Measuring Spanish orthographic development in private,public and subsidised schools in Chile

The current study has a twofold purpose: first, to determine the reliability of a tool for assessing orthographic development in Spanish; second, to assess differences in students’ performance on the measure across multiple types of primary schools in a large city in Chile. A Spanish developmental spelling inventory that contained words of increasing orthographic difficulty was administered twice to students in first through fifth grades in three types of schools: public, private and partially subsidised. These school types in large part represent varying levels of student socio-economic status because of costs associated with attending them. Results demonstrate that (a) the Spanish spelling inventory is able to reliably measure the development of orthographic knowledge in Spanish, and (b) there is a relationship between school type and student achievement. The authors describe individual cases to highlight the qualitative nature of differential performance for students in greater- or lesser-resourced schools.     

Observing Interprofessional Collaboration: Impact on Attitude and Knowledge Acquisition

Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) in the medical field is an important factor for good clinical outcomes and should be taught as early as in undergraduate medical education. Since implementing IPC training is an organizational challenge, students are often limited in their opportunities to experience real-life IPC. Therefore, an approach where students observe successful IPC activities of role models in an applied anatomical format was proposed. It was studied whether observing IPC activities in undergraduate anatomical education has an impact on both students' attitude toward IPC and on knowledge acquisition. Further, it was examined whether the attitudes and knowledge of students from different medical disciplines were influenced in different ways. Therefore, 75 medical students and thirty-eight physiotherapy students participated in a study with the task of observing a live broadcast of an interprofessional teaching session. Participants were asked about their attitudes toward interprofessional learning, their evaluation of professional responsibilities, and their profession-specific knowledge before and after observing the IPC session. The participants' attitude toward interprofessional learning improved for both groups of students. Moreover, students of physiotherapy adjusted their evaluation of their own and others' professional responsibilities after observing IPC. In both student groups, knowledge increased, in particular, with respect to the field of knowledge in other professions. So, observing IPC can modify students' attitudes and support knowledge acquisition. The implementation of IPC observations provides students from various healthcare disciplines with a clearer impression of professionals' responsibilities and gives learners the opportunity to acquire knowledge from healthcare fields unfamiliar to them.     

Automatic registration of large range datasets with spin-images

Terrestrial laser scanning technique has represented one of the more advances occurred in the last years in the field of data acquisition. Time-of-Flight (TOF) systems provide a fast and reliable tool to measure millions of 3D points allowing a very effective and dense measurement of the surface geometry. Nowadays, the generation of high quality 3D models is a practice applied to different kind of objects: small or medium size artworks, parts of human body, cars, buildings, civil infrastructures (like dams, bridges, plants, etc.) and whole archaeological sites as well. In most cases, in order to capture the whole object geometry a number of single scans need to be acquired from different positions and then stitched together (i.e. registered each other) to generate the full 3D model. The automatization of the registration of multiple scans acquired from a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) still represents a very attractive research field. The chance to automatically align several point clouds would reduce processing costs in terms of time and human resources. In addition it would allow even non-specialist users to produce 3D models with good quality. This paper contributes to this research area by presenting a method for the automatic registration of very dense point clouds acquired by TLS systems. The proposed solution is an extension to large datasets of an automatic range data registration procedure we developed a few years ago for the modelling of point clouds acquired with close-range laser scanners. Such procedure, based on the spin-images (SIs) algorithm, has been then improved with the introduction of a multi-resolution method that generates a pyramid of spin-images in order to speed up the matching between adjacent scans. The results we present show that this method can be successfully applied for the automatic registration of high density laser scans of complex and large structures of Cultural Heritage.     

Developmental Improvements and Persisting Difficulties in Children’s Metacognitive Monitoring and Control Skills: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Perspectives

This study investigated age-dependent improvements of monitoring and control in 7/8- and 9/10-year-old children. We addressed prospective (judgments of learning and restudy selections) and retrospective metacognitive skills (confidence judgments and withdrawal of answers). Children (N = 305) completed a paired-associate learning task twice, with a 1-year delay. Results revealed improvements in retrospective, but not in prospective monitoring and control. Furthermore, control remained suboptimal, seemingly a consequence of overoptimistic monitoring. Both age groups showed stronger monitoring-based control at the second compared to the first assessment. The comparison with a cross-sectional sample (N = 144) revealed that improvements in retrospective monitoring can be mainly attributed to naturally occurring development, whereas retrospective control seemed to improve due to increased task familiarity.     

Correction to: A Critical Review of Students’ and Teachers’ Understandings of Nature of Science

Science & Education - The original article unfortunately contains incorrect presentation of Tables 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6.     

Special curricular themes for library education in Nigeria

The Nigerian society has cultural and social differences from those of people in developed countries from which educational programmes and practices have been borrowed. The differences are reflected in the peculiarities in the majority of Nigerian citizens’ need for educational and informational services in libraries. In responding to these peculiar needs of a people whose majority has had no tradition of using books, the librarian who administers their needs may require education and training which must differ in content from the conventional library programmes as currently borrowed from developed countries.

Core courses for the training of librarians who are expected to provide information which may not be recorded in print form, have been suggested for preparing these librarians for the kind of service that would sustain the interest and appreciation of their clientele in the use of libraries. The selected courses, based on the culture and structure of the people, will involve the production of literacy resources, information gathering and dissemination for non-literates, book publishing to conform with local demands and public relations activities which would ensure the social relevance of the library school programmes to the needs of the society.