Bridging the Divide: A comparative analysis of articles in higher education journals published inside and outside North America

Articles published in three leading North American higher education journals during the year 2000 are compared with those published in three leading, English language, non-North American higher education journals (and with a larger sample of fourteen such journals). The comparison focuses on the location of their authors, the themes researched, the levels at which the analyses are pitched, the methods and methodologies employed, and the explicitness of both methodological and theoretical engagement. Compared to the non-North American sample, the North American articles evidence a dominance of North American-based authors, a greater focus on the student experience, and on institutional and national level studies, and a much stronger emphasis on multivariate analysis as a method. Articles in the North American sample were also more likely to be both methodologically and theoretically explicit. Possible reasons for the divergent patterns observed are identified and discussed.     

“It's a Difficult Matter”1: Historical perspectives on the enduring problem of the practicum in teacher preparation

Current reviews of teacher education pay considerable attention to problems associated with the practicum, and often claim to propose major changes in order to improve the quality of new graduates. Many of the problems they address concerning the practicum and its relation to the ‘theoretical’ component of programs are longstanding, and have been the focus of sustained critique and consequent ongoing modification. Between 1900 and 1950 teacher educators and administrators in England and Australia sought to develop programs that balanced and integrated theory and practice, supported by a range of teaching and administrative procedures. They identified a range of problems in staffing, curriculum and pedagogy, school placements and supervision, and explored a wide range of possible solutions to those problems from minor adjustments to substantial reconceptualisations of whole programs. However, many such solutions generated further problems of their own. The analysis of the history of the practicum in teacher preparation indicates how firmly contemporary proposals are embedded within the framework of assumptions and approaches that have shaped teacher education for over a century.     

Education and the Changing Economic and Industrial Order: An International Perspective

The nature of the indigenous development movement in education is considered and a case made for using regional strengths in the developing world as a foundation for a new internationalism incorporating the best of the East and West. It is further argued that a well resourced education system is the best instrument for coping with the vast changes to the economic industrial and social order. However, the new demands will have to be met not by further narrow vocationalism but by an emphasis on universal education and providing opportunities for mature age students. Educators are called upon to maintain their commitment to the full personal development of all people.     

Early intervention for reading disabilities: teaching the alphabet principle in a connectionist framework

Forty-eight children referred by teachers at the end of first grade for difficulty in reading were randomly assigned to three treatments, all of which modeled connections between written and spoken words but did not teach phonics rules, for eight half-hour individual tutoring sessions. The children were taught 48 words of varying orders of spelling-sound predictability (Venezky, 1995) using a whole-word method, for making connections between a word's name and its constituent letters; a subword method, for making connections between each color-coded spelling unit and its corresponding phonemes; or a combined whole-word and subword method. Regardless of the method used, children improved reliably on standardized reading measures and the taught words, showing that they could make connections between written and spoken words at the whole word and subword levels, even when rules were not taught. By posttest, the subword method showed a reliable advantage on a standardized test of real word reading. Knowledge of sounds associated with both multiletter and single-letter spelling units predicted reading achievement. Order of spelling-sound predictability (easy, moderate, difficult) was correlated with standardized measures of reading at pretest and posttest, and the magnitude of the relationship increased as a result of the intervention. Individual differences in verbal intelligence, rapid automatized naming, and phonological and orthographic skills predicted response to the intervention. Instructional implications of the results are discussed.     

Developmental skills related to writing and reading acquisition in the intermediate grades

Multiple measures of the fine motor system, the orthographic system, the phonological system, the working memory system, the verbal intelligence system, the writing system, and the reading system were administered to 300 students in grades 4, 5, and 6. Results showed that the writing system and the reading system share many of the same orthographic, phonological, and working memory sub-processes but thepatterns of concurrent relation between these sub-processes and writing and between these subprocesses and reading differ. These results are consistent with the view that writing and reading draw upon the same as well as unique cognitive systems.