Intervention Provided to Linguistically Diverse Middle School Students with Severe Reading Difficulties

This study investigated the effectiveness of a multicomponent reading intervention implemented with middle school students with severe reading difficulties, all of whom had received remedial and/or special education for several years with minimal response to intervention. Participants were 38 students in grades 6-8 who had severe deficits in word reading, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Most were Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) with identified disabilities. Nearly all demonstrated severely limited oral vocabularies in English and, for ELLs, in both English and Spanish. Students were randomly assigned to receive the research intervention (n = 20) or typical instruction provided in their school's remedial reading or special education classes (n = 18). Students in the treatment group received daily explicit and systematic small-group intervention for 40 minutes over 13 weeks, consisting of a modified version of a phonics-based remedial program augmented with English as a Second Language practices and instruction in vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension strategies. Results indicated that treatment students did not demonstrate significantly higher outcomes in word recognition, comprehension, or fluency than students who received the school's typical instruction and that neither group demonstrated significant growth over the course of the study. Significant correlations were found between scores on teachers' ratings of students' social skills and problem behaviors and posttest decoding and spelling scores, and between English oral vocabulary scores and scores in word identification and comprehension. The researchers hypothesize that middle school students with the most severe reading difficulties, particularly those who are ELLs and those with limited oral vocabularies, may require intervention of considerably greater intensity than that provided in this study. Further research directly addressing features of effective remediation for these students is needed.     

图书馆馆际间的合作：全球性的进展

作者鼓励图书馆专业人员,不单要为自己的图书馆尽心尽力,也要走出自己的图书馆,贡献才智与全世界数字图书馆链接。为了达到提供更快的服务,把好的资源信息送到更边远的地区,作者列举近年来图书馆界馆藏数字化的多项工程的进展,说明图书馆馆际间合作的必要性,因为工程浩大,影响深远,需要靠跨国界、跨行业、跨机构的参与、精诚地合作、克服挑战和经费的大力支持。作者更鼓励图书馆专业人员,贡献一己之力,来完成服务无围墙的世界图书馆的宏愿,做一个真正的世界图书馆人。参考文献43。     

Automated opinion detection: Implications of the level of agreement between human raters

The ability to agree with the TREC Blog06 opinion assessments was measured for seven human assessors and compared with the submitted results of the Blog06 participants. The assessors achieved a fair level of agreement between their assessments, although the range between the assessors was large. It is recommended that multiple assessors are used to assess opinion data, or a pre-test of assessors is completed to remove the most dissenting assessors from a pool of assessors prior to the assessment process. The possibility of inconsistent assessments in a corpus also raises concerns about training data for an automated opinion detection system (AODS), so a further recommendation is that AODS training data be assembled from a variety of sources. This paper establishes an aspirational value for an AODS by determining the level of agreement achievable by human assessors when assessing the existence of an opinion on a given topic. Knowing the level of agreement amongst humans is important because it sets an upper bound on the expected performance of AODS. While the AODSs surveyed achieved satisfactory results, none achieved a result close to the upper bound.     

Organisational culture and values and the adaptation of academic units in Australian universities

This study explores connections between the organisational culture and values of academic units in Australian universities and their efforts to adapt to external environmental pressures. It integrates empirical findings from case studies with theories of organisational culture and values and adaptation. It identifies seven dimensions of academic unit’s organisational culture and values that influenced how case study academic units adapted. Then patterns of heterogeneity and homogeneity within these dimensions are noted and their associations with different modes of adaptation are discussed.     

The Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers

The overall mission of the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers—(CNAM) [National Conservatory of Industrial Arts and Trades] is outlined. One of its centers, the Centre national de l'entrepreneuriat—(CNE) [National Center for Entrepreneurship] is described in greater detail. In particular, this center offers various services, notably training and retraining, to small entrepreneurs, including distance training via a virtual training system, @ppui^©. It also offers a range of entrepreneurial consultation services to small and to very small businesses and to regional institutions.     

Infants of depressed mothers show "depressed" behavior even with nondepressed adults

To determine whether the "depressed" behavior (e.g., less positive affect and lower activity level) of infants noted during interactions with their "depressed" mothers generalizes to their interactions with nondepressed adults, 74 3-6-month-old infants of "depressed" and nondepressed mothers were videotaped in face-to-face interactions with their mothers and with nondepressed female strangers. "Depressed" mothers and their infants received lower ratings on all behaviors than nondepressed mothers and infants. Although the infants of "depressed" versus nondepressed mothers also received lower ratings with the stranger adult, very few differences were noted between those infants' ratings when interacting with their mother versus the stranger, suggesting that their "depressed" style of interacting is not specific to their interactions with depressed mothers but generalizes to their interactions with nondepressed adults as early as 3 months of age.     

The Relative Merits of Different Types of Overall Evaluations of Teaching Effectiveness

An unresolved issue in student evaluations of teaching effectiveness (SETE) literature is what type of overall evaluation of teaching effectiveness should be used in personnel decisions. The objective of this study is to compare the merits of: (a) an overall evaluation made by students, (b) a weighted average overall evaluation with the weights determined by students, (c) a weighted average overall evaluation with the weights being determined by the individual instructors teaching their respective classes, (d) an unweighted average overall evaluation, and (e) a second-order factor that proxies for an overall evaluation. Our results indicate that: (a) all of these overall evaluations were very highly intercorrelated, (b) the unweighted and weighted average overall evaluations measured virtually the same thing, and (c) the second-order factor that served as an overall evaluation was most highly correlated with the other overall evaluations and had the advantage of being most understandable to the faculty.     

On Models and Mickey Mouse

The re‐issue of a nineteenth‐century French Drawing Course is the occasion for an examination of issues of ‘models of good practice’ in current art teaching. These are listed as an expanded set of student‐centred pedagogical paradigms, which embrace the forceful popular imagery of electronic games and comic strips. The formalist adaptations of comic‐strip imagery by artists in the 1970s which challenged traditional divisions between high and popular art, are contrasted with the scathing Marxist analysis by Dorfman and Matterlart, Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, which still has political resonance. The darkly ambivalent, if much theorised, appropriations of popular imagery by contemporary artists Pettibon and Murakami are adduced as part of an on‐going problematic, where ideological readings are glossed over for fear of jeopardising the liberal consensus in art and education.