Motor correlates of ADHD: contribution of reading disability and oppositional defiant disorder

This study investigated whether the likelihood of motor impairment in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) increases with the presence of other disorders, and whether the co-occurring diagnoses of reading disability (RD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) account for the motor deficits seen in ADHD. A total of 291 children (218 boys, 73 girls) participated. Six groups of children were compared: ADHD only (n = 29); RD only (n = 63); ADHD and RD (n = 47); ADHD and ODD (n = 19); ADHD, RD, and ODD (n = 21); and typically developing control children (n = 112). Motor skills were assessed with the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency and the Beery Test of Visual-Motor Integration. We found that the motor skills of the ADHD-only group did not differ from the typical control group. Furthermore, motor impairment in ADHD increased as a function of co-occurring disorders, and the presence of RD rather than ADHD predicted motor impairment.     

Becoming interested during teacher education

In this article we examine first-year student teachers’ possibilities to become interested in professional issues in teacher education. We study the phenomenon of becoming interested among first-year student teachers via three different kinds of data. We analysed our data through John Dewey’s definition of interest, where a person has an interest if s/he is actively keen on some object that has personal meaning for her/him. According to our data, student teachers adopt an object of interest that teacher educators provide. Learners found it difficult to find the objects of interests by themselves, and it was exceptional for them to find personal meaning and an active state of interest. This is problematic because studying may be performance-oriented without the conditions of interest conceptualised by Dewey. Through our study we also discuss a theoretical approach which would help understand the mechanism behind becoming interested.     

Children's help seeking and impulsivity

The aim of the present study was to analyze the relationship between students' (100 children aged 8 to 12) help-seeking behavior and impulsivity. Help-seeking behavior was evaluated using a naturalistic experimental paradigm in which children were placed in a problem-solving situation and had the opportunity to seek help from the experimenter, if needed. Impulsivity was analyzed using the Hyperactivity–Impulsivity Scale from the Teacher Rating Form of the Multidimensional Peer Nomination Inventory (TR-MPNI), Circle Tracing Task (CTT), Matching Familiar Figures (MFF), and Impulsiveness and Venturesomeness scales from the Eysenck Junior I₆ questionnaire. Structural equation modeling (SEM) showed that impulsivity was not related to children's question asking. Different correlational patterns were found for question asking and other help-seeking variables (i.e., performance scores and mean reflection time preceding question asking). The two Eysenck Junior I₆ scales showed no significant correlations with other measures. The importance of considering the many sidedness of both help-seeking and impulsivity constructs is discussed.     

Towards sustainable well-being in SMEs through the web-based learning program of ergonomics

Promoting well-being at work in the context of sustainable development is a complex and dynamic issue. To enhance sustainable well-being at work, organizational learning (OL) is one requirement. The purpose of this study was to identify and describe the characteristics of the learning program of the ergonomics ‘the Ergonetti’ that promote sustainable well-being at work implemented in the small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The data was gathered through individual thematic interviews of 14 students who participated in the study and carried out the learning tasks in 10 different SMEs. The data was analyzed using inductive content analysis in the frame of sustainable well-being at work and organizational learning. The characteristics of the learning program of ergonomics that promoted sustainable well-being at work related to the categories describing worker’s individual capabilities and competence, work organization and environment, and leadership. The results suggest that, in the light of promoting sustainable well-being at work the learning program of ergonomics may be considered an efficient and straightforward distance learning program accessible through the Internet. In addition, sustainable well-being at work through learning is rarely being in focus of occupational health research.     

Assessing user-specific difficulty of documents

On the web, a huge variety of text collections contain knowledge in different expertise domains, such as technology or medicine. The texts are written for different uses and thus for people having different levels of expertise on the domain. Texts intended for professionals may not be understandable at all by a lay person, and texts for lay people may not contain all the detailed information needed by a professional. Many information retrieval applications, such as search engines, would offer better user experience if they were able to select the text sources that best fit the expertise level of the user. In this article, we propose a novel approach for assessing the difficulty level of a document: our method assesses difficulty for each user separately. The method enables, for instance, offering information in a personalised manner based on the user’s knowledge of different domains. The method is based on the comparison of terms appearing in a document and terms known by the user. We present two ways to collect information about the terminology the user knows: by directly asking the users the difficulty of terms or, as a novel automatic approach, indirectly by analysing texts written by the users. We examine the applicability of the methodology with text documents in the medical domain. The results show that the method is able to distinguish between documents written for lay people and documents written for experts.     

The Developmental Dynamics of Literacy Skills During the First Grade

The aim of the study was to investigate prospective relationships between reading and writing performance during the first grade of primary school. The data was collected from 83 Finnish‐speaking children who were examined four times on reading, spelling, and productive writing skills during the first grade. At the beginning of the school year, they were also tested on initial reading skill. The results showed that reading and spelling manifested a reciprocal relationship during the first semester: reading performance increased subsequent spelling proficiency, and spelling skills enhanced subsequent reading. Later on, however, reading predicted spelling in a less reciprocal association. In turn, productivity of writing predicted subsequent reading performance during the first grade although the reverse was not true. The results suggest that it may be important to emphasize the support which compositional writing may offer to the development of reading.     

Phonological and sensory short-term memory are correlates and both affected in developmental dyslexia

We investigated whether poor short-term memory (STM) in developmental dyslexia affects the processing of sensory stimulus sequences in addition to phonological material. STM for brief binary non-verbal stimuli (light flashes, tone bursts, finger touches, and their crossmodal combinations) was studied in 20 Finnish adults with dyslexia and 24 healthy controls. To determine sensory Item STM, participants were asked to match pairs of sequences of increasing length. In Time STM, participants matched pairs of five-stimulus-sequences of increasing stimulus onset asynchrony between the stimuli. Phonological STM was studied with digit span forwards and backwards, pseudoword span, pseudoword matching span, and pseudoword repetition. Earlier results associating phonological STM impairment with dyslexia were replicated. Dyslexic participants also performed more poorly than controls in sensory STM, suggesting that they have general difficulties in representing temporal sequences in STM. Further, sensory STM, phonological STM, temporal acuity, and reading ability were correlated, pointing to shared processes.     

Mathematics-related emotions among Finnish adolescents across different performance levels

This study examined the relation of mathematics performance and gender with seven mathematics-related emotions (enjoyment, pride, anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness and boredom) among adolescents. Using strict and lenient mathematics performance cut-off scores, respective groups of adolescents with mathematics difficulties (MD, n = 136), low (LA, n = 166) and typical mathematics performance (TA, n = 1056) were identified. Our results revealed that the MD group reported more shame than the LA group. The MD group also reported more negative emotions and less positive emotions than the TA group, with the exception of boredom, for which there was no statistically significant difference. The interaction effect between mathematics performance group and gender on emotions was significant. Only females with MD showed significantly higher levels of hopelessness and shame than females with LA, while males with LA even reported more boredom than males with MD. Concerning gender differences, males reported slightly more pride and enjoyment than females. However, the direction and magnitude of the gender differences showed great variance among mathematics performance groups. The practical implications of the results are discussed.