Research Methods

Klaus Krippendorf, CONTENT ANALYSIS: AN INTRODUCTION TO ITS METHODOLOGY (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1980---$16.00/$7.95)

Karl Erik Rosegren, ADVANCES IN CONTENT ANALYSIS (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1981---$25.00/$12.50)

Nick L. Smith, COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES IN EVALUATION: NEW PERSPECTIVES IN EVAUATION, VOLUME 3 (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982---$22.50)

Jerome Johnston and James Ettema, POSITIVE IMAGES: BREAKING STEREOTYPES WITH CHILDREN'S TELEVISION (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1982---$22.95/$10.95)     

Value Creation in the Publishing Industry: The Impact of Acquiring IT Services Firms Between 2002 and 2007

With the presence of online, digital content and new services for manipulating and searching it, printing and publishing firms may experience technological uncertainty and risk and diminishing profitability. Mergers and acquisitions are approaches for dealing with the current technology and market changes that are underway in the printing and publishing industry. Using an event study methodology and a sample of 60 U.S. printing and publishing firms, this study investigates the value creation of acquiring information technology (IT) services firms. The study's findings reveal that printing and publishing firms experience significant increases in their market values as a result of acquiring IT services firms. In fact, non-newspaper firms realize the largest increases in market value. The study's findings should help academicians and practitioners understand the kinds of strategic acquisitions from which printing and publishing firms are most likely to benefit.     

Legislation issues

Director of International Organizations at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Rome-La Sapienza, as well as a teacher at the Libera Universita degli Studi Sociali in Rome. Her field of expertise covers public and private international law, the European Union laws, and the subject of human rights. She has devoted a large part of her research to the rights of disabled persons. She has participated in a number of United Nations consultations, as well as for other international governmental agencies, on issues related to the rights of women, children and the disabled.     

Impacts After One Year of “Healing Classroom” on Children's Reading and Math Skills in DRC: Results From a Cluster Randomized Trial

This article examines the effects of one year of exposure to “Learning to Read in a Healing Classroom” (LRHC) on the reading and math skills of second- to fourth-grade children in the low-income and conflict-affected Democratic Republic of the Congo. LRHC consists of two primary components: teacher resource materials that infuse social-emotional learning principles into a reading curriculum and collaborative school-based teacher learning circles to exchange information about and solve problems in using the teacher resource materials. To test the impact of LRHC on children's reading and math skills, 40 school clusters containing 64 schools and 4,465 students were randomized to begin LRHC in 2011–2012 or to serve as wait-list controls. Hierarchical linear models (students nested in schools, nested in school clusters) were fitted. Results indicate marginally significant positive impacts on children's reading scores (d_wt = .14) and geometry scores (d_wt = .14) but not on their addition/subtraction scores. These results should be treated with caution given the reported significance level of p < .10. The intervention had the largest impacts on math scores for language minority children and in low-performing schools. Research, practice, and policy implications for education in low-income conflict-affected countries are discussed.     

Assessing contributions to group assignments

We report the use of a combination of self‐ and peer‐assessment in an undergraduate social psychology laboratory course. Students worked in small groups on a self‐directed empirical project that they each wrote up independently as a laboratory report. Marks for the written assignment were moderated by a contribution index measure based on the self‐ and peer‐assessment measures. Our analyses indicated that: (i) students took the peer‐assessment process seriously, clearly differentiating between group members on the contributions questionnaires; (ii) students show a self‐bias, rating their own contribution to the group task higher than that of other group members; (iii) for a large majority of students the contribution index resulted in very little moderation of the final assignment marks; (iv) there was a strong correlation between the contribution index and the overall assignment score. Implications for the assessment of group work are considered.     

The effect of phonics instruction on the reading comprehension of beginning readers

This study investigated whether two groups of6-year-old beginning readers taught to read by aphonics and by a ``book experience' non-phonicsapproach would differ in reading comprehension as wellas the processes of word recognition. The two groupswere matched for word recognition but despite this, thephonics taught children had higher readingcomprehension. Phonics taught children produced morecontextually appropriate errors, and in both singleword and text reading made more spoken attempts atreading unknown words. The non-phonics taught childrenhad much faster reading reaction times to familiarwords but they scored less in phoneme segmentation andnonword reading tasks. Compared with the nonphonicsgroup, the phonics group spent more time in attemptsat identifying unknown words and this included usingcontextual information, which apparently resulted inmore rehearsal of the meaning of the story text andhence better reading comprehension performance.