A possible contribution of word-retrieval difficulties to reading and spelling impairments

Good and poor readers at the junior high school level and good and poor spellers at the university level were compared on their ability to produce words in response to a semantic cue (a category name), a visual cue (three letters), and an auditory cue (a syllable rime). Kindergarten children were tested on a word-identification task and their retrieval of words in response to the semantic and auditory cues. At all ages, poor readers or spellers produced fewer words on all word-retrieval tasks than did good readers or spellers. Performance on the auditory and visual word-retrieval tasks correlated very highly with pseudoword reading and spelling ability in the two older groups; in the kindergarten children, auditory retrieval correlated with word identification. The results suggest that poor readers have not organized words in long-term memory according to rhyming families but that good readers have. We speculate that failure to retrieve rhyming words during acquisition of reading and spelling skills underlies the failure of poor readers and spellers to abstract the higher-order relationships between orthography and phonology.     

‘Power to empower’: conceptions of teaching and learning in a pedagogical co-design partnership

ABSTRACT

This study is an autoethnographic reflection on power and expertise in an evolving student/staff partnership. The partnership was initiated as pedagogical co-design in the development and implementation of a peer-assisted learning programme. Through a process of critical reflection that linked our partnership experience with themes from relevant literature, we (the staff and student authors) became co-researchers of our practice. The evolution of the partnership provided a unique perspective from which to compare our experiences of power and expertise across both contexts. We characterised our pedagogical co-design partnership as a shift from the more traditional ‘power over’ model of delivery towards ‘power to empower’ where both student and staff partners had agency and voice. Key to this important transition was a shared philosophy of student-centred teaching. As the partnership transformed from co-teaching to co-researching we needed to re-negotiate power dynamics; while our different pathways had converged on a common view of student-centred learning, our research expertise remained disparate. We were able to negotiate this challenge by drawing on our existing relationship based on respect, reciprocity and responsibility, reinforcing views of partnership that value equality of opportunity and a focus on learning and process, rather than equality of contributions and outcomes.     

Where the two shall meet: Exploring the relationship between teacher professional culture and student learning culture

This study focuses on the understudied connection between teachers’ and students’ perceptions of school culture. Utilizing a longitudinal sample of approximately 130,000 students and 9000 teachers in 225 New York City traditional public schools, we investigate how professional culture among teachers intersects with students’ collective emotional engagement—that is, the extent students together view the school environment as trusting and respectful, both between teachers and students and among students (i.e., student learning culture). We find that when the teachers report a strong collaborative culture, believe they have adequate materials, and feel physically safe, students report a stronger and more positive learning culture. Our results thus fill a gap in prior research on school change that has looked at either teacher or student perceptions of school culture but not the two together. Here, because our results demonstrate such a positive relationship between the collective views of teachers and the collective views of students regarding the environment in which these groups work, they suggest new avenues for research to examine how such subcultures within a school may, together, act as critical and interdependent levers for school change.     

It “Ain’t” Always So: Sixth Graders’ Interpretations of Hispanic-American Stories with Universal Themes

This article examines the responses of eight sixth grade students discussing four realistic fiction Hispanic-American multicultural stories with universal themes by Gary Soto in peer-led literature discussion groups. The results indicate the importance of a reader’s sociocultural frame—class, race, and gender, on their interpretation of multicultural stories with universal themes. As the socio-economic status and ethnicity of the students varied from those of the protagonists,’ most of the universal experiences of the protagonists were not accessible to the students, as evidenced in the students’ interpretations of the character’s actions. The exception was a story focusing on social acceptance. The children’s norms for physical appearance, language, and food customs also influenced their interpretations. Peggy S. Rice is an Assistant Professor at Ball State University, where she teaches courses in children's literature and English language arts methods.     

General Education Teachers' Attitudes and Perceptions of Teamwork Supporting Children with Developmental Concerns

The successful inclusion of children with developmental concerns in general education classrooms is influenced by the participation of general educators on the teams that support these children. One hundred and forty-eight general education teachers who were serving on teams that support children with developmental concerns in schools were asked to complete the Attitudes About Teamwork Survey, the Team Characteristics Survey, and the Team Process Perception Survey. Respondents held a generally positive attitude about teamwork. Challenges related to scheduling and time for teaming were noted. Central themes emerged relative to perceptions about benefits (discipline collaboration, sharing of knowledge/ideas), limitations (time constraints), and supports (collaboration and supports of individual efforts). Respondents provided recommendations for the improvement of teamwork related to management, organization, and communication. Practical implications of the results and directions for further investigation in this area are discussed.     

Implications from self-efficacy and attribution theories for an understanding of undergraduates’ motivation in a foreign language course

Although studies on self-efficacy and attribution have independently contributed to the motivation literature, these two constructs have rarely been considered together in the domain of foreign language learning. Here, 500 undergraduates in Spanish, German, and French courses were asked to report whether test scores represented a successful or unsuccessful outcome and to provide attribution and self-efficacy ratings upon receiving their grades. Representing an innovation over previous studies, attributions were measured in two ways, using dimensions of attributions and asking about actual reasons for a real outcome. In regressions predicting achievement, self-efficacy was the strongest predictor, supplemented by ability attributions. Students who attributed failure to lack of effort had higher self-efficacy than students not making effort attributions.     

Strategic enrolment management (SEM) in self-financed higher education of Hong Kong: evaluation and measurement

The purpose of this study is to examine how the dimensions of strategic enrolment management (SEM) tie to the success metrics in the area of enrolment, retention and graduation from senior and programme management perspectives of a self-financed institution in Hong Kong. The literature on SEM has demonstrated that managing enrolment is a global concern and requires institution-wide effort. For successful SEM, it has to be a performance-based, outcome-oriented system which requires significant data to determine its effectiveness, success or failure, growth or decline. Though the focus of most SEM research is about the implementation of SEM in achieving enrolment and retention goals, there are far fewer studies that look critically at the perceptions of success tying SEM to success metrics. This study fills the research gap regarding the perceptions of tying SEM to the success. Thus, success metrics are vital in assessing the achievement of enrolment, retention and graduation goals. This study employs a combination of survey results and a formal content analysis methodology from a series of in-depth face-to-face interviews with both senior and programme managers at a self-financed institution in Hong Kong. The research identifies the perceived importance of different components related to enrolment, retention and graduation successes and examines differences in these perceptions between senior management and programme management. New success metrics (availability of an Honours degree programme, the employability ratio and student learning outcomes) are found in both enrolment and graduation stages which are quantified as perceived SEM success in a self-financed institution in Hong Kong.     

Create-A-Scape: Mediascapes and curriculum integration

The paper is a theoretical reflection on a research study of ‘Create-A-Scape’, a software resource for making mediascapes to support learning in the primary and secondary school curriculum. Mediascapes are collections of location-sensitive texts, sounds and images that are geo-tagged or ‘attached to’ the local landscape, and learners use mobile technologies, such as PDAs, to roam in a space or landscape to detect and respond to these multimedia tags. The study, commissioned by Futurelab, was conducted in the summer of 2007 in England. Its aims were to investigate the Create-A-Scape resource and present insights into its use, perceptions of use, and the implications and potential of mediascape tools for learning, teaching and pedagogy. A survey of all who had downloaded the software outlined early perceptions and use of the resource. Five selected case studies were developed through visits, observations and interviews with teachers and pupils using the resources to create mediascape activities. A cross-case analysis articulated three distinctive theoretical perspectives, namely creativity, teacher knowledge and a sense of place. The paper presents the conduct and findings of the study, develops the discussion of the theoretical framework, and considers the potential of such resources for mobile technologies in curriculum integration, and supporting learning in meaningful physical places.     

A Defence of Teaching General Thinking Skills

There has been developing interest in thinking skills in schools over the past decade. However in the UK the consensus seems to have been against the possibility of the very existence of general thinking skills. We present three main arguments in defence of general thinking skills which hinge upon assumptions in a priori arguments about transfer, we suggest that a clearer definition of the domains of knowledge theory is necessary for the way it is used against thinking skills and we offer a consideration of the expert/novice objections about subject or domain-specific knowledge.