How does morphosyntactic skill contribute to different genres of Chinese writing from grades 3 to 6?

This 4‐year longitudinal study examined the extent to which morphological awareness, syntactic processing, working memory (WM) and reading skills predict unique variances developmentally in three genres of Chinese writing (narration, argumentation and exposition) among 246 young Mandarin‐speaking children. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted using the writing performance of three genres at the fourth year as the dependent variables. After controlling for reading skills and WM, morphological awareness was uniquely associated with all three types of writing genres longitudinally, while syntactic processing made a significant longitudinal contribution to narrative and argumentative writing during the earlier years. With the autoregressive effect of writing controlled, WM was uniquely associated with narrative writings across all four years, and with argumentative and expository writing in the later years. Reading skills were uniquely related to concurrent narrative and expository writing.     

Fine-grained auditory discrimination and performance on tests of receptive vocabulary and receptive language

This research investigated the relation between children’s performance on two measures of receptive language and children’s auditory discrimination of consonant-vowel sounds having frequency and temporal acoustic differences. The measures of fine-grained auditory discrimination produced significant multiple regression coefficients against both receptive vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised) and receptive language (Token Test for Children) scores. Validation analyses conducted by predicting receptive vocabulary and language scores for a new sample of children and relating them to the actual scores led to significant outcomes. It was concluded that fine-grained auditory discrimination is particularly important in the relatively early stages of language learning. The cooperation of the participating children, teachers, principals, and school district administrators is gratefully acknowledged. This research was supported, in part, by a grant from NINCDS (NIH).     

Collaborative teacher roles in facilitating inclusion: Preservice preparation for general and special educators

Abstract

Collaboration between general and special education teachers has been viewed as important to the successful education of students with disabilities who are served in inclusive classes. The purpose of this study was to analyze and compare the perceptions of a national sample of general and special education teacher educators regarding their perceptions of actual and ideal emphases placed on specific collaborative roles in teacher preparation programs for general and special education teachers. The authors analyzed the data and found significant differences between teacher educator perceptions of the degree of emphasis actually placed on collaborative roles and the degree of emphasis that should be placed on these roles in teacher preparation programs.     

Quality assurance,the educational standards debate,and the commodification of educational research

ABSTRACT

The idea of quality assurance dominates educational discourse at the present time. This is reflected in the emphasis placed on test and examination results, inspections and school performance indicators. It is argued in this article that this is not simply an attempt to legitimate traditional conceptions of knowledge. It is also an attempt to construct a new narrative of knowledge. School effectiveness research is an example of this as it applies a performativity criterion to educational research methodology. The article concludes by suggesting that action research may be subordinated to the logic of performativity, and as a result is less able to fulfil its proper purpose which is to create the conditions for innovative experiments in education.