Employers’ support for adult higher education students in liberal post-socialist contexts

In most European countries, the proportion of adult students among both full-time and part-time workers has increased significantly over recent decades. Undertaking paid work is also increasingly common among traditional students. The opportunities to work while studying depend largely on the role of employers in promoting learning. However, both theoretical frameworks and empirical studies typically focus on the behaviour of firms in providing training. The support of employers for formal adult education has remained a marginal topic. The aim of this article is to analyse the contributions of employers to the acquisition of higher education from the perspective of the adult learners; we investigated how employers support their staff in higher education studies. We also tried to identify which kinds of learners have a better chance of receiving various benefits. We used two different data-sets: quantitative data from a study of adult students in higher education and qualitative data from interviews with managers of small- and medium-sized enterprises and at least one employed participant in formal adult education, collected in the framework of the international research project Towards a Lifelong Learning Society in Europe: The Contribution of the Education System supported by the EU Sixth Framework Programme.     

A rejoinder to Sarangapani and Winch

A statistical relationship between student affect and student achievement is routinely observed—students who like a particular subject also tend to do well in that subject. Theory suggests that the underlying causality is a mutual influence relationship in which affect influences, and is influenced by, achievement. Published analyses, however, usually assume a unidirectional influence—affect influences achievement. To the extent that the latter assumption is an over‐simplification, as theory suggests it is, then current understandings of the importance of affect for achievement are probably in error to some degree. The analyses reported here take a position consistent with theory to model the underlying causality of the relationship between affect and achievement as bidirectional. To this end, the present analyses formulate a non‐recursive structural equation model which specifies affect and achievement as influences on each other. This model is estimated separately for each of 23 nations, 19 of which are members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). All 23 nations participated in the OECD‐sponsored Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a programme whose focus is national achievement levels in populations of 15‐year‐olds. The results of these analyses lend support to the proposition that affect and performance exist in a mutual influence relationship, though the nature of this relationship varies between countries.     

Vocabulary Is Important for Some,but Not All Reading Skills

Although there is evidence for a close link between the development of oral vocabulary and reading comprehension, less clear is whether oral vocabulary skills relate to the development of word-level reading skills. This study investigated vocabulary and literacy in 81 children aged 8 to 10 years. In regression analyses, vocabulary accounted for unique variance in exception word reading and reading comprehension, but not text reading accuracy, decoding, or regular word reading. Consistent with these data, children with poor reading comprehension exhibited oral vocabulary weaknesses and read fewer exception words correctly. These findings demonstrate that oral vocabulary is associated with some, but not all, reading skills. Results are discussed in terms of current models of reading development.     

Cultures of (Un)happiness: teaching,schooling, and light and dark humor

The author explores humor during a time of increasingly hostile accountability measures directed toward educators. Drawing on incongruity and other theories of humor, he explores both light and dark humor and some aspects of the educational potential and power of humor. Noting how humor is related to creativity and problem management, the argument is that humor has an important place not only in producing educator well-being but for student learning and school renewal.     

Development of Category‐Based Induction and Semantic Knowledge

Category‐based induction is a hallmark of mature cognition; however, little is known about its origins. This study evaluated the hypothesis that category‐based induction is related to semantic development. Computational studies suggest that early on there is little differentiation among concepts, but learning and development lead to increased differentiation based on taxonomic relatedness. This study reports findings from a new task aimed to (a) examine this putative increase in semantic differentiation and (b) test whether individual differences in semantic differentiation are related to category‐based induction in 4‐ to 7‐year‐old children (N = 85). The results provide the first empirical evidence of an age‐related increase in differentiation of representations of animal concepts and suggest that category‐based induction is related to increased semantic differentiation.     

Education as Part of the Migratory Project of Latin American Migrant Women Traveling to the United States in Undocumented Conditions

Education is an indispensable element for the development of society. In Latin America, the point of origin of most of the undocumented immigrants to the United States, equal opportunity in access to education and educational achievement is still pending. The study presented here focuses on the analysis of the expectations of female migrants via Mexico’s northern border, focusing attention on educational attainment as an important aspect of the “American Dream” of the migrant women interviewed and their dependents.     

Culture,education, thought

Doctor of psychological sciences. Member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. Honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founding director of the Institute of Mankind.     

Inference making ability and its relation to comprehension failure in young children

Young children's reading comprehension skill is associated with their ability to draw inferences (Oakhill 1982, 1984). An experiment was conducted to investigate the direction of this relation and to explore possible sources of inferential failure. Three groups of children participated: Same-age skilled and less skilled comprehenders, and a comprehension-age match group. The pattern of performance indicated that the ability to make inferences was not a by-product of good reading comprehension, rather that good inference skills are a plausible cause of good reading comprehension ability. Failure to make inferences could not be attributed to lack of relevant general knowledge. Instead, the pattern of errors indicated that differences in reading strategy were the most likely source of these group differences.     

Early intervention for reading disabilities: teaching the alphabet principle in a connectionist framework

Forty-eight children referred by teachers at the end of first grade for difficulty in reading were randomly assigned to three treatments, all of which modeled connections between written and spoken words but did not teach phonics rules, for eight half-hour individual tutoring sessions. The children were taught 48 words of varying orders of spelling-sound predictability (Venezky, 1995) using a whole-word method, for making connections between a word's name and its constituent letters; a subword method, for making connections between each color-coded spelling unit and its corresponding phonemes; or a combined whole-word and subword method. Regardless of the method used, children improved reliably on standardized reading measures and the taught words, showing that they could make connections between written and spoken words at the whole word and subword levels, even when rules were not taught. By posttest, the subword method showed a reliable advantage on a standardized test of real word reading. Knowledge of sounds associated with both multiletter and single-letter spelling units predicted reading achievement. Order of spelling-sound predictability (easy, moderate, difficult) was correlated with standardized measures of reading at pretest and posttest, and the magnitude of the relationship increased as a result of the intervention. Individual differences in verbal intelligence, rapid automatized naming, and phonological and orthographic skills predicted response to the intervention. Instructional implications of the results are discussed.