From human resources to human rights: Impact assessments for hiring algorithms

Ethics and Information Technology - Over the years, companies have adopted hiring algorithms because they promise wider job candidate pools, lower recruitment costs and less human bias. Despite...     

Educational Television—Report on a visit to America

On Saturday 2nd July 1966, I left Glasgow by air and reached Boston that evening. Emmanuel College was my place of residence while I followed a course in Educational Research methods which was given by Professor Donald Spearitt and others at the Graduate School of Education of the University of Harvard. I worked mainly in Longfellow Hall and the newly erected Larsen Hall on the Appian Way, Cambridge. Privileged access to libraries, including the famous Widener Library, was granted to me. That semester in Harvard was particularly valuable in providing standards with which to evaulate and appreciate the work I was later to see in many studios and classrooms throughout the USA. I also had the advantage of discussing problems with first-rate educationists who suggested the most useful places to visit and introduced me to key people in the world of Instructional Television.     

Exploring teachers' perceptions of children's imaginative writing at home

This study explores an area of writing that has been largely neglected – children’s imaginative writing at home. In an educational climate dominated by the standards agenda and top‐down directive discourses, this study draws inspiration from children who are creating opportunities for writing themselves and are developing agency through their writing at home. The positive approach to reading advocated in Margaret Clark’s (1976) seminal work on ‘young fluent readers’ has been very influential. Rather than reporting what children are unable to do, Clark explored the early experiences and home setting of competent pre‐school readers, posing the question: what can they teach us? Taking this lead, one of the premises of this study is that we should similarly seek to understand the experiences of young competent writers so that we can learn more about children who choose to write of their own volition outside of school. This paper presents the findings of the preliminary phase of an ongoing doctoral study. Drawing on questionnaire data, it specifically focuses upon Year 5 and 6 teachers’ views of children’s imaginative home writing, exploring problems of identification and teachers’ perceptions of their pupils as imaginative writers at home.     

Evaluating the implementation of performance improvement training: The E3 process for success

The E³ process for success provides a basic framework for evaluating the implementation of a training program implemented as a broad‐based performance improvement strategy. The regularity of conducting the evaluation helps to determine challenges and opportunities for modification, integration, and continuous application for the desired change.     

Word Recognition and the Nature of Reading Difficulty in Children with An Intellectual Disability: A Review

IT HAS OFTEN been assumed that, given appropriate instruction, children with intellectual disability can reach a level of achievement in reading commensurate with their level of mental development. This paper reviews evidence to the contrary, with particular reference to the skills required for word recognition. Similarities between specific reading disability and reading difficulty in children of low intelligence are noted, especially in deficits in short‐term memory. Much of the research with children with an intellectual disability has focussed on the teaching of sight‐word recognition; however, studies of decoding skills indicate that ability to acquire and use a knowledge of spelling patterns is a major problem underlying difficulty in independent word recognition by these children. Efforts to teach these children more efficient decoding skills have met with only limited success.     

Reflections on an Ecuadorian Preschool: Identifying Opportunities for Assistance

As part of a mission team to Ecuador, the authors participated in numerous enrichment activities in an impoverished urban preschool. They discuss their visits to an orphanage and a special education facility while collaborating with the parochial leadership, medical personnel, and educators in Quito, Ecuador. The authors reflect on successful activities and opportunities for students and staff in these diverse settings.     

The Use of Letter Position Cues in the Visual Processing of Words by Children with an Intellectual Disability and Nondisabled Children

TWO EXPERIMENTS were designed to investigate possible deficiencies in strategies used for decoding words by children with an intellectual disability. The experiments focused specifically on the use of letter position cues as aids to word identification. In Experiment 1,20 children with an intellectual disability (ID) aged 10 to 12 years were matched with two groups of nondisabled children, one for mental age (MA) and one for chronological age (CA), on a visual search task, with response times to array types (word, pseudoword, or nonword) and target position in positive arrays as the dependent variable. The ID group showed response time advantages only when the target letter was in the initial position of an array; however both nondisabled groups responded faster when the target letter was in either the initial or final position, compared to the medial position, and this pattern occurred for words (MA group) and words and pseudowords (CA group) but not for nonwords. Experiment 2 extended the investigation to the oral reading of isolated words. In substitution errors made by children with an intellectual disability, the incorrect word tended to resemble the test word only in the initial letter. In errors made by MA‐matched children, however, both the initial and final letters tended to be the same as those in the test word, suggesting that these are salient cues to word recognition. The findings are interpreted with reference to previous work on early reading acquisition and to research which suggests a more generalised deficiency in the acquisition and use of strategies by ID subjects in cognitive tasks.     

Integrating technology into teacher education: How online discussion can be used to develop informed and critical literacy teachers

This paper reports findings from 6 years of investigation of the use of online discussions with large cohorts of preservice literacy teachers (approximately 150 each year). The report outlines essential components for effective online discussion, noting the challenges involved when aiming for informed and critical literacy discussion among large groups of novice educators. It elaborates on the most successful approach to this undertaking which involved the use of case study scenarios as the focus of discussion. The report argues that the case study discussions were most effective in promoting professional discussion because they allowed a more effective expert role for the instructors.     

Effects of restraint on open-field activity,shock avoidance learning,and gastric lesions in the rat

Many rat studies of learned helplessness confound the stress of restraint with inescapable shock. In the present experiment, albino rats were held immobile for 0, 2, 8, 14, or 18 h. Behavioral deficits were observed in an open-field activity maze and in two-way shuttlebox avoidance acquisition. In the activity maze, a sex X restraint interaction was observed for latency to leave the center square, ambulation, and frequency of center square crossing. Males were slower to leave the center square, had fewer ambulations, and crossed the center square less frequently than females. These effects were potentiated by restraint. Males reared significantly less than females, and restrained animals reared significantly less than nonrestrained animals. Restraint also significantly increased the frequency of grooming. On the avoidance tasks, a significant restraint X trial block interaction indicated slower learning for restrained animals. The severity of the decrements increased with restraint duration. The presence of stomach lesions was positively correlated with stress duration and the severity of the behavioral decrement. The results indicate that restraint produces a variety of behavioral changes which may result in interpretive difficulties for helplessness studies that confound restraint and shock.