Student‐directed learning strategies to promote the progress of students with intellectual disability in inclusive classrooms

Student‐directed learning strategies involve teaching students to modify and regulate their own behaviour. Teaching students to self‐regulate behaviour has been identified as one means of promoting self‐determination, and promoting and enhancing self‐determination has become a valued outcome internationally. In addition, however, student‐directed learning strategies could prove important for including students with disabilities in general education classrooms by reducing the student's dependency upon others in the classroom setting. Four students with intellectual disability were supported to select an educational goal on which they wanted to work and were taught to self‐monitor their progress toward that goal in general education classrooms. Their progress toward the goal was evaluated through data collection activities and by using the Goal Attainment Scaling process. In general, students achieved their self‐selected goals. The potential contribution of student‐directed learning strategies to inclusion and promoting self‐determination are discussed.     

The S‐Machine: An Alternative Approach to Teaching Assembler Programming

The demand for assembler language programmers has dropped dramatically over the past 20 years with the advent of structured programming languages and the accessibility of hardware features from high‐level languages. Nevertheless, a course in assembler language programming is often the first, and sometimes the only, introduction a student has to a machine's hardware. For this reason alone, assembler language programming courses should not be removed from a curriculum; instead, they should be kept and taught in conjunction with modern software engineering practices. This article describes an alternative approach to teaching assembler language programming. Whereas the students are still introduced to a machine and its assembler language, they are required to write several low‐level library routines they used in introductory courses (such as ACM CS1 and CS2). Furthermore, the S‐Machine's support software allows students to study the internals of an assembler, a librarian, and a linker.     

Training and Scoring Issues Involved in Large-Scale Writing Assessments

Many states are implementing direct writing assessments to assess student achievement. While much literature has investigated minimizing raters' effects on writing scores, little attention has been given to the type of model used to prepare raters to score direct writing assessments. This study reports on an investigation that occurred in a state-mandated writing program when a scoring anomaly became apparent once assessments were put in operation. The study indicates that using a spiral model for training raters and scoring papers results in higher mean ratings than does using a sequential model for training and scoring. Findings suggest that making decisions about cut-scores based on pilot data has important implications for program implementation.     

Blocking student performance in high school?

Block schedules have been used in several different high schools in various areas of the United States. Reasons for their use vary from better preparing students for college work to fewer disruptions of the school day. Several studies have examined the impact of changing from a semester system to a block system on the academic performance in specific areas with varying results. This paper examines the impact of a change of schedule on overall academic performance as measured by a student’s Grade Point Average. This study indicates that for the specific case studied, the change in systems did have a positive effect on performance.     

Public speaking as cultural ideal: Internationalizing the public speaking curriculum

Institutes of higher education around the world respond to the challenge of globalization by internationalizing their curricula. We argue that adding an element of cultural reflection to curriculum design is an important step toward internationalization. We use ethnographic analysis to highlight the cultural gap between Anglo-American and non-Anglo interpretations of public speaking. We begin by reconstructing the Anglo cultural ideal of public speaking from a historical overview of the evolution of the public speaking textbook (Sproule, J.M. [2012]. Inventing public speaking: Rhetoric and the speech book, 1730–1930. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 15, 563–608.). Then, we review alternative cultural models of public speaking. Finally, we identify directions for future research and curriculum design.     

What happens to precocious readers' performance by the age of eleven?

This paper reports on the progress made by a small group of fourteen 11‐year‐old children who had been originally identified as being precocious readers before they started primary school at the age of five. The data enable comparisons to be made with the performance of the children when they were younger so that a six‐year longitudinal analysis can be made. The children who began school as precocious readers continued to make progress in reading accuracy, rate and comprehension, thereby maintaining their superior performance relative to a comparison group. However, their progress appeared to follow the same developmental trajectory as that of the comparison group. Measures of phonological awareness showed that there are long‐term, stable individual differences that correlated with all measures of reading. The children who were reading precociously early showed significantly higher levels of phonological awareness than the comparison children. In addition, they showed the same levels of performance on this task as a further group of high achieving young adults. A positive effect of being able to read at precociously early age was identified in the significantly higher levels of receptive vocabulary found amongst these children. The analyses indicated that rises in receptive vocabulary resulted from reading performance rather than the other way round.