The development of reading skills in young partially sighted readers

Young learners with severe visual impairments are restricted in many ways, and psychologists and special needs teachers require information about the nature and extent of the possible educationally handicapping effects. This article, written by Michael Tobin, Emeritus Professor of Special Education within the School of Education at the University of Birmingham, and Eileen Hill, a teacher at Queen Alexandra College, Birmingham, reports the use of a longitudinal approach to measure how reading development is affected in these children and to uncover the relationships with and among other cognitive factors. The 60 participants were part of a larger cohort of children registered as blind or partially sighted, their reading progress being monitored from seven to 12 years of age. While improving in all three skill areas as measured by the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability, there were significant deficits/lags in development as compared with the norms for their fully‐sighted age peers, especially in speed of reading. Even more disturbing was the finding that the deficits increased with age. Significant correlates of reading, changing in importance over time, were intelligence, visual efficiency, phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge and short‐term memory. It is proposed that, if the educationally handicapping effects of the impairment are to be overcome, a formal, regular cycle of testing to monitor progress be instituted by specialist teachers and educational psychologists. together with the design, development and standardisation of a new reading assessment procedure; and that the professionals collaborate in the construction of programmes of continuing structured teaching to improve speed of reading throughout primary and early secondary schooling.     

Key contributors: Ernst von Glasersfeld’s radical constructivism

This article reviews the significance of the contributions of Ernst von Glasersfeld to research in science education, especially through his theoretical contributions on radical constructivism. As a field shaper, Glasersfeld’s subversive ideas catalyzed debate in the science education community and fuelled transformation of many facets including research methods, ways of thinking about teaching and learning, curriculum, and science teacher education. Perturbations emanating from the debates on constructivism forged new pathways that led to the development and use of many of the sociocultural frameworks employed by authors in Cultural Studies of Science Education.

学前教育中的文化

在学前教育领域,中国、美国、日本都有独特的文化观念和实践方法,但这些文化观念和实践方法正受到多种因素的威胁。在全球化时代,各个国家间需要互相学习,取长补短。中国学前教育应该传承中国文化中好的方面。学前教育工作者要理清传统文化中最值得保留下来的文化观念和实践方法,使其代代相传。     

Solidarity and conflict: aligned and misaligned prosody as a transactional resource in intra- and intercultural communication involving power differences

This ethnographic study of teaching and learning in urban high school science classes investigates the ways in which teachers and students talk, gesture, and use space and time in interaction rituals. In situations where teachers coteach as a means of learning to teach in inner-city schools, successful teacher-teacher collaborations are characterized by prosodic expressions that converge over time and adapt to match the prosodic parameters of students’ talk. In these situations our ethnographic data provide evidence of solidarity and positive emotions among the teachers and also between students and teachers. Unsuccessful collaborations are associated with considerable differences in pitch between consecutive speakers participating in turns-at-talk, these being related to the production of negative emotions and conflicts at longer time scales. Situational conflicts are co-expressed by increases in pitch levels, speech intensities, and speech rates; and conflict resolution is accelerated by the coordination of pitch levels. Our study therefore suggests that prosodic alignment and misalignment are resources that are pragmatically deployed to manage face-to-face interactions that have solidarity and conflict as their longer-term outcomes.     

Development and assessment of specialized liaison librarian services: clinical vs. basic science in a veterinary medicine setting

In 1998, the University of Florida Health Science Center Libraries (HSCL) developed and implemented a Liaison Librarian Program, dedicated to providing customized, subject-specific services to the faculty, students, clinicians, researchers, staff, and administrators of the six Health Science Center Colleges (Dentistry, Health Professions, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Veterinary Medicine). Subject- and role-specific (clinical vs. basic sciences) liaisons were assigned. This paper describes the HSCL liaison program, exemplified by the liaisons' work with the College of Veterinary Medicine. Preliminary program evaluation, a pilot project developed to discern the needs of the veterinary medicine clientele and facilitate awareness of liaison services, and subsequent re-evaluation of patron awareness and satisfaction are also discussed.     

Dialectical constraints to the discursive practices of a high school physics community

The study investigates how the discursive practices in a physics class were constrained by social forces associated with the larger context in which teaching and learning were situated. The teacher understood teacing and learning in terms of constructivism, believed that students should have more autonomy in the classroom, and structured activities to involve students actively in the learning process. However, despite his efforts to enact the curriculum in a manner that was consistent with constructivism, the emphasis still was on goals such as learning to use formulas to perform calculations and memorizing facts. In addition to constructivism, belief sets that shaped the enacted curriculum related to time being scarce, content coverage being a primary concern, and students needing to be prepared for examinations. A characteristic of the classroom community was a relative imbalance between the voices of science and common sense. Even though the teacher was concerned with students making sense of physics, examples are provided of students accepting the viability of scientific claims despite contradictions with their common sense notions. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 34: 491–507, 1997.