Characteristics of Children Who Struggle with Reading: Teachers and Speech-Language Pathologists Collaborate to Support Young Learners

Speech language pathologists (SLPs) have developed specialized knowledge about oral language and its relationship to early literacy development that can be particularly useful to early childhood educators. The purpose of this article is to highlight ways in which an SLP can support early childhood teachers in a Response to Intervention role by assessing and facilitating young students’ early literacy acquisition. In this article, we observe students who are struggling to attain one of the Common Core State Standards, discuss factors that may inhibit their typical development of early literacy, and illustrate several evidenced-based instructional practices to assist young students who struggle with reading to achieve success.     

The Informational Text Structure Survey (ITS2): An exploration of primary grade teachers’ sensitivity to text structure in young children's informational texts

There has been no research reported about if or how well primary grade teachers can identify information text structures in children's authentic informational texts. The ability to do so accurately and reliably is a prerequisite for teachers to be able to teach students how to recognize and use text structures to assist them in comprehending informational texts. The authors report the development of the Informational Text Structure Survey (ITS²). Prior to training, primary grade teachers demonstrated low accuracy and reliability in identifying traditional expository text structures in well-structured children's grade level–appropriate informational texts. Results after training with the ITS² instrument showed significant improvements in the teachers’ accuracy and reliability in identifying traditional informational text structures in well-structured children's grade level–appropriate informational texts after training with the ITS² instrument.     

Using the Text Structures of Information Books to Teach Writing in the Primary Grades

Teaching children in the primary grades the text structures and features used by authors of information text has been shown to improve comprehension of information texts and provide the scaffolding and support these children need in order to write their own information texts. As teachers implement the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards (CCSS), they will need support and training on how to meet these increased curricular demands. In this article, we describe how children’s information books can be used as exemplars of well-structured text models to teach young students how to write selected discourse patterns required in the CCSS. As children in the primary grades learn to recognize and use well-structured example information texts as models for their own writing, they will be better prepared to deal with less well-structured, more complex text examples in their reading and writing in the years to come.     

Assessment as Judgment-in-Context: Analysing how teachers evaluate students' writing 1

In this paper, we analyse teachers' judgments of students' written texts. We document how teachers use evidence in ways that depend both on their knowledge of the students and on the assessment framework they need to use. We analyse teachers' judgments by contrasting the structures of assessments made using teachers' normal classroom judgment processes with those made using an external set of “benchmark” standards. We show how the tension between demands for system-wide assessment validity and localised contextually sensitive site validity impacts on the richness and consistency of the judgment processes. We conclude that current understandings of teacher judgment processes that operate in everyday assessment practices generally fail to account for the complexity and dynamism of this routine classroom activity. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the methodology of judgment analysis, combined with think-aloud protocols, has the potential to shed light on the complexities associated with the operation of judgment in educational assessment.     

Gender differences in information seeking behavior in three universities in West Bengal, India

The Information Revolution has resulted in dynamic changes in information dissemination services. It is difficult for most people to understand the dynamic causes, processes, and the effects of these changes on the information world. Gender as a variable has been identified in some studies as a possible influencing variable in information seeking research. Some social psychology depicts physical, mental and social differences between men and women in society. Gender as a variable may be useful for better understanding the cognitive and social background of human information processing and may have important implications for information dissemination services and systems. Hence, it is pertinent to explore the gender-specific differences in information seeking behavior of university students so as to better assist them in their information search processes.The objective of this study was to determine whether gender as a variable is related to the information seeking behavior of university students. Data were collected from 600 university students studying different disciplines (arts, science and commerce) from three state-aided universities in West Bengal, India. Data tools included a General Information Schedule and an Information Seeking Behavior Inventory. Significant differences were noted in most of the domains of information seeking behavior with respect to gender (male and female). Females scored high on all the domains of information search except in diversity in search where the males were found to be high. The findings may have implications for research and practice in psychology, especially in the subfields of educational institutions, library science, cognitive development, and training and performance appraisal.