Enabling skills in early reading acquisition: A study of children in Latvian kindergartens

Preschool children in Latvia were tested in order to examine the relationships among various enabling skills and early reading performance. A principal component analysis indicated three factors: a phonemic awareness factor, a naming factor, and a short-term memory factor. Multiple regression analyses with word identification and sentence comprehension as dependent variables yielded further support to the powerful role played by phonemic awareness in explaining variance in both these aspects of reading. Unexpectedly, neither naming nor short-term memory contributed to explain unique variance in word and sentence reading. The Latvian orthography is very consistent, and our results provide further evidence to the importance of phonemic awareness in early reading acquisition especially in a transparent language. Therefore, the tasks used when assessing phonemic awareness can be very useful when screening children at risk for developing reading problems. Enhancing children's letter knowledge and phonemic awareness skills should be a priority goal in the kindergarten classroom.     

Curriculum research for students with intellectual disabilities: a content-analytic review

Curriculum content, the issue of what to teach is fundamental. For students with intellectual disabilities (ID), the choice of educational content is crucial in a life span perspective. Curriculum research for this learner group is sparse. Drawing on a curriculum approach, the purpose of this content analytic reviw study is to analyse trends in curricular research, and discuss implications for further curricular research and policy. Curricular research articles from 1994 to 2016 were identified from databases, using systematic search procedures and specific criteria for inclusion and categorisation of the literature. Based on prior review studies, functional life skills and cognitive academic content formed the analytical fulcrum. The results showed that cognitive academic articles had the highest coverage in the literature and showed a steep increase in publication frequency compared to functional life skill articles. If curricular research on functional life skills stagnates, curriculum policy and practice may fail to provide students with ID the skills necessary for social and practical adaption in their communities. A discursive connection to normative curricular frameworks is essential to analyse and guide curricular choices. This article provides analytical insight and directions for future research in the field of curriculum research for students with ID.     

Research groups as communities of practice—a case study of four high-performing research groups

As the number of globally mobile students has expanded, governments are assumed to be consistently and intentionally competing for talent, in what has been called a “great brain race”. While the notion of competition has become dominant, there is little evidence on long-term policy dynamics in this field, not only across jurisdictions but also over time. We seek to address this gap in this paper through a longitudinal analysis of the politics and public policies impacting international students in four major recruiting countries—Australia, Canada, England and the USA. Through this comparative analysis of the period 2000 to 2016, we demonstrate that international student numbers across the jurisdictions have grown steadily but that this appears to be decoupled from political and policy changes. We also discuss how “internationalization” initiatives provide an insufficient policy umbrella for policy action on the recruitment and retention of international students. Public policy impacting international students spans multiple government agencies or ministries, encompassing different policy fields. This requires greater policy coordination, which remains elusive for the most part.     

Use, updating and integration of ICT in higher education: Linking purpose, people and pedagogy

In this article the use, updating and integration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for teaching and learning purposes is discussed. Based on an empirical study using interviews and document analysis of the implementation of ICT in five Norwegian universities and colleges, the article analyse a number of factors that are of importance for the implementation of ICT in higher education. The analysis discloses that Norwegian higher education institutions often have adequate economic resources and a rather well developed technical infrastructure and support structure related to the use of ICT. However, attempts to link ICT initiatives to organisational development issues and to human resource management have not been very successful. In the conclusion it is argued that pedagogical issues and organisational and human development aspects must be better linked if ICT is to play a more effective role in teaching and learning in Norwegian higher education.     

Fleeing through the globalised education system: the role of violence and conflict in international student migration

ABSTRACT

This article connects directly to the globalisation of both education and conflict, and attends to the intersection between these phenomena, by focusing on conflict-induced student migration, an area, which has until recently been neglected in studies of higher education and migration, and peace and conflict research. The focus is on the very intersection of these research traditions in trying to understand how increasing globalised student migration is intertwined with the internationalisation of higher education and violent conflicts. The research on which this article is based was carried out at Malmö University, Sweden. The focus is on mapping the linkages between violent conflicts and student migration, using a mixed methods design.     

Comparability of the Social Skills Improvement System to the Social Skills Rating System: A Norwegian Study

The Social Skills Improvement System-Rating Scales (SSIS-RS) is a multi-informant instrument assessing social skills and problem behavior in children and adolescents. It is a revised version of the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS). A Norwegian translation of the SSRS has been validated, but this has not yet been done for the Norwegian translation of the SSIS-RS. This study compared the Norwegian versions of the SSRS and the SSIS-RS administered to samples of children (aged 8–12 and 13–16?years) and their parents and teachers (n = 599). The results indicated moderate to strong relations between the common subscales across all forms of the two instruments and acceptable to excellent internal consistency across all common subscales. We conclude that the SSIS-RS is a good instrument for measuring social skills and problem behavior among children and adolescents in Norway.     

The effects of transfer in teaching vocabulary to school children: An analysis of the dependencies between lists of trained and non-trained words

In the present study, 81 Norwegian students were taught the meaning of words by the Word Generation (WG) method and 51 Norwegian students were taught by an approach inspired by the Thinking Schools (TS) concept. Two sets of words were used: a set of words to be trained and a set of non-trained control words. The two teaching methods yielded no significant differences for the trained words, but the WG participants performed better than the TS participants on the non-trained words. An analysis of the dependencies between the trained words and non-trained words suggested that the participants of the WG program, in contrast to the TS students, profited from a transfer effect that resulted in augmented scores on the non-trained words.     

Relationships between learning approach,procrastination and academic achievement amongst first-year university students

Individual differences in student learning influence academic performance, and two aspects influencing the learning process are the particular learning approach the students use and procrastination behaviour. We examined the relationships between learning approaches, procrastination and academic achievement (measured 1 year later as the grade point average (GPA)) amongst 428 first-year university students. Deep and strategic learning approaches positively predicted GPA, and a mediation analysis showed that the strategic learning approach also partly mediated the effect between deep learning approach and GPA. Less procrastination was associated with a strategic learning approach, but procrastination tendencies did not predict GPA. Recommendations are made for educating new students in cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies, helping reduce their procrastination and facilitating the use of deep and strategic learning approaches.     

Towards a semantic e-learning theory by using a modelling approach

In the present study, a semantic perspective on e‐learning theory is advanced and a modelling approach is used. This modelling approach towards the new learning theory is based on the four SECI phases of knowledge conversion: Socialisation, Externalisation, Combination and Internalisation, introduced by Nonaka in 1994, and involving two levels of knowledge—tacit and explicit. In the Socialisation phase, the teacher–student interaction activates the exploratory learning behaviour. This phase is emotionally and socially loaded. The Externalisation phase is partly emotional but a cognitive dimension is also needed, which requires creativity. This phase works optimally if it is collaborative in nature. In the Combination phase, an ability for hypothetical–deductive thinking is needed for the modelling approach. During the Internalisation phase, the learning process requires that students engage in seeking to understand and explain natural phenomena, which further demands testing of the theoretical concepts.     

Students' Misbehaviours in Turkish and English Primary Classrooms

This paper deals with the comparison of students' misbehaviours in Turkish and English primary classrooms. A field study was conducted in order to discern students' misbehaviours based on students' age, gender, time of day, seating arrangement, types of learning activities and subject matter. Semi-structured in-depth interview and systematic classroom observation were used to collect data from two different cultural contexts. Participants in this study were 20 primary school teachers. The results show that there are differences and similarities between Turkish and English primary classrooms in terms of the causes and types of students' misbehaviours. Certain misbehaviours that are caused by different cultural and educational contexts are frequently observed either in English or in Turkish classrooms.