Rhythm production at school entry as a predictor of poor reading and spelling at the end of first grade

Rhythm plays an organisational role in the prosody and phonology of language, and children with literacy difficulties have been found to demonstrate poor rhythmic perception. This study explored whether students’ performance on a simple rhythm task at school entry could serve as a predictor of whether they would face difficulties in word reading and spelling at the end of grade 1. The participants were 479 Norwegian 6-year-old first graders randomized as controls in the longitudinal RCT on track (n = 1171). Rhythmic timing and pre-reading skills were tested individually at school entry on a digital tablet. On the rhythm task, the students were told to tap a drum appearing on the screen to two different rhythms (2 Hz paced and 1.5 Hz paced). Children’s responses were recorded as they tapped on the screen with their index finger. Significant group differences were found in rhythm tapping ability measured at school entry, when groups were defined upon whether children went on to score above or below the 20th percentile reading and spelling thresholds in national assessment tests at the end of grade one. Inclusion of the school-entry rhythmic tapping measure into a model of classification accuracy for above or below threshold reading and spelling improved accuracy of classification by 6.2 and 9.2% respectively.     

Teaching Nature of Scientific Knowledge to Kindergarten Through University Students

Science & Education -     

Headteacher critique and resistance: a challenge for policy,and for leadership/management scholars

Educational leadership/management scholars have undertaken work which documents the difficulties particular headteachers face when implementing policy. Some have suggested that headteachers mediate policy, ensuring the best possible outcomes for their schools, but there is also critique of this argument and a counter‐suggestion that heads ought to resist the imposts of conservative, marketised policies which produce and reproduce educational inequities. In this article I consider this position, and argue that if the field is to take up the question of resistance then it will need to extend its theoretical resources, interrogate and test out the limits of the proposition through empirical example, consider instances where resistance appears to occur, and move beyond a focus on individual headteachers to take seriously their collective professional organisations. In making this argument, I generate some suggestions for future research.     

Determining Sufficient Measurement Opportunities When Using Multiple Cut Scores

Many educational testing programs report examinee performance at more than two levels of proficiency. Whether these assessments have the capacity to support these multiple inferences, though, is a topic that has not been widely discussed. This study proposes a method for evaluating the minimum number of measurement opportunities for reporting students' performance at multiple achievement levels and describes an application of the method for reading and mathematics assessments that are used by some school districts in Nebraska. Analyses were based on judgments collected from 110 teachers about characteristics of items and tasks from multiple assessments in reading and mathematics at grades 4 and 8, and in high school. Results suggested that there were generally enough items on the mathematics assessments to classify students into two or three performance levels, but rarely enough to make the four classifications that the state reported. Items on the reading assessments were generally distributed across the proficiency levels and tended to allow reporting for all four classification levels. These findings have implications for both practitioners and policymakers in how scores are interpreted.     

GTravels towards Problem Based Learning in Medical Education (VPBL)

This paper reports the results and insights ofan exploratory investigation of theeffectiveness of a prototypic virtualproblem-based learning (VPBL) exercisedelivered via the WWW, that uses HypermediaAssisted Instructional Technologies (HAIT). The study targeted all first year medicalstudents at a south-central University Schoolof Medicine who were enrolled in the humanphysiology course during the Spring 2000 (n =150). A quasi-experimental, post-test onlyresearch design compared the VPBL and atext-based version of the same PBL exercise onstudents' achievement, as measured by a set ofselected physiology examination items, andtheir perceptions of the learning environment,as measured by the Teaching and LearningEnvironment Questionnaire (TLEQ) (Chauvin &Bowdish, 1998). Findings suggest that the VPBLis equally as effective as the text-basedversion for enhancing students' learning andtheir learning environment in small group, PBLsessions. In this paper, we examine theevidence supporting the VPBL innovation andexplore what constitutes necessary andsufficient evidence that an educationalinnovation should be incorporated appropriatelyinto the medical educational practice of aschool. We examine instructional design issuessuch as learner control, instructional control,and teacher and learner roles as related toinstructional development for the WWW, bycomparing and contrasting our observations ofthe VPBL design experiment with theprofessional literature.     

Correlations between WISC-R subtests and verbal,performance, and full scale IQ scores for minority group children

The relationship between WISC-R subtest scores and Verbal, Performance, and Full Scale IQs was investigated for a sample comprised of rural Appalachian children. The sample was comprised of both white and black children who might be described as culturally different by virtue of low family income and residence in the mountainous areas of Virginia and North Carolina. Data analysis consisted of computing product-moment correlations (rs) between each of the ten subtests and the Verbal, Performance, and Full Scale IQs. Correlations between individual subtests and the FS IQ ranged from.49 through.63, but none of the differences between these rs were large enough to attain significance. Correlations between the verbal subtests and Verbal IQ ranged from.64 for Comprehension up to.78 for Vocabulary. For the performance subtest, the rs ranged from.54 between Coding and the Performance IQ up to.72 for Object Assembly.     

Research Subjects,Participants or Co-researchers? Extending the Involvement of Students in Art and Design Research

Art education has a range of purposes. Art is said to support students to explore, interpret, ask critical questions, communicate and realise ideas, experiment, take risks, collaborate, tell stories and/or engage in social and political actions. In this paper, we consider whether educational researchers have the same capacious view of students’ potential and capacities for involvement. We bring the results of a Rapid Evidence Review (RER) of the benefits of arts education into conversation with the literatures on student voice and participation. We outline the ways in which student voice and participation are discussed, then move to the results of the RER. We conclude with a discussion of the opportunities for art education researchers to develop research practices that are inclusive of students.