history techniques, specifically the distant and close reading of newspapers, in an attempt to locate references to male homosexuality in the Australian sporting press. The focus is not on finding references to homosexual athletes, but rather on locating attitudes, innuendo and inferences concerning homosexuality, non-heteronormative masculinity and homophobia. The sophisticated search engine provided by Trove – the digitization programme of the National Library of Australia – allows for specific word searches across 170 million articles from 800 newspapers from 1803 to 1954, including a handful of sport-themed publications. This project uses a distant-reading approach to find instances of contemporaneous homosexual-related terms – colloquialism, euphemism, legal parlance and slurs – in four popular sport newspapers and to focus on two words: effeminate and sissy. Given the commonality and multiple meanings of these words, a close reading is necessary to filter these findings in order to facilitate a reading of the ‘snippets and shadows’ of homosexuality that remain.