Taiwan Elementary Teachers’ Views of Science Teaching Self-Efficacy and Outcome Expectations

This paper presents the results of a case study involving 282 Taiwanese elementary science teachers at the elementary level. These teachers provided responses to the science efficacy instrument (STEBI-A) and also provided personal data regarding how their years of general (YTE) and science (YTS) teaching experience may have influenced student achievement in science. Researchers used two multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to investigate the interaction and influence of YTE and YTS upon the personal science teaching efficacy (PSTE) and science teaching outcome expectations (STOE) of these teachers. The results advocate the position that the years of general teaching experience of elementary science teachers in Taiwan have a significantly greater impact upon their personal science teaching efficacy and science teaching outcome expectations than years of teaching science. This evidence calls into question whether Bandura and Tschannen-Moran’s view of teacher efficacy as both context and subject matter specific at the elementary level can be applied to Taiwan elementary teachers who teach science. The results of this study should benefit educators and policy-makers with respect to future elementary teacher education throughout Taiwan and other developing nations. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Use of Writing with Symbols 2000 Software to Facilitate Emergent Literacy Development

This paper outlines the use of the Writing with Symbols 2000 software to facilitate emergent literacy development. The program’s use of pictures incorporated with text has great potential to help young children with and without disabilities acquire fundamental literacy concepts about print, phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, vocabulary development, and comprehension. The flexibility and features of the software allow early childhood professionals to create a variety of early literacy tools for the classroom, including worksheets, storybooks, and interactive activities.     

Accumulating Knowledge: When Are Reading Intervention Results Meaningful?

Abstract

The three target articles provide examples of intervention studies that are excellent models for the field. They rely on rigorous and elegant designs, the interventions are motivated by attention to underlying theoretical mechanisms, and longitudinal designs are used to examine the duration of effects of interventions that occur. When studies are carefully designed, effect sizes tend to be modest. We argue that the meaningfulness of effect sizes should not necessarily be determined with reference to Cohen's rule of thumb, and that modest effect sizes can result in major change in performance if they cumulate.     

Occupy All the Dispositifs: Memes,Media Ecologies,and Emergent Bodies Politic

This article assesses Occupy Wall Street as an amalgamation of mediated processes of subjectivation associated with marginal popular culture (memes, meme-platforms, Anonymous operations). This accumulation, I argue, is part of a broader convergence of agencements, of subjectifying processes that took place on and offline, in and out of concentrated occupied zones. OWS gives us one example in response to Toni Negri's call for a genealogy of dispositifs of subjectivation from the perspective of resistance. In addition to examining the accumulation of mediated subjective apparatuses, I propose we think of OWS as an ecology, one that engenders an antagonistic response by a militarized biopolitical state subject (itself an accumulation). I end with some preliminary thoughts on OWS' recomposition after the state's decompositional dispositifs.     

An Experimental Study of Scheduling and Duration of "Tier 2" First-Grade Reading Intervention

This study compared the effects on reading outcomes of delivering supplemental, small-group intervention to first-grade students at risk for reading difficulties randomly assigned to one of three different treatment schedules: extended (4 sessions per week, 16 weeks; n = 66), concentrated (4 sessions per week, 8 weeks; n = 64), or distributed (2 sessions per week, 16 weeks; n = 62) schedules. All at-risk readers, identified through screening followed by 8 weeks of oral reading fluency (ORF) progress monitoring, received the same Tier 2 reading intervention in groups of 2 to 4 beginning in January of Grade 1. Group means were higher in word reading and ORF at the final time point relative to pretest; however, the groups did not differ significantly on any reading outcome or on rates of adequate intervention response. Of potential covariates, site, age, free lunch status, program coverage rate, and tutor were significantly related to student outcomes; however, the addition of these variables in multivariate models did not substantially change results. Rates of adequate intervention response were lower than have been reported for some first-grade interventions of longer duration.     

Rhetoric and practice in pre-service teacher education: the case of Teach For America

Teach For America (TFA), an organization that places college graduates in urban and rural classrooms for two-year terms of service, is lauded by reformers who see its five-week summer training institute as evidence that teachers have little to learn before entering classrooms. Yet, while boosters see TFA as a radical alternative to traditional teacher education, a look at the evolution of their increasingly robust summer training model hardly affirms that perception. In fact, much of what is done in the summer institute parallels the work of traditional teacher education programs in the USA – a surprising state of affairs given the rhetoric of so many TFA supporters. This project traces the evolution of TFA’s summer training institute across two decades, highlighting the growing divide between TFA’s outward-facing image and its actual work. Framing TFA’s summer institute as a case study for examining the relationship between rhetoric and practice in education, the article raises broader questions about how the policy-making context affects the construction and perception of reality.     

Electronic reading and digital library technologies: understanding learner expectation and usage intent for mobile learning

Mobile information technology is changing the education landscape by offering learners the opportunity to engage in asynchronous, ubiquitous instruction. While there is a proliferation of mobile content management systems being developed for the mobile Web and stand-alone mobile applications, few studies have addressed learner expectations and usage intent in consuming digital documents from online content providers and digital libraries with specific emphasis on formal instruction. Understanding usage intent and actual usage of a mobile learning agent as a result of ease of use and usefulness of mobile devices will be addressed in this study. A research framework for instructional technology usage is proposed to help better articulate critical success factors in implementing formal learning using a mobile device, specifically an electronic reader or a tablet computer.     

The ADAPT Program: A Developmental Approach for Serving Profoundly Disturbed Children

The need to provide educational and therapeutic services for profoundly emotionally handicapped children has been well documented in the professional literature. The purpose of this article is to describe a local program for this population of children. The program, known as ADAPT, is operated by the Hillsborough County School System in Tampa, Florida.     

Effects of music on source evaluations

Dr. Simpkins is an assistant professor in the department of advertising at Michigan State University, while Mr. Smith is a media analyst at Campbell‐Ewald, Inc. in Detroit. The research that follows offers some useful advice to producers of commercials and other material using a musical background.     

Mathematical learning difficulties and PASS cognitive processes

This study examined the relationships between mathematical learning difficulties (MLD) and the planning, attention, simultaneous, successive (PASS) theory of cognitive processing. The Cognitive Assessment System (CAS) was used to measure the PASS processes for a group of 267 Dutch students with MLD who attended either general or special education. The results showed that students with MLD performed lower than their peers on all CAS scales and that the MLD group contained many students with cognitive weaknesses in planning or successive processing. Moreover, students who had specific difficulties with the acquisition of basic math facts, the automatization of such facts, or word-problem solving were found to have distinct PASS cognitive profiles. In order to investigate the relationships between cognitive abilities and improvement in the mastery of basic math facts and problem solving, 165 of the students with MLD were given a special multiplication intervention. It appeared that the effectiveness of this particular intervention did not differ across the groups of students with specific cognitive weaknesses.