Teachers’ skill ratings of children with learning disabilities: A comparison of the United States and Japan

This study compared U.S. and Japanese grade school teachers’ perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of children in their classrooms identified as fitting commonly used criteria for a learning disability. U.S. teachers identified 4.0 percent of their children as meeting the criteria and Japanese teachers identified 1.5 percent. The teachers then rated these children’s abilities in the areas of listening, speaking, reading/writing, reasoning, mathematics, social, and study skills. Overall, U.S. and Japanese teachers’ rating patterns were similar on 70 percent of the skills. In most areas where significant differences were found—listening, speaking, reading/writing and study skills—U.S. teachers rated higher percentages of their children as “weaker” than Japanese teachers. A noteworthy exception was the area of social skills where Japanese children received higher percentages of “weak” ratings. U.S. and Japanese teachers also differed in their perceptions of causative factors leading to their children’s learning difficulties. We discuss the findings in terms of U.S.-Japanese differences in writing systems and cultural expectations.     

美国体操运动员的培养现状及其启示

为促进我国体操事业的可持续发展,同时也为能够吸取发达国家体操管理机制的成功经验,运用文献资料法和调查访问法介绍了美国体操运动员培养的现状和管理机制,并对其进行适当的分析和研究,以期为解决我国体操运动员培养过程中所出现的问题提供参考和借鉴.     

A Liberal Arts Education: Global Trends and Challenges

The debate about the effectiveness of the liberal arts curriculum is centuries old, but recent financial and social pressures have placed the survival of the liberal arts in the United States at even greater risk. Using Kimball's (1995) notion of the oratorical and philosophical traditions of liberal education, this article first identifies the critical importance of balancing breadth and depth in the curriculum before honing in on breadth as being in particular danger in the current climate. After analyzing the major threats to breadth in American higher education, the article looks overseas to find a new case for the value of breadth in the curriculum. It focuses on Hong Kong's university system, where a large-scale, multiyear project is underway to graft a fourth year of general education onto a three-year model of discipline- or profession-specific training. The resulting contrast between American institutions discarding curricular breadth while foreign universities rediscover it is telling. This topic has particular relevance for Christian colleges and universities as they seek the holistic development of their students.     

Terra Populus: Workflows for Integrating and Harmonizing Geospatial Population and Environmental Data

The Terra Populus project (TerraPop) addresses a variety of data management, curation, and preservation challenges with respect to spatiotemporal population and environmental data. In this article, we describe our approaches to these challenges, with a particular focus on geospatial data workflows and associated provenance metadata. The goal of TerraPop is to enable research, learning, and policy analysis by providing integrated spatiotemporal data describing people and their environment. To do so, TerraPop is assembling a globe-spanning and temporally extensive collection of high-quality population and environmental data, ensuring good documentation, and developing a Web-based data access system that enables users to assemble customized integrated data sets drawing on a variety of data sources and formats. We describe TerraPop's collection strategies, detail the geospatial workflows involved in preparing data for ingest into the project database and those used to transform data across formats for dissemination, and discuss the system used to capture and manage provenance metadata throughout the project. A key aspect of the project is the development of global current and historical administrative unit boundaries that can be linked to census data. These boundaries serve as the linchpin of TerraPop's data integration strategy, and constitute an important data set in their own right.     

Solitary and Collaborative Pretense Play in Early Childhood: Sources of Individual Variation in the Development of Representational Competence

This study evaluates sources of individual variation in child pretense play as an expression of emerging mental representation. Family sociodemographic characteristics, maternal personological characteristics, and maternal affective and cognitive play behaviors, as well as children's gender, language competence, and play, were examined simultaneously. Naturalistic child solitary play and child collaborative play with mother were videorecorded in 141 20–month-olds. Child solitary play, child-initiated and mother-initiated collaborative play with mother, and maternal demonstrations and solicitations of play were then coded into nonsymbolic and symbolic acts. Zero-order relations obtained between child play and, respectively, child gender and language, family SES, and maternal verbal intelligence, personality, physical affection, and play demonstrations and solicitations. Structural equation modeling supported the following unique predictive relations: Child language and mothers' symbolic play positively influenced child collaborative play, and child gender and mothers' verbal intelligence predicted child solitary play. Child gender and mothers' verbal intelligence and physical affection influenced mothers' play and so influenced child collaborative play indirectly. The cognitive advantages of child play and maternal influences on child play are placed in an adaptive parenting framework.     

Risk-taking in explanation of biological events

Risk-taking by biology students as they attempt to explain observed biological events was investigated. The dependent variable, risk-taking as measured by the Extremity-Confidence of Hypothesis Test and the Risk-Taking Verbal Observation Scale, was analyzed within 2 × 2 and 2 × 3 factorial designs. The independent variables consisted of two levels of achievement motivation and status of information, and three levels of group arrangement for discussion. The results indicate that verbal risk-taking is influenced by differential knowledge of the information and the composition of a discussion group based on the members' measured achievement motivation. No differences were noted in the comparison groups on risk-taking as measured by the Extremity-Confidence of Hypothesis Test. A significant, but low, positive correlation was found to exist between IQ and risk-taking in verbal discourse by individuals. Based on the results of this study, the suggestion that risk-taking is a multidimensional trait is supported, and the magnitude of its expression may be influenced by differential treatments.