Relating deaf students' reading and language scores at college entry to their degree completion rates

Graduation patterns were examined for 905 deaf students (1990-1998) at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Students with higher reading and language skills had the best overall graduation percentage. Comparison of recipients of different degrees--bachelor of science (BS) versus fine arts (BFA); associate of applied science (AAS) versus occupational studies (AOS)--showed 92% of BS and 82% of AAS graduates reading at the 9th-grade level or above, versus 65% of BFA and 47% of AOS graduates. Interestingly, 80% of non-degree-earning students read at the 9th-12th grade levels; in absolute terms, they outnumbered graduates with similar reading skills in the AAS and BFA programs combined, and in the BS program. This indicates a need for improved counseling, placement, and retention strategies. Students performed similarly across degree categories, regardless of curriculum requirements and difficulty. Only non-degree-earning students had significantly lower grade averages.     

New Media/Internet Research Topics of the Association of Internet Researchers

This study summarizes prior reviews of new media and Internet research, and the growth of the term Internet in academic publications and online newsgroups. It then uses semantic network analysis to summarize the interests and concepts of an interdisciplinary group of Internet researchers, as represented by session titles and paper titles and abstracts from the 2003 and 2004 Association of Internet Researchers conferences. In both years, the most frequent words appearing in the paper abstracts included Internet, online, community, social, technology, and research. The 2003 papers emphasized topics such as the social analysis/research of online/Internet communication, community, and information, with particular coverage of access, individuals, groups, digital media, culture; role and process in e-organizations; and world development. The 2004 papers emphasized topics such as access; news and social issues; the role of individuals in communities; user-based studies; usage data; and blogs, women, and search policy, among others.     

Focus-on-form instructional methods promote deaf college students' improvement in English grammar

Focus-on-form English teaching methods are designed to facilitate second-language learners' noticing of target language input, where "noticing" is an acquisitional prerequisite for the comprehension, processing, and eventual integration of new grammatical knowledge. While primarily designed for teaching hearing second-language learners, many focus-on-form methods lend themselves to visual presentation. This article reports the results of classroom research on the visually based implementation of focus-on-form methods with deaf college students learning English. Two of 3 groups of deaf students received focus-on-form instruction during a 10-week remedial grammar course; a third control group received grammatical instruction that did not involve focus-on-form methods. The 2 experimental groups exhibited significantly greater improvement in English grammatical knowledge relative to the control group. These results validate the efficacy of visually based focus-on-form English instruction for deaf students of English and set the stage for the continual search for innovative and effective English teaching methodologies.     

The role of social-academic goals in Chinese students’ self-regulated learning

European Journal of Psychology of Education - The role of mastery and performance goals in self-regulated learning (SRL) has received much attention. However, in collectivist and Confucian-heritage...     

K-ABC content bias: Comparisons between Mexican American and White children

Content (item) bias on the Mental Processing Scales and the Achievement Scale of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) was investigated with 100 Mexican American and 100 White fifth- and sixth-grade boys and girls. All children were English-speaking and from similar socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. An item-group (partial correlation) method that controlled for age, sex, and ability was used to examine bias. On the Mental Processing Scales, 17 (14%) of 120 items were found to be biased—the strong majority against the Mexican American children. On the Achievement Scale, it was observed that 58 (63%) of 92 K-ABC items were biased—all against the Mexican American sample. This latter finding is discussed in the context of possible differences in learning opportunities (language based, SES based, and school segregation) experienced by the two ethnic groups.     

An Early Endeavor to Apply Quality Concepts to the Systematic Design of Instruction: Successes and Lessons Learned

In 1988, two staff members in the design department at Motorola Training and Education Center (MTEC) began a self-initiated project to develop and implement a system to improve the quality of courses being developed for their customers. This article describes how they applied Motorola's six steps to Six Sigma quality to their instructional design activities. While their quality system was not institutionalized throughout the instructional design department, several valuable lessons were learned that might benefit others embarking on a similar endeavor. Lessons learned dealt with: the sample of customers used to determine customer requirements, product-specific customer requirements, a continuous improvement system within the context of an instructional systems design model, the level of organizational readiness, involvement of stakeholders, the role of rewards and recognition, and appropriate metrics.