Functional reading difficulties in Denmark

In this first Danish study of adult reading skills, 1124 adults between 18 and 67 years of age participated in an interview about reading habits and skills, and 445 were tested individually at home using six common texts. Great care was taken to ascertain that subjects were representative of the whole adult population and that the texts covered most types of everyday reading. Three percent of the participants were found to have severe functional reading difficulties and a further 9 percent to have moderate difficulties. Regression analyses found several unique predictors of reading difficulties: age (adults over 45 years reading more poorly than younger adults), limited basic education, no vocational training nor higher education, and a small amount of reading needed at work. The rate of poor readers was about four times higher among persons with low income than among others. Men and women read equally well although men tended to rate themselves lower as readers than women did. Methodological issues and some educational implications are discussed.     

‘Children’s clans’; social organisation and interpretive reconstruction as aspects on development of peer-groups in outdoor play

The focus of this article is children’s self-organisation of peer-groups through play. The play was initiated by encounters with the environment. The use of ethnographic methods in early childhood research has proved helpful to elucidate, interpret, and understand children’s experiences and the creation of meaning in their everyday lives. This inquiry draws on field notes, informal conversations with the children, and photos from a study of kindergarten children’s experiences of outdoor places and landscapes in Norway. Going out of doors together with the children regularly over a period of 10 months revealed aspects of how children’s interactions in play connect to their use of natural landscapes and its place in peer-group social organisation. The data are presented as ‘narrative maps’ and episodes written as ‘emplotted’ narratives.     

The Role of Desegregation and Teachers of Color in Discipline Disproportionality

The Urban Review - Scholars note the multitude of ways that the continual shifts in the racial composition of schools affect students, but fewer studies consider the implications of such shifts for...     

Eye-movement parameters and reading speed

This study addressed the relationship between four eyemovement parameters and reading speed of 20twelve-year-old children during silent and oralreading. The results indicated that each of theparameters correlated significantly with speed ofsilent reading. In fact, reading speed could bepredicted by the following variables: recognitionspan, average fixation duration, and number ofregressive saccades. Moreover, the relationshipbetween silent and oral reading speed, on one hand,and between reading fluency and reading errors in oralreading speed, on the other, was examined. The resultsindicated that in terms of reading speed, significantinterrelationships existed between silent and oralreading. Furthermore, fluency and errors wereintercorrelated phenomena, but only fluency wassubstantially related to oral reading speed.     

Is the Simple View of Reading too Simple?

According to the Simple View of Reading (SVR), reading comprehension is the product of word decoding ability and linguistic comprehension (R = D × C). However, there is also evidence showing that an additive model (R = D + C) explains just as much or even more of the variance in reading comprehension than the product model. To further evaluate these models, 467 Norwegian students in grade 6 were administered measures of reading comprehension, decoding ability, listening comprehension, phonemic awareness, and rapid digit naming. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the explanatory power of each model, in addition to the influence of phonemic awareness and rapid naming. The preliminary hierarchical regression analyses were replicated among Swedish students. According to the present study, the additive model explained more of the variance in reading comprehension than the product model, and only rapid naming contributed significantly to explain variance in reading comprehension, above and beyond that explained by the SVR.     

DEN HERBARTSKE PEDAGOGIKKS INNFLYTELSE I NORGE

Gill, P. E. 1976. The Relationship Between Mental Ability and Eight Background Variables. Scand. J. educ. Res. 20, 135‐145. Multiple regression is seen as a search technique when applied to IQ. test data. The results from such a search are stochastic rather than deterministic. Because of this it is imperative that comprehensive samples be studied. The sample in this study (n = 3,695) was representative of the population of Irish 6‐ to 12‐year‐olds. The results are surprising in that the total variance explained by predictors such as SES, sex, family size, position in family, absenteeism and urbanity is never more than 8 %. Differences in how predictors behave with IQ and Vocabulary are noted. SES, family size and urbanity are the most significant predictors. When Vocabulary is the criterion, sex differences (in favour of girls) emerge consistently. It is contended that pupils of low intelligence go absent more often than their peers. The total variance explained was increased when homoscedasticity was reduced by stabilizing criterion variance (by reducing age span).     

Challenging the premises of international policy reviews: an introduction to the review symposium

In 2009, a think tank called the International Alliance of Leading Education Institutes (IALEI) announced the results of a study entitled Climate Change and Sustainable Development: The Response from Education. Intended for a policy audience, the study offered a glimpse into the status of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and an early look at the emergence of Climate Change Education (CCE), in 10 different nations. As with most international reports, the IALEI report provoked many questions, some of which are more broadly relevant to scholarship and practice. This paper introduces a review symposium that addresses three such questions: (1) How coherent is the concept of ESD across national contexts and what conceptual tensions continue to surround ESD and CCE? (2) Can nation-level analyses tell us anything useful about countries where education is not centrally governed? and (3) In light of the evolving relationship between educational research and policy, how should researchers engage with ongoing policy debates?     

Sources of difficulty in assessment: example of PISA science items

ABSTRACT

The understanding of what makes a question difficult is a crucial concern in assessment. To study the difficulty of test questions, we focus on the case of PISA, which assesses to what degree 15-year-old students have acquired knowledge and skills essential for full participation in society. Our research question is to identify PISA science item characteristics that could influence the item’s proficiency level. It is based on an a-priori item analysis and a statistical analysis. Results show that only the cognitive complexity and the format out of the different characteristics of PISA science items determined in our a-priori analysis have an explanatory power on an item’s proficiency levels. The proficiency level cannot be explained by the dependence/independence of the information provided in the unit and/or item introduction and the competence. We conclude that in PISA, it appears possible to anticipate a high proficiency level, that is, students’ low scores for items displaying a high cognitive complexity. In the case of a middle or low cognitive complexity level item, the cognitive complexity level is not sufficient to predict item difficulty. Other characteristics play a crucial role in item difficulty. We discuss anticipating the difficulties in assessment in a broader perspective.