One in Three? Teachers' Attempts to Identify Low Self-Esteem Children

The maintenance of healthy self-esteem remains a central concern in pastoral care. It is almost taken for granted that we can identify low self-esteem in children based on the knowledge built up through day-to-day interactions. But self-esteem is essentially a personal perception, and one may ask, to what extent can another make reliable judgements about such a phenomenon? This study looked at the match between teachers' judgements of their pupils' self-esteem and the children's own self-reports. The teachers concerned were committed to self-esteem enhancement as an important goal of their teaching, but the findings indicate that when trying to identify low self-esteem children in their classes, they were frequently unsuccessful. These findings are discussed, and implications considered.     

Oral Language and Reading in Bilingual Children

This article examines the question: Do lexical, syntactic, fluency, and discourse measures of oral language collected under narrative conditions predict reading achievement both within and across languages for bilingual children? More than 1,500 Spanish–English bilingual children attending kindergarten–third grade participated. Oral narratives were collected in each language along with measures of Passage Comprehension and Word Reading Efficiency. Results indicate that measures of oral language in Spanish predict reading scores in Spanish and that measures of oral language skill in English predict reading scores in English. Cross‐language comparisons revealed that English oral language measures predicted Spanish reading scores and Spanish oral language measures predicted English reading scores beyond the variance accounted for by grade. Results indicate that Spanish and English oral language skills contribute to reading within and across languages.     

The German registry: The evolution of a recordkeeping model

The German registry system is unique in its approach to records management. By way of better understanding this approach, the historical development of this registry is portrayed in its characteristic phases: first the adoption of the practice of using registers in the Middle Ages; second the transposition of this practice into a complete recordkeeping system in the Prussian administrations of the 18th and 19th centuries; third the attempt to streamline this system in the early 20th century; and fourth the nature of the registry in modern German administrations, and in particular how it has adapted to the use of electronic records. Apart from the historical presentation, however, this study also aims to highlight central concepts of the German registry, including entries, action files, and the idea of registry itself being applied to the entire activity of keeping records. Finally, it is suggested that these concepts can provide new insights into various areas of archives as well as into current recordkeeping problems. This article is a completely revised version of the thesis which I submitted in 1997 (under the title “The German Registratur”) for the Master of Archival Studies degree at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia. My thanks to Angelika Menne-Haritz and Wendy Duff for their comments during the writing of this revision.