Making sound decisions: A framework for judging the worth of your data

In our daily lives, we encounter decision points on a continuous basis. To maximize the likelihood of successful decisions, organizational members must draw on relevant, reliable, valid, and complete data. Sometimes copious data are available, but an overabundance can make it difficult to judge the worth of the data. This article presents a data evaluation framework that provides guidance for decision makers to evaluate and determine the potential effectiveness of the data they will use to inform their decisions.     

Neighborhood matters: racial socialization of African American children

Differences in racial socialization practices and their effects were examined in a sample of 241 African American 1st graders (average age 6.59 years) living in an urban area. Child outcomes included cognitive development, receptive language skills, and child problem behavior. The cultural environment of the home was associated with higher cognitive scores for boys living in high negative social climate and low social capital neighborhoods and for girls living in high social capital neighborhoods. The positive association of promotion of mistrust and child behavior problems was magnified in neighborhoods that had low levels of social capital. A high negative social climate in the neighborhood attenuated the positive association between preparation for bias/promotion of mistrust and externalizing problems.     

Effectiveness of Spanish intervention for first-grade English language learners at risk for reading difficulties

The effectiveness of an explicit, systematic reading intervention for first-grade students whose home language was Spanish and who were at risk for reading difficulties was examined. Participants were 69 students in 20 classrooms in 7 schools from 3 districts who initially did not pass the screening in Spanish and were randomly assigned within schools to a treatment or comparison group; after 7 months, 64 students remained in the study. The intervention matched the language of instruction of their core reading program (Spanish). Treatment groups of 3 to 5 students met daily for 50 min and were provided systematic and explicit instruction in oral language and reading by trained bilingual intervention teachers. Comparison students received the school's standard intervention for struggling readers. Observations during core reading instruction provided information about the reading instruction and language use of the teachers. There were no differences between the treatment and comparison groups in either Spanish or English on any measures at pretest, but there were significant posttest differences in favor of the treatment group for the following outcomes in Spanish: Letter-Sound Identification (d = 0.72), Phonological Awareness composite (d = 0.73), Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery-Revised Oral Language composite (d = 0.35), Word Attack (d = 0.85), Passage Comprehension (d = 0.55), and two measures of reading fluency (d = 0.58-0.75).     

The Virtual Learning Environment ROODA: An Institutional Project of Long Distance Education

This article describes ROODA (), a virtual learning environment and one of the official Long Distance Education platforms that has been in use since 2005 at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil. It is free software that integrates syncronous and assyncronous interaction/communication tools and publications. In this study, details about institutional demands in relation to long distance education are discussed and ROODA is described with the components that were part of its development such as: modelling and programming, graphic interface and documents for users. Moreover, 19 functions were conceived. Finally, project investigation paths are presented where the platform described is inserted.

Ranking of library and information science researchers: Comparison of data sources for correlating citation data,and expert judgments

This paper studies the correlations between peer review and citation indicators when evaluating research quality in library and information science (LIS). Forty-two LIS experts provided judgments on a 5-point scale of the quality of research published by 101 scholars; the median rankings resulting from these judgments were then correlated with h-, g- and H-index values computed using three different sources of citation data: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Google Scholar (GS). The two variants of the basic h-index correlated more strongly with peer judgment than did the h-index itself; citation data from Scopus was more strongly correlated with the expert judgments than was data from GS, which in turn was more strongly correlated than data from WoS; correlations from a carefully cleaned version of GS data were little different from those obtained using swiftly gathered GS data; the indices from the citation databases resulted in broadly similar rankings of the LIS academics; GS disadvantaged researchers in bibliometrics compared to the other two citation database while WoS disadvantaged researchers in the more technical aspects of information retrieval; and experts from the UK and other European countries rated UK academics with higher scores than did experts from the USA.     

Home book reading and reading achievement in EU countries: the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2011 (PIRLS)

Home shared book reading during the preschool years is a strong predictor of students’ reading achievement in primary school, and, according to Sénéchal (2012), it can benefit more children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. This study examines the association between frequency of book reading before the start of compulsory education and the reading achievement of 4th-grade students whose parents have high and low education levels in 22 European countries. Using data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS 2011), we show that the contribution of shared reading for the achievement of students from distinct SES backgrounds is different in different countries and that shared reading does not always benefit more children from low-SES backgrounds. Results are discussed in light of Sénéchal's home literacy model, the dynamics of cultural capital, and current policy efforts to support children's literacy development in European countries.     

Nonreinforced flavor exposure attenuates the effects of conditioned taste aversion on both flavor consumption and cue palatability

Nonreinforced exposure to a cue tends to attenuate subsequent conditioning with that cue—an effect referred to as latent inhibition (LI). In the two experiments reported here, we examined LI effects in the context of conditioned taste aversion by examining both the amount of consumption and the microstructure of the consummatory behavior (in terms of the mean size of lick clusters). The latter measure can be taken to reflect affective responses to, or the palatability of, the solution being consumed. In both experiments, exposure to a to-be-conditioned flavor prior to pairing the flavor with nausea produced by lithium chloride attenuated both the reduction in consumption and the reduction in lick cluster sizes typically produced by taste aversion learning. In addition, we observed a tendency (especially in the lick cluster measure) for nonreinforced exposure to reduce neophobic responses to the test flavors. Taken together, these results reinforce the suggestion from previous experiments using taste reactivity methods that LI attenuates the effects of taste aversion on both consumption and cue palatability. The present results also support the suggestion that the failure in previous studies to see concurrent LI effects on consumption and palatability was due to a context specificity produced by the oral taste infusion methods required for taste reactivity analyses. Finally, the fact that the pattern of extinction of conditioned changes in consumption and in lick cluster sizes was not affected by preexposure to the cue flavors suggests that LI influenced the quantity but not the quality of conditioned taste aversion.     

WHEN IS A SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT PERCEIVED AS SUPPORTIVE BY BEGINNING MATHEMATICS TEACHERS? EFFECTS OF LEADERSHIP, TRUST, AUTONOMY AND APPRAISAL ON TEACHING QUALITY

This study examines the hypothesis that the more support beginning mathematics teachers perceive and the better they evaluate the management of their school, the higher their teaching quality is. Indicators of teaching quality were how the teachers, who were in their third year in the profession, regarded themselves able to cope with the challenges of mathematics instruction and generic tasks like classroom management and how satisfied they were with their job. Indicators of support were the level of appraisal and autonomy the teachers reported. School management indicators were the administrative leadership of the principal and the climate of trust as perceived by the teachers. Our results reveal that teacher support plays an important role in the quality of beginning mathematics teachers. All quality indicators improved significantly if beginning teachers reported more appraisal and autonomy. A climate of trust plays an important role for the extent of autonomy perceived. Administrative leadership was significantly related to the amount of appraisal the teachers reported. Our results provide important information on how to steer a school so that the quality of beginning mathematics teachers is maximized.