The effect of text genre on parent use of joint book reading strategies to promote phonological awareness

This study compared the rates of different types of joint book reading behaviors of parents of preschool children with and without language impairments using two different text genres. Participants included 72 preschool children between the ages of 51 and 70 months. Fifty-five children were typically developing and 17 were diagnosed with language impairments. Parent–child dyads were videotaped during periods of joint book reading using two different types of text (one alphabet-rhyming and one narrative). Results indicated parents rarely used reading behaviors known to enhance their preschoolers’ phonological awareness. However, when used, there was a significant difference between the two types of texts. The alphabet book elicited a higher rate of phonological awareness and print concept behaviors, while the narrative book resulted in parents using more content behaviors. In addition, the parents of typically developing children used more phonological awareness behaviors than the parents of children with language impairments.     

Learning to rank with (a lot of) word features

In this article we present Supervised Semantic Indexing which defines a class of nonlinear (quadratic) models that are discriminatively trained to directly map from the word content in a query-document or document-document pair to a ranking score. Like Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), our models take account of correlations between words (synonymy, polysemy). However, unlike LSI our models are trained from a supervised signal directly on the ranking task of interest, which we argue is the reason for our superior results. As the query and target texts are modeled separately, our approach is easily generalized to different retrieval tasks, such as cross-language retrieval or online advertising placement. Dealing with models on all pairs of words features is computationally challenging. We propose several improvements to our basic model for addressing this issue, including low rank (but diagonal preserving) representations, correlated feature hashing and sparsification. We provide an empirical study of all these methods on retrieval tasks based on Wikipedia documents as well as an Internet advertisement task. We obtain state-of-the-art performance while providing realistically scalable methods.     

Traits and skills theories as the nexus between leadership and expertise: Reality or fallacy?

The assumption that effective leaders differ in some identifiable and fundamental ways from other people is still a large part of mainstream industrial‐organizational psychology. Based on a research review on the trait theory of leadership and the concept of expertise, this article finds a convergence between leader and expert traits. Results suggest that leaders and experts may share similar characteristics, with expertise encompassing skills theory. Implications for performance improvement and human resource developers are discussed.     

Exploring youth engagement in agricultural development: the case of farmers’ children in the Philippines as rice crop manager infomediaries

Purpose: This paper explores the intersections between community development and youth development in an initiative that mobilized farmers’ children as Rice Crop Manager (RCM) infomediaries (information mediators). RCM is an ICT-enabled nutrient management application.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The study engaged 30 farmers’ children in high school level from the provinces of Pangasinan, Isabela, Camarines Sur, Iloilo, Bukidnon, and Davao del Norte from November 2016 to October 2017. They interacted with the research team (the authors) and the RCM-SMS platform that sends text messages regarding fertilizer recommendations. A staff member from the Agricultural Training Institute (ATI) also called the students for some follow-up questions. The research team conducted three rounds of interviews with the students concerning the messages and calls that they received and what they did with the information.

Findings: This study finds that farmers’ children can perform infomediary roles quite effectively. Academically excellent children and those involved in farm work performed best.

Practical Implications: The study provides guidance on similar initiatives tapping young people in agricultural development.

Theoretical Implications: This paper finds that while Community Youth Development (CYD) Theory provides a powerful lens in understanding community and youth development intersections, some identified outcomes may overlap and may not be very easy to observe. Hence, the identified outcomes may be revisited for clarity and to make them more all-encompassing.

Originality/Value: The paper documents actual parent-child interaction when the latter is mobilized to serve as an infomediary to access nutrient management-related information on rice.