Outcasts on the Inside: Graduates, Employability and Widening Participation

The drive to widen access and participation in higher education is rapidly transforming the sector. Despite this, through an interplay of social, cultural and gender-related factors, students from ‘widening participation’ backgrounds can all too frequently become, within their own institutions, ‘outcasts on the inside’: formally accepted by the university without ever acquiring, still less embodying, the traditional social and cultural advantages bestowed by HE. Thus, the irony of widening participation would seem to be that by entering higher education an already disadvantaged educational habitus should be reinforced not transformed. Based on a three-year ethnographic study, this paper explores the factors motivating widening participation students to enrol in higher education, the nature of their experiences, and the extent to which higher education represents an attempt at social repositioning.     

Understanding the relations between RAN letter subtest components and word reading in first-grade students

First-grade students (N = 221) were individually tested on a battery of cognitive and achievement measures of verbal fluency, visual attention, phonological awareness, orthographic recognition, rapid automatized naming (RAN) of letters and objects, and reading. All tests were subjected to postacquisition scoring, and all RAN measures were segregated into measures of articulation time, pause time, and consistency of the pause time. Structural equation modeling demonstrated that word reading was directly and significantly predicted by RAN letter naming and general RAN cognitive processing time of objects. Moreover, RAN letter reading constructs were significantly and directly predicted by the latent variables of phonological awareness, orthographic recognition, and general RAN object articulation and cognitive processing times. RAN letter naming constructs were also significantly and indirectly predicted by visual attention. The reading model was found to be consistent with a total mediation of the relation of phonological awareness and reading through RAN letter naming and supported the validity of the RAN letter naming subtest as a basic letter reading test. These findings supported the double-deficit hypothesis for letter reading. We suggest that phonological memory is a basic factor underlying general RAN cognitive processing time of objects and domain-specific information associated with phonemes and their graphic representations.     

Who Am I? Compositions of the self: an autoethnographic,rhizotextual analysis of two poetic texts

This article employs an autoethnographic, rhizotextual approach to analyse the compositional processes involved in the construction of two poems by the same author. What the analysis reveals is not only the internal thinking of the author in the process of composition but how the socio‐cultural standpoint of the author is implicated in the texts. It is posited that, in addition to the author's own lived experience informing composition, rhizotextual analysis enables us to extend beyond the self to interrogate the ‘secondary worlds’ of others and to form an empathic relationship to the ‘Other’. The findings of this article have implications for teachers’ knowledge of the socio‐cultural contexts of written composition. An authoethnographic, rhizotextual approach allows personal insights into the self, both as a writer and a person. This approach has implications for classroom practice, particularly for writing around issues of identity located in social class, gender, ‘race’, disability and sexual orientation, as well as the growing body of work on the teacher as a writer.     

Sequential Associations Between Caregiver Talk and Child Play in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typical Development

This study examined sequential associations between child play and caregiver talk in 98 caregiver–child dyads (M_{mental age} = 14 months). Fifty dyads included a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Analyses revealed sequential associations between child play and caregiver follow‐in (FI) utterances (utterances related to the child's attentional focus) were stronger in the ASD as compared to the typically developing (TD) group. FI utterances were more likely to elicit functional play than caregiver‐focused utterances, and more so in the ASD group. Across groups, FI directives were more likely to elicit functional play than FI comments. These findings have important implications for research involving caregiver–child play as an early intervention context for children with ASD.     

科学、艺术与数学的教育计划

赫拉克莱冬是一个小国家的小型博物馆,它试图在一个文化产业并不总是受欢迎的环境中努力前行。在过去的10年中,该馆设法将艺术、科学和数学整合到一个独特的教育计划中,旨在使数学学习变得更容易、使学生热爱艺术、使科学更易于理解。为此,该馆正在与包括教育专家、数学家、美术教师在内的各路专家一起工作,使该馆开展的工作能适应并满足学生们的各种需求。     

Film and text: Order effects in recall and social inferences

This article compares film and text with regard to effects produced by the order in which conflicting information is presented. Film is more influential and better recalled than conflicting text information, regardless of the order in which media appear. Conflicting paragraphs produce a primacy effect, whereas analogous film segments produce no order effect. Results are interpreted in terms of differences between visual and verbal encoding and between episodic and semantic memory.     

Parental involvement in children's schooling: Different meanings in different cultures

Three types of parent involvement—communicating, volunteering at school, and learning at home—were explored in two cultures within the United States. Immigrant Chinese parents and European American parents of young children reflect their different traditions in the ways they involve themselves in their child's academic life. European American parents volunteered more in schools, while Chinese American parents focused more on systematic teaching of their children at home. Chinese American parents were more critical of typical primary school report cards without ABC grades. Parents’ home teaching methods showed stability over time, demonstrating that parents who used formal, structured methods at Time 1 continued to do two and four years later.     

THE CULTURAL LITERACY TEST: A VALIDATION AND FACTOR ANALYSIS

In his 1987 book, Cultural Literacy, Hirsch presented a provocative theory of the relationships among cultural literacy and reading and writing skills. In addition, Hirsch (1990) developed the 115-item Cultural Literacy Test (CLT), which was designed to measure the construct of cultural literacy. Research has demonstrated the CLT's validity. The study discussed in this article involved 1,343 community college students and found significant relationships among the CLT, grade point average, and first-semester remedial and regular English, history, and government courses, as well as evidence of factorial validity. This study, together with others, emphasizes the clinical usefulness of the CLT. The CLT should be routinely administered to students suspected of experiencing reading problems.     

Academic Achievement of First-Generation Students in a Canadian University

Previous research has shown that first-generation students confront greater problems than traditional students. In order to determine if this disadvantage extends to first-year grade-point averages (GPAs) in a commuter university in which the majority are first-generation students, 1,849 students at York University in Toronto were surveyed at the end of the first year and survey results were merged with information on grades from administrative records. The results of stepwise regression and classification and regression tree analyses show that traditional students enjoy a slight advantage in terms of GPA, and that while traditional students have higher levels of involvement than first-generation students, for both student groups involvement in various university activities contributes to GPA.