The relationship between phonological awareness and the development of orthographic representations

A training study was conducted to investigatethe relationship between phoneme segmentationability and the development of orthographicrepresentations. Five-year-old children withvarying degrees of phoneme segmentationability were taught to read ten new words byrepeated presentation of the words onflashcards. It was found that those childrenwho were most well equipped to perform phonemesegmentation tasks acquired this new readingvocabulary significantly faster than those whowere less phonemically aware. A series ofpost-tests was implemented to discover thenature of the internal orthographicrepresentations which the children had createdfor the words learned. The results of thesepost-tests demonstrated that the children whowere most phonemically aware had alsointernalised the most detailed orthographicrepresentations, despite needing fewerlearning trials. Salient letters fororthographic storage were predictable from thechildren's phoneme segmentation abilities. This paper provides strong support for thethesis that phonemic awareness is related toorthographic storage as well as alphabeticreading techniques.     

Where would formal, academic mathematics stand in a curriculum informed by ethnomathematics? A critical review of ethnomathematics

This paper is a critical review of the ethnomathematics literature and classifies ethnomathematics according to where it might stand in relation to the teaching of formal, academic mathematics. This paper investigates what it sees as four possibilities: ethnomathematics should replace academic mathematics, ethnomathematics should be a supplement to the mathematics curriculum, ethnomathematics should be used as a springboard for academic mathematics and ethnomathematics should be taken into consideration when preparing learning situations. We argue that it is only through the lens of formal, academic mathematics sensitive to cultural differences that the real value of the mathematics inherent in certain cultures and societies be understood and appreciated.This revised version was published online in October 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Potential or problem? An investigation of secondary school teachers’ attributions of the educational outcomes of students with specific learning difficulties

Despite strong support for inclusive education in principle, many teachers and administrators still demonstrate mixed responses to the inclusion of certain students in their classrooms. Students with specific learning difficulties (SpLD) form a large group of students in inclusive classrooms yet some provincial, state and national jurisdictions fail to acknowledge the existence of these students. Not acknowledging and understanding these students can deny them the recognition and resources necessary for their genuine participation in education and, in turn, society. The aim of this study was to examine British in-service secondary teachers’ attributional responses to students with and without specific learning difficulties. The participants included 122 British secondary school teachers who were surveyed in response to vignettes of hypothetical male students who had failed a class test. The study found that while teachers attributed more positive causes towards students without SpLD, they exhibited more negative causes towards students with SpLD. Teachers’ causal attributional outcomes of students’ level of achievement can impact upon the students’ own attributions, with teachers’ responses for students with SpLD having the potential to, unintentionally, influence students’ own sense of self-efficacy and motivation. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of the research and recommendations for practice.     

Separating patent wheat from chaff: Would the US benefit from adopting patent post-grant review?

This article assesses the impact in the US of adopting a patent post-grant review (PGR) procedure similar to one provided in the America Invents Act (AIA) of 2011. We employ novel methods for matching US patents to their European counterparts to find that opposition rates are about three times higher among European Patent Office (EPO) equivalents of US litigated patents as against control-group (unlitigated) patents. Contingent on reaching a final judgment in EPO post-grant opposition, we find that about 70% of these equivalents have challenged claims that are either completely revoked or amended. Using our empirical findings to inform a series of welfare estimates, we calculate benefit-to-cost ratios that the US may expect from implementing PGR in the range of 4:1–10:1. We also discover that these large social benefits result primarily from eliminating unwarranted market power in the current stock of granted patents, and much less so from litigation cost savings per se. Our results provide evidence that the US may benefit substantially from adopting the AIA post-grant review, but only provided that costs are controlled and that administration and appeals are not allowed to become too costly.     

Response to comment on estimating school efficiency

After correcting errors in our paper ([Bifulco and Bretschneider, 2001]), [Ruggiero, 2003]) finds that efficiency estimates provided by DEA and COLS have higher correlations with true efficiency values than indicated in our analysis. However, because Ruggiero only considers cases without measurement error, his analysis leaves the primary question of our study unanswered. Using the corrected data generation process proposed by Ruggiero, we find that the presence of measurement error substantially reduces the correlations between estimates of efficiency provided by DEA and COLS and true efficiency. Thus, the primary conclusions of our original study remain. If the administrative data sets used in school accountability programs have significant amounts of measurement error, and if the methods used to estimate efficiency require exogenous inputs, than measures of school efficiency can be quite misleading.     

She's Reddit: A source of statistically significant gendered interest information?

Information about gender differences in interests is necessary to disentangle the effects of discrimination and choice when gender inequalities occur, such as in employment. This article assesses gender differences in interests within the popular social news and entertainment site Reddit. A method to detect terms that are statistically significantly used more by males or females in 181 million comments in 100 subreddits shows that gender affects both the selection of subreddits and activities within most of them. The method avoids the hidden gender biases of topic modelling for this task. Although the method reveals statistically significant gender differences in interests for topics that are extensively discussed on Reddit, it cannot give definitive causes, and imitation and sharing within the site mean that additional checking is needed to verify the results. Nevertheless, with care, Reddit can serve as a useful source of insights into gender differences in interests.     

Old Mr. Borden: An Unforgettable Teacher

BIOGRAPHY: Across The Busy Years by Nicholas Murray Butler. Volume 11. Charles Scribner's Sons. 452 pp. $3.75.

I Remember: The Autobiography of Abraham Flexner. Simon and Schuster. 414 PP. 3-75

Jimmy Hare, News Photographer by Cecil Carnes. The Macmillan Company. 293 pp. $3.00.

Jonathan Swift: Giant in Chains by Frank Stier Goodwin. Liveright Publishing Corp. 450 pp. $3.00.

Prince Metternich: Statesman and Lover by Roaul Auernheimer. Alliance Book Corporation. 365 pp. $3.50. Translated from the German by James A. Galston.

The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century England by Donald A. Stauffer. Princeton University Press. 572 pp. $5-00.

Who Was This Nazarene? by Albert F. Gilmore. Prentice-Hall, Inc. 325 pp. $2.75.

EDUCATION: History and Philosophy of Education, Ancient and Medieval by Frederick Eby and Charles Flinn Arrow-wood. Prentice-Hall, Inc. 940 pp. $3.75.

Modern Philosophies of Education by John S. Brubacher. McGraw-Hill Book Company. 370 PP.

New Zealand Observer: A Schoolmaster Looks at America by J. E. Strochan. Columbia University Press, 128 pp. $1.50.

Student Teaching by Charles W. San-ford, William Habberton, and Liesette J. McHarry. College of Education, University of Illinois, 164 pp. $1.70.

FICTION: Delilah by Marcus Goodrich. Farrar and Rhinehart. 496 pp. $2.75.

English History in English Fiction by Sir John Marriott. E. P. Dutton and Co. 308 pp. $2.75.

Mighty Mountain by Archie Binns. Charles Scribner's Sons. 440 pp. $2.75.

GENERAL LITERATURE: A P: The Story of News by Oliver Gramling. Farrar and Rinehart, Inc. 493 PP. $3.50.

Bellevue by Lorraine Maynard in collaboration with Laurence Miscall. Julian Messner, Inc. 280 pp. $2.50.

The Rape of The Masses by Serge Chakotin. Translated by E. W. Dickes. Alliance Book Corporation. 310 pp. $3.00.

There Shall Be No Night by Robert E. Sherwood. Charles Scribner's Sons. 178 pp. $2.00.

Why Men Behave Like Apes and Vice Versa by Earnest Albert Hooton. Illustrated. Princeton University Press. 234 pages. $3.00.

HISTORY: Greek And The Greeks by Walter Miller. Illustrated. The Macmillan Co. 508 pp. $3.00.

Women And The West by William F. Sprague. The Christopher Publishing House. 294 pp. $3.50.

PHILOSOPHY: The Ways of Things by William Pepperell Montague. Prentice-Hall. 712 pp. $4.00.

Wars of Families of Minds by William Lowe Bryan. Yak University Press. 143 pp. $2.00.     

A Developmental Model of Reading Acquisition Based upon Early Scaffolding Errors and Subsequent Vowel Inferences

This paper investigates the processes that predict reading acquisition. Associations between (a) scaffolding errors (e.g., “torn” misread as “town” or “tarn”), other reading errors, and later reading and (b) vowel and rime inferences and later reading were explored. To assess both of these issues, 50 6‐year‐old children were shown a number of CVC words, and word reading errors were noted. Children were then taught families of riming words that could serve as a basis for rime or vowel analogies (e.g., “bark”, “mark”, “dark” → “park” or “harm”) before attempting to read the CVCs a second time. Children’s reading ability was measured at age 6 and two years later at age 8. The results showed that, among word reading error groups, only scaffolding errors at age 6 were unique predictors of reading at age 8, after reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness were controlled. Vowel but not rime inferences predicted reading at age 8. The results are used to inform a model of the role of phoneme awareness and grapheme use in early reading development wherein vowel inference‐use helps to specify precise representations of CVC words from preliminary scaffolding errors.     

On the Meanings of Self‐Regulation: Digital Humanities in Service of Conceptual Clarity

Self‐regulation is of interest both to psychologists and to teachers. But what the word means is unclear. To define it precisely, two studies examined the American Psychological Association's system of controlled vocabulary—specifically, the 447 associated terms it presents—and used techniques from the Digital Humanities to identify 88 closely related concepts and six broad conceptual clusters. The resulting analyses show how similar ideas are interrelated: self‐control, self‐management, self‐observation, learning, social behavior, and the personality constructs related to self‐monitoring. A full‐color network map locates these concepts and clusters relative to each other. It also highlights some of the interests of different audiences, which can be described heuristically using two axes that have been labeled abstract versus practical and self‐oriented versus other‐oriented.