Segmenting Texts Into Meaningful Word Groups: Beginning Readers’ Prosody and Comprehension

It was hypothesized that prosodic reading facilitates beginning readers’ comprehension by allowing them to segment the text into meaningful word groups. Two prosodic features of the oral reading of second-grade students were considered: lack of inappropriate pauses and attention to punctuation. To examine the unique contribution of these features to reading comprehension, fluency (speed and accuracy of reading) and vocabulary were controlled. As expected, both prosodic features were significantly related to comprehension, jointly explaining as much variance as fluency. Accordingly, it might be counterproductive to encourage reading speed and accuracy at the expense of prosody.     

The Relation Between Morphological Awareness and Reading Comprehension: Evidence From Mediation and Longitudinal Models

We examined the role of a hypothesized factor in reading comprehension: morphological awareness, or the awareness of and ability to manipulate the smallest meaningful units or morphemes. In this longitudinal study, we measured English-speaking children’s morphological awareness, word reading skills, and reading comprehension at Grades 3 and 4, in addition to their phonological awareness, vocabulary, and nonverbal ability as control measures. Path analyses revealed that word reading skills partially mediated the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension at each grade. Further, children’s early morphological awareness partially explained children’s gains in reading comprehension, and their early reading comprehension partially explained their gains in morphological awareness. These findings support the predictions of recent models of reading comprehension: that morphological awareness impacts reading comprehension both indirectly through word reading skills and directly through the language system and that morphological awareness underpins the development of reading comprehension (e.g., Perfetti, Landi, & Oakhill, 2005).     

Sliding manifold design for linear systems with unmatched disturbances

This paper offers an efficient sliding manifold design method that minimizes the impact of unmatched disturbances onto SM dynamics and system accuracy. System sensitivity upon unmatched constant or slowly varying external disturbance vector is evaluated by the steady-state dependent criterion function. An infinite set of sliding manifolds that minimize the chosen optimization criterion is determined and a way of selecting a manifold out of that set that provides adopted SM dynamics is suggested. The proposed approach has been demonstrated on numerical examples and verified by simulations.     

Research on Gender and Education in the Nordic Countries

Sex has for many years been an important independent variable in educational research, but the serious theoretical discussion of the variable as a dependent variable belongs mostly to the last three decades. A need for a conceptual reorientation has emerged which, for one thing, resulted in the replacement of the concept sex by the concept gender. The article in this section presents and discusses the necessity and the development of this theoretical reorientation in the Nordic countries, which has attracted many researchers and instigated inventive projects. In addition the article gives an overview of Nordic empirical gender research in or related to education: first the studies that opened up the field, then the development that followed. This presentation focuses on different subareas, such as studies of gender and ability, learning and achievement, studies of gender aspects of classroom interaction, studies of single‐sex learning arrangements, action research studies in order to expand the interpersonal and emotional skills repertoire of boys and girls, studies of gender identity. Although differences between the Nordic countries are clear, similarity is the dominant trait. At the end the article comments on recent viewpoints on the likely development of gender policy and outlines basic educational questions within the Nordic educational systems.     

Effects of three types of retirement preparation program: A qualitative study of civil servants in Brazil

ABSTRACT

Studies on the effectiveness of retirement planning programs are relatively scarce. Retirement preparation and planning programs may assist individuals to smooth the transition to retirement and subsequent adjustment. This qualitative study examines the effects of three retirement preparation programs on civil servants in Brazil. Theoretically, the study builds on the transtheoretical model (TTM), also called the stages of change model. Twenty civil servants (aged 53–67) working for the Brazilian government were randomly assigned to one of the three retirement planning programs entitled testimony, short, and extensive. The results of qualitative interviews, conducted 6 months after completion of the programs, show that participants on the extensive program presented a broader array of changes in retirement planning and had progressed through more stages of the TTM than participants who took part in the short and testimony programs.     

SARA: A Text-Based and Reader-Based Theory of Signaling

We propose a two-component theory of text signaling devices. The first component is a text-based analysis that characterizes any signaling device along four dimensions: (a) the type of information it makes available, (b) its scope, (c) how it is realized in the text, and (d) its location with respect to the content it cues. The second component is a reader-based analysis in which signaling effects on text-processing are hypothesized to depend jointly on (a) the relevance of the signaled information to the readers' goals and background knowledge and (b) the accessibility of the signaled information to cognitive processes. The two components of the model are closely related: The text-based component specifies the information made available to the reader, and the accessibility of that information is influenced by the realization properties, scope, and location of the signaling device relative to the cued content.     

A conceptual framework for analysing the impact of influences on student engagement and learning

The notion that ‘customer satisfaction’ should be the ultimate measure of quality provision of any service organization is often accepted in the higher education context. However, measuring the quality of an educational institution based on students’ satisfaction is insufficient as it diverts the focus from student development, advancement and growth to an affective evaluation of the service. More appropriate measures of quality of higher education institutions are student engagement and learning. This study describes the likely impact of perceived overall quality of higher education institutions on student engagement. The contribution of this study is twofold. First, it draws attention to the importance of higher education institution quality as the main institutional-level determinant of student engagement and, second, it suggests a comprehensive multilevel conceptual framework for its empirical testing.     

(7) Yugoslavia: Library education in Yugoslavia

This paper discusses Nigerian university library buildings from 1948, when the first university institution was established, up to 1998. Through the use of a questionnaire, study visits to 12 of the 31 university libraries, interviews with library staff and review of the literature, it was found that all Nigerian university libraries started from temporary sites. While all five first generation universities had their first permanent library buildings erected within the first decade of their establishment, only five of the eight second generation universities have moved into their permanent library buildings after over 25 years of existence. Of the 15 third generation universities established in the 1980s, only five have erected and occupied their permanent buildings. Library buildings of the first generation universities were found to be very standard and grand in design while the same cannot be said of most of their second and third generation counterparts. For libraries with permanent structures, the designs were mostly modular. The paper recommends that library buildings be given priority in universities' physical development plans and that realistic library building standards be formulated with the co-operation of the National Universities Commission, the Nigerian Library Association and the Committee of University Librarians of Nigerian Universities (CULNU).     

The model of pre-acculturative stress—A pre-migration study of potential migrants from Russia to Finland

This study tested a model of factors predicting pre-acculturative stress among potential migrants from Russia to Finland prior to their migration (N = 244). By applying the theory of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), the model of acculturative stress (e.g., Berry, 2006) and the expectations model (e.g., [Black, 1992] and [Black et al., 1992]) to the pre-acculturation stage, it was hypothesized that the potential migrants’ pre-acculturative stress is a result of expectations about future (post-migration) adaptation. These expectations are developed through direct and indirect pre-migration contacts with, as well as knowledge about, the society of immigration. Three types of expectations during the pre-acculturation stage were studied: expected difficulties in socio-cultural adaptation, expected duration of adaptation, and expected discrimination. In line with the hypotheses, experiences of pre-acculturative stress clearly originated from the expectations that potential migrants had regarding their upcoming post-migration adaptation. Also, socioeconomic status, gender, general well-being, self-efficacy, perceived social support, and length of the pre-acculturation stage played important roles in predicting expectations and/or stress among the potential migrants. The study highlights that pre-acculturation is a complex process that begins at the pre-migration stage. It contributes to our understanding of pre-acculturation in general, as well as the factors affecting the formation of pre-acculturative stress among voluntary ethnic migrants.     

Sports and Violence Reflected in the Mirror of Modern Societies: Sport Ambiguities

The theory of Norbert Elias, with regard to the ‘civilising process’, widely taken up and nourished by his epigons such as Eric Dunning, does not fully explain the reasons why sport, far from systematically pacifying, tends equally to reproduce or amplify certain violent tendencies in societal groups, when it does not in itself constitute the germ of the violence in the heart of contemporary societies. In fact, Elias considers the ‘new’ social configuration as a tool used to control violence, forgetting that the institutionalisation of budding practices also bears witness to social and societal transformations, including free time, access to education, growth of cities, the economic development of states, circulation of goods, merchandise and people, the forming of the media and communication cultures, and the dissemination of information and cultural models. The purpose of this study is to show how his singular posture prevents Elias from understanding all the facets of sport as being prey to its own tensions and contradictions, particularly when it is a case of examining the ‘educational’ positions of the activity reflected in the mirror of the socio-historical conditions of the production of culture and the ways in which the practice of sport has been instrumentalised.