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.     

Using Necessary Information to Identify Item Dependence in Passage-Based Reading Comprehension Tests

Applications of traditional unidimensional item response theory models to passage-based reading comprehension assessment data have been criticized based on potential violations of local independence. However, simple rules for determining dependency, such as including all items associated with a particular passage, may overestimate the dependency that actually exists among the items. The current study proposed a more refined method based on cognitive principles and substantive theories to determine those items that pose a threat. Specifically, the use of common necessary information from text was examined as a contributor of local dependence. Cognitively similar item pairs, those with connected necessary information, had higher local dependence values than item pairs with no connected necessary information. Results suggest that focusing on necessary information may be useful to some extent for understanding and managing item dependence for passage-based reading comprehension tests.     

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.     

学术简讯

不同国家依据市场准则对高等教育进行调整,这些调整导致了新的社会阶层——学生消费者的产生,从而影响了高等教育的性质、目的和价值观。政府支持学生消费者权利的重要尝试体现在高校与学生的合约中,这些合约规定了学生期望获得服务的水平以及他们为之应尽的义务。作者运用布迪厄的理论框架分析了高校的组织特征和运作机制,关注其对学生学习过程和教师学术行为的影响。高校为提高市场运作而提供了很多生产和服务信息,通过研究这些信息,作者发现高校常常营造一种特殊形象向即将升学的学生进行宣传,这种形象同时也调整着在校生的预期。这说明信息并非中立,而往往能构建起学生体验的独特概念,影响着学生的身份并强化了学生作为消费者的地位。就此而言,我们认为在变革了的社会经济政治环境中,高等教育作为公共产品与私人产品的平衡被重建了。在学术与政策层面,对消费主义的关注为大学注入了外在驱动的实用主义目标,从而强化了当前将高等教育看作私人投资的观念。     

Exploring classroom life through cogenerative dialogues

In response to Shady’s reflection on his experience as a teacher-researcher in which he explored different cogen structures, we consider fluid participant configurations using cogens as a research method to provide insights into classroom life. Our cogens illuminated the role of symbolic, cultural and social capital in student–teacher alignments that changed across different classroom situations. In Shady’s study, as well as our own, respectful student–teacher relationships that involved the teacher and students first establishing common social capital, enabled the teacher to “be in with” the students, and vice versa. We raise questions about how the structure of cogens might affect the nature of the dialogue that is cogenerated.     

Constructing Macbeth: Text and Framing in a Secondary Urban Classroom

This study focuses on a secondary English classroom in an East London school, and the multimodal nature of the students’ construction of the literary heritage text Macbeth, specifically in their dramatic reinterpretation of Act 1, Scene 7, where Lady Macbeth persuades Macbeth to pursue his ambitions and kill the current king, Duncan. From this classroom event, this study goes on to explore how a social semiotic reading can reveal insights into school students’ learning and recreation of this text.