Dislexia fonémica: decodificación-codificación fonémica y comprensión lectora silenciosa

Resumen

Se estudiaron los procesos fonémicos de decodificación y codificación en relaáón a la comprensión lectora en una muestra de 49 disléxicos de 10 a 12 años, comparándolos con un grupo de 32 lectores normales, pareados por edad, curso y nivel socio-económico. Todos los niños tenían un CI normal y se les aplicó cuatro tests verbales estandarizados, más tareas experimentales de percepción, discriminación e integración auditivo-fonémica y de comprensión.

Se pudo delimitar, dentro de los disléxicos, un subgrupo de ellos con un rendimiento inferior en decodificación de pseudo-palabras, perceptión auditivo-fonémica, comprensión verbal oral y comprensión lectora silenciosa, lo que confirmó la hipótesis principal del estudio. Las diferencias entre disléxicos y lectores normales también fueron significativas. Los procesos fonémicos más estrechamente relaáonados con lectura y deletreo de pseudopalabras fueron discriminación auditiva de palabras similares e inversión oral de secuencias de letras CVC (trigramas). Esta investigación forma parte de un estudio de seguimiento.     

The study of the pupil’s cognitive structure: the concept of angle

The present research approached a problem which has a twofold aspect: the concept of angle and the techniques needed to represent how pupils construct that concept in their cognitive structure during their years in school. In order to access the knowledge of the concept of angle, we used the pathfinder associative networks. This technique provided us with the data of the 458 networks of the participating students, using 11 concepts related to the general concept of angle. We used quantitative indicators on the network characteristics: coherence, complexity, and similarity with others. Results showed how the pupil’s cognitive structure evolutioned during instruction and what were the most relevant concepts for them. On the basis of the results, we have proposed what we call the “Theory of Nuclear Concepts” which offers a new focus to understanding how the processes of teaching and learning occur.     

A Cross-age Study of Senior High School Students' Conceptions of Basic Astronomy Concepts

Senior high school students' astronomy conceptions were analysed by means of a written questionnaire presented to them during the beginning of the first semester. The main findings were: (1) Most students answered correctly the questions dealing with the following subjects: the day-night cycle, the reason for the different seasons, and the time of the Moon's revolution around the Earth and the Sun. (2) Most students chose their best account for changes in the Moon's phases as the Moon moving around the Earth. Despite that, most students thought that the Moon must be in its full phase in order to get a total solar eclipse. (3) Most students underestimated distances in the Universe and overestimated the Earth's diameter. (4) Most students answered incorrectly the questions dealing with the following subjects: Sun overhead at noon, longitude time zones, and Moon's rotation. (5) Students studying physics succeeded significantly better than their colleagues in some of the subjects that were taught as a part of their optics and mechanics courses.     

Adjunctive behaviors are operants

Adjunctive behaviors such as schedule-induced polydipsia are said to be induced by periodic delivery of incentives, but not reinforced by them. That standard treatment assumes that contingency is necessary for conditioning and that delay of reinforcement gradients are very steep. The arguments and evidence for this position are reviewed and rejected. In their place, data are presented that imply different gradients for different classes of responses. Proximity between response and reinforcer, rather than contingency or contiguity, is offered as a key principle of association. These conceptions organize a wide variety of observations and provide the rudiments for a more general theory of conditioning.     

On the Concept of Force: How Understanding its History can Improve Physics Teaching

Some physicists have pointed out that we do not know what force is. The most common definition of force in textbooks has been criticized for more than two centuries. Many studies have shown that the concept of force is a problem for teaching. How to conceive force on the basis of the concepts and criticism of force in the works of Newton, Euler, d’Alembert, Lagrange, Lazare Carnot, Saint-Venant, Reech, Kirchhoff, Mach, Hertz and Poincaré is the question of the present article. This part of the article is followed by an overview of definitions of force in contemporary textbooks. In the next part, an answer to the question is given: how to understand force within the framework of the laws of motion and in applications. Finally, some educational implications are considered.     

Development of a Measure to Assess Youth Self-reported Experiences of Activity Settings (SEAS)

There is a need for psychometrically sound measures of youth experiences of community/home leisure activity settings. The 22-item Self-Reported Experiences of Activity Settings (SEAS) captures the following experiences of youth with a Grade 3 level of language comprehension or more: Personal Growth, Psychological Engagement, Social Belonging, Meaningful Interactions, and Choice & Control. Forty-five youth aged 14–23 years (10 with severe disabilities) completed the SEAS in 160 leisure activity settings. The SEAS has good to excellent internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha from 0.71 to 0.88) and moderate test–retest reliability (mean scale intra-class correlation coefficient = 0.68), as expected due to changes in activity settings over time. The SEAS was able to differentiate various types of activity settings and participation partners. The SEAS can be used to gain greater understanding of situation-specific experiences of youth participating in various types of recreation and leisure activity settings, including youth with different types of disabilities and those without disabilities.