Attribution style in adolescents with Down's syndrome

Educational research places emphasis on the fact that individuals who have experienced repeated failures may develop an attribution profile characterized by a bias towards primarily external causes. The aim of this study is to compare the attribution style of adolescents with Down's syndrome with that of normal children and adolescents matched for mental and chronological age; three groups consisting of 10 participants each were employed, an experimental group and two control groups were employed. The experimental group were Down's syndrome adolescents. Participants in the first control group were matched to the experimental groups for mental age, and those in the second for chronological age. All of the 30 participants were given an attribution test consisting of 14 items, illustrative of everyday or school‐related events in which the main character experienced either success or failure. The participants were asked to attribute the character's performance to one of five causes: ability, effort, help, luck or task difficulty. The results show that adolescents with Down's syndrome tend to attribute performance to external help. Their attribution style would seem to be very similar to that of the control participants matched for mental age.     

Estranged but not Alienated: A Precondition of Critical Educational Theory

Alienation is a double‐edged concept adaptable to both positive and negative or critical accounts of the individual, culture and society. It is also elastic enough to describe very different economical and cultural effects, and thus it is a potential source of confusion and inconsistency. Alienation is characterised by a Janus‐faced adaptability to both neutral/positive and negative uses: the former may be considered as endemic, the latter as historical. In some respects alienation is neither avoidable in education nor wholly undesirable.     

My Life in Libraries

The article is a memoir of the author's career, which she spent primarily at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign. As Slavic Bibliographer there, she organized the Slavic Reading Room in the Slavic and East European Library and was the first head of the Slavic Reference Service. She reinvigorated the American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies (ABSEES). She was a founding member and/or was very active in virtually all of the national and international Slavic librarians' organizations. In addition, she served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). Beyond just Slavic librarianship she established the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs at the University of Illinois and served as its founding director. She was also a member of George Soros's Network Library Program Board, part of his Open Society initiative.     

Children Who Read Words Accurately Despite Language Impairment: Who Are They and How Do They Do It?

Some children learn to read accurately despite language impairments (LI). Nine- to 10-year-olds were categorized as having LI only ( n  =   35), dyslexia (DX) only ( n  =   73), LI + DX ( n  =   54), or as typically developing (TD; n  =   176). The LI-only group had mild to moderate deficits in reading comprehension. They were similar to the LI + DX group on most language measures, but rapid serial naming was superior to the LI + DX group and comparable to the TD. For a subset of children seen at 4 and 6 years, early phonological skills were equally poor in those later classified as LI or LI + DX. Poor language need not hinder acquisition of decoding, so long as rapid serial naming is intact; reading comprehension, however, is constrained by LI.     

'Being in the World': The event of learning

This paper employs an eclectic mix of paradigms in order to discuss constituting characteristics of young children's learning experiences. Drawing upon a phenomenological perspective it examines learning as a form of 'Being' and as the result of learners' engagement with the world in their own, unique, intentional manners. The learners' intentions towards their world are expressed in everyday activity and participation. A social constructivist perspective is thus employed to present learning as situated in meaningful socio-cultural contexts of the everyday, lived world and as a form of participation in those settings. These characteristics of learning are brought together into a holistic, synthesised model, a Gestalt of learning. The proposed synthesis has relevance for and is applicable to educational contexts as a means of making sense of children's learning experiences and of promoting and facilitating them.     

Developmental Outcomes for Children at High Risk of Dyslexia and Children With Developmental Language Disorder

We followed children at family risk of dyslexia and children with preschool language difficulties from age 3½, comparing them with controls (N = 234). At age 8, children were classified as having dyslexia or Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and compared at earlier time points with controls. Children with dyslexia have specific difficulties with phonology and emergent reading skills in the preschool period, whereas children with DLD, with or without dyslexia, show a wider range of impairments including significant problems with executive and motor tasks. For children with both dyslexia and DLD, difficulties with phonology are generally more severe than those observed in children with dyslexia or DLD alone. Findings confirm that poor phonology is the major cognitive risk factor for dyslexia.     

Cosmopolitan dice recast

This article argues that hegemonic cosmopolitan narrativity fails to frame a complex cosmopolitan normativity. The hegemonic cosmopolitan narrative celebrates a mobile selfhood merely hospitable to the encountered, mobile diversity that comes ashore. A recent educational-theoretical ‘refugee-crisis’ initiative serves as an illustration of the normative shortcomings of the new cosmopolitanism. The implicit normativity of the dominant cosmopolitan narrativity is, I claim, politically too weak to cover the normative surplus of a more critical cosmo-politics. Cosmopolitanism should be recast to make higher ethico-political demands on the global self and world for the cultivation of neglected ecological and relational sensibilities.     

Bachelor Graduates on the Labour Market. A Cross‐national Comparison of the Employers' Viewpoint

One of the most vehemently discussed questions in the process of restructuring traditional long study programmes according to the Bachelor/Master model is how to develop first cycle curricula and degrees which are a meaningful preparation for a following Master programme as well as for the labour market—as stressed in the Bologna Declaration. It remains to be seen for which occupational levels undergraduate programmes will prepare and how these new degrees will be assessed on the labour markets in different countries in Europe. The article focuses on the employers' viewpoint, giving an overview of the assessment of Bachelor degrees in four countries: Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands and Norway. As it is a very early stage to provide in‐depth analyses because so far there are hardly any Bachelor graduates on the labour markets, the article illustrates from a more analytical perspective what factors might influence their transition to the world of work and the development of their further careers.     

Globalisation,the challenge of educational synchronisation and teacher education

In this article, we set out from the challenge that globalising synchronisation – usually exemplified by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and World Bank initiatives – presents for education to argue that the time–space compression effected by globalisation must educationally be dealt with with caution, critical vigilance and a broadening of educational theoretical outlooks. We focus on the demands this raises upon the teacher as a researcher and a critical thinker and claim that meeting such demands presupposes some curricular enrichment of teacher education. We suggest two theoretical frameworks that can effect such enrichment and be made relevant to a critique of the globalising educational synchronisation, namely, the charge of developmentalism and the capabilities approach (Sen, Nussbaum) to equality. We conclude with some indications of the need for a reformulated notion of cosmopolitanism that should be contrasted with those globalising practices that often appear in cosmopolitan guise.     

Rare Polonica in The New York Public Library: Books of the Fifteenth–Eighteenth Centuries: Introduction

The New York Public Library (NYPL) holds one of North America's largest and oldest collections of books pertaining to the Slavic, Baltic, East European and Eurasian languages and peoples. The present catalog describes 514 volumes dating from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries held by the NYPL. The following categories of material are included: books printed in the Polish‐Lithuanian Commonwealth; books printed outside of the homelands by Polish printers; titles by ethnic Polish authors, regardless of place of imprint or language of publication; works by foreign authors printed in the Polish language, or on subjects connected with Poland and/or the Rzeczpospolita. The catalog includes incunabula and 62 works of the sixteenth century.