MORAL AND RELIGIOUS INFLUENCES AS RELATED TO ENVIRONMENT OF STUDENT LIFE. DORMITORY LIFE FOR COLLEGE WOMEN

This article tests the assumption that Horace Bushnell was the father of the religious education movement, despite the fact that at least two generations lapsed between the final edition of his groundbreaking book, Christian Nurture, in 1861 and the formation of the Religious Education Association in 1903. It contends that William Rainey Harper was both the father of the movement and the founder of the Religious Education Association, while Bushnell can be viewed as the “spiritual father” of the movement, with Henry Clay Trumbull as the link between the two. George Albert Coe can be seen as the “dean” of religious educators and a leader of the movement in the first half of the 20th century.     

RELIGIOUS TEACHING AND INFLUENCE OF THE UNIVERSITY∗

The purpose of this column is to keep religious educators abreast of relevant significant research in the general field of psychology. Its implications for methods and materials in religious education are clear. Religious educators may well take advantage of every new finding in scientific research.

Each section describes a group of findings which have been reported in PSYCHOLOGICAL ABSTRACTS together with titles of these works so that those who wish may go to the original source.

This column is written as a service to religious educators by the Union College Character Research Project. All abstracts are used with permission of the periodical, PSYCHOLOGICAL ABSTRACTS. The abstract numbers are Volume 35. Number 1, February 1961 and Volume 35, Number 2, April 1961.     

Phonemic awareness development in 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children: an examination of emergent,receptive, knowledge and skills

The National Institutes of Health has deemed illiteracy a national health crisis based on reading proficiency rates among American children. In 2002, the National Early Literacy Panel identified six pre-reading skills that are most crucial precursors to reading mastery and predict future reading outcomes. Of those skills, phonological awareness, and in particular phonemic awareness, is the strongest independent predictor of early reading outcomes. However, limited research has addressed the development of these component skills due in part to the fact that many of the measures used to assess sub-skills such as phonemic awareness are oral production measures that cannot easily be administered with children under the age of five, and are not designed to detect implicit or emerging knowledge. To address this limitation, we developed and administered two receptive measures of phonemic awareness to 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children. We found evidence for the emergence of this component skill earlier in ontogeny than is currently acknowledged in the literature. Overall, children performed at above chance rates on measures of receptive phonemic awareness at the level of the individual phoneme as early as 2.5-years-old. Results are discussed in terms of the need for a paradigm shift in prevailing models of how phonological awareness develops, as well as the potential to identify children at-risk for reading failure at an earlier point in ontogeny than is currently feasible.     

THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF BIBLE STUDY.

Teacher‐training programs for Jewish educators in the United States have de‐emphasized the Hebrew language as an essential element in their curricula. Research in the field of sociolinguistics points to the relationship of language, culture, and identity. It is the purpose of this paper to point out the intimate relationship between Hebrew language and Jewish culture and identity. The de‐emphasis of Hebrew‐language learning leads teachers to present a culture and religion which does not properly reflect the texts, culture, and practice that form the base of Jewish tradition. The need to transmit an authentic tradition effectively requires an awareness and understanding of the centrality of Hebrew in the training of Jewish teachers.     

Categorization and Its Developmental Relation to Early Language

Three studies examine the developmental relation between early linguistic and cognitive achievements. Studies 1 and 2 attempt to replicate previous findings of a strong temporal link between the ages at there is a sharp rise in new nominal productions and the appearance of 2-category grouping using a longitudinal design. Studies 1 and 2 differ principally in whether the same stimuli were employed each time the children's categorization was tested or whether different stimuli were employed. Study 3 compares the categorization performance of children identified as late talkers to age-matched and language-matched controls cross-sectionally. Our findings consistently show that children's ability to classify objects in a spatial of temporal order is independent of advances in productive vocabulary growth. These results suggest that although children's developing knowledge of object categories may underlie developments in categorization and naming such developments depend on other abilities as well Studyin the past experiences of the child and the particular context in which the behavior is exhibited may be a more meaningful approach to understanding changes in categorization and ultimately its relation to language.