Developing Successful Readers: Building Early Comprehension Skills through Television Viewing and Listening

Developing the ability to read is a complex process involving a variety of skills, including both basic language skills and language comprehension skills. Although a balanced reading program would include the development of basic language and comprehension skills, comprehension has often been overlooked in early reading instruction. In this article, we examine recent research findings on how comprehension skills develop in young children and discuss the implications of those findings for comprehension assessment and interventions.     

Quality of teaching in four European countries: a review of the literature and application of an assessment instrument

Background From 2002 onwards, initiatives and first steps for the project International Comparative Analysis of Learning and Teaching (ICALT) have been taken by the inspectorates of education in England, Flanders (Belgium), Lower Saxony (Germany) and The Netherlands. The inspectorates of education in these European countries reviewed the results of research on the basic characteristics of good and effective teaching and selected standards and indicators for an observation instrument that could be used to evaluate the quality of teaching. The inspectorates from these countries jointly developed an instrument to observe and analyse the quality of learning and teaching in primary schools.

Purpose The observation instrument was piloted for reliability and inter-rater reliability, and for validity, in the four countries.

Sample Mathematics lessons in England, Flanders (Belgium), Lower Saxony (Germany) and The Netherlands were observed in 854 classrooms, with children who were about 9 years old when they started the school year.

Design and methods Inspectors in the four countries were trained in the proper use of the observation instrument, and used the instrument during their own inspections or evaluations.

Results This study shows that the quality of teaching in the four countries can be compared in a reliable and valid way as regards five aspects: ‘efficient classroom management’, ‘safe and stimulating learning climate’, ‘clear instruction’, ‘adaptation of teaching’ and ‘teaching–learning strategies’.

Conclusions It is found that only a few percentage points of difference between teachers are due to differences existing in the four countries. Furthermore, it may be concluded that the five aspects of quality of teaching are positively and significantly correlated with pupil involvement, attitude, behaviour and attainment.     

Effective School Improvement in Mathematics

This article addresses the evaluation of the Mathematics Improvement Programme. The results show that the programme improved the learning results of pupils in grade 3 with half a standard deviation and reduced the percentage of struggling pupils to less than 1%. Fifteen percent of the variance in pupil results is to be explained at the school level. About a quarter of this 15% can be explained by differences between the experimental and the comparison group. All of this condition variance is explained by the experimental variables. Five out of 10 implementation features contribute significantly to differences in pupil results.     

Poverty reduction and adult education: beyond basic education

One of the Millennium Development Goals declared by the United Nations in 2000 was to reduce by half the population of people living in extreme poverty, by 2015. Adult education can and should contribute significantly to this development goal. Nevertheless it has hardly been explored so far in the national Poverty Reduction Strategies Papers. In as far as attention has been given to the contribution of adult education to the reduction of poverty, the trend has been to focus on literacy or basic education. Nevertheless, adult education is potentially much more than literacy or basic education. Successful contribution of adult education to poverty reduction programmes includes also agricultural extension, vocational education, community development and training for active citizenship. In this introduction of the special issue of the International Journal of Lifelong Education, we will sketch the state of the art for each of these branches of adult education. Moreover, our central argument will be that developing countries do not only need a more extended system for adult education, but also a more flexible and more targeted system than the rather traditional practices in most developing countries.     

Discussion on Conditions of Production and Distribution of 8mm Films in the I.C.E.F. Member Countries

Mr. Möller (Canada) said that there were two points which could supplement Dr. Hubalek's lecture as far as Canada was concerned.     

Studying enzymatic bioreactions in a millisecond microfluidic flow mixer

In this study, the pre-steady state development of enzymatic bioreactions using a microfluidic mixer is presented. To follow such reactions fast mixing of reagents (enzyme and substrate) is crucial. By using a highly efficient passive micromixer based on multilaminar flow, mixing times in the low millisecond range are reached. Four lamination layers in a shallow channel reduce the diffusion lengths to a few micrometers only, enabling very fast mixing. This was proven by confocal fluorescence measurements in the channel’s cross sectional area. Adjusting the overall flow rate in the 200 μm wide and 900 μm long mixing and observation channel makes it possible to investigate enzyme reactions over several seconds. Further, the device enables changing the enzyme/substrate ratio from 1:1 up to 3:1, while still providing high mixing efficiency, as shown for the enzymatic hydrolysis using β-galactosidase. This way, the early kinetics of the enzyme reaction at multiple enzyme/substrate concentrations can be collected in a very short time (minutes). The fast and easy handling of the mixing device makes it a very powerful and convenient instrument for millisecond temporal analysis of bioreactions.     

Response to fluency-oriented intervention of Dutch poor readers

Dysfluency is the major characteristic of dyslexia in languages with a relatively shallow orthography, particularly when unfamiliar words have to be processed. The present study investigated to what extent slow identification of unfamiliar words can be speeded up and whether the expected variation in response-to-intervention can be related to differences in the phonological recoding skills in order to gain insight in the core deficits of dyslexia. The intervention involved four months of continued individual practice of fluency after maximal accuracy was achieved. Response-to-intervention was made operational in terms of individual learning curves, derived from multilevel analysis with repeated measures of response times, number of trials and accuracy as dependent variables. Increasing fluency was indicated by response times getting shorter. An unselected group of poor grade 2 readers who received the intervention in addition to regular classroom practice improved their reading compared to a matched control group who received no additional training. As expected, there were substantial individual differences between students in terms of response-to-intervention (RTI). Good and poor treatment responders progressed comparably when the training was done in the relatively easy training condition with closed word sets of four letter words with one consonant cluster, repeating the overlapping cluster + vowel. Increasing the difficulty level of the training condition to word sets overlapping in consonant cluster only, resulted in substantial individual differences in all three dependent variables. In fact, the poor responders did not improve any more whereas the poor responders continued to do so. This particular characteristic of each student's individual learning curve appeared to be highly predictive of the overall response-to-intervention or intervention outcome. The contribution of this finding to the understanding of dyslexia is discussed in terms of RTI.     

Evidence of the relative age effect in football in Australia

Abstract The birth date distributions of elite male and female footballers in Australia, from junior youth (age 14 and upwards) to senior (professional) players, were examined. A statistically significant relative age effect was found among junior male players, reducing in effect with increasing age. An inter-year relative age effect that became apparent among the players at national level in the Under-17 and Under-20 age groups, due to the timing of the respective World Cups for those age groups, was also identified. It is conjectured that this might lead to players born in certain years having a curtailed pathway in the elite game, leading to drop-out among this very elite group. In the case of women elite players, no significant relative age effect was found among youth players, possibly due to less fierce competition for places, although a significant effect was found to exist at senior elite level.