The impacts of network centrality and self‐regulation on an e‐learning environment with the support of social network awareness

An e‐learning environment that supports social network awareness (SNA) is a highly effective means of increasing peer interaction and assisting student learning by raising awareness of social and learning contexts of peers. Network centrality profoundly impacts student learning in an SNA‐related e‐learning environment. Additionally, self‐regulation behavior significantly influences online learning of students. However, exactly how network centrality and self‐regulation influence learning behavior and effectiveness in an e‐learning environment remains unclear. Therefore, this study investigates how both variables (ie, network centrality and self‐regulation) impact student learning in an SNA‐related e‐learning environment. Analytical results indicate that the student group with high‐level centrality and low‐level self‐regulation more significantly progresses in learning achievement than the other groups. The second finding shows the group also has the highest number of students asking for help, revealing they have the highest system utilization rate.     

Effects of Mexican Immigrant Parents’ Daily Workplace Discrimination on Child Behavior and Family Functioning

This study investigated Mexican immigrant parents’ reports of perceived workplace discrimination and their children's behavior, parents’ moods, and parent–child interactions. Parents of one hundred and thirty‐eight 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children were asked to complete one survey daily for 2 weeks (N = 1,592 days). On days when fathers perceived discrimination, fathers and mothers reported more externalizing child behaviors, and mothers reported fewer positive child behaviors. When mothers perceived discrimination, they reported more externalizing child behaviors; fathers reported more internalizing child behaviors. Parents reported worse mood on days with perceived discrimination. Perceived discrimination was not strongly related to parent–child interactions. For fathers, but less so for mothers, those whose psychological acculturation indicated separation had more negative relations between daily perceived workplace discrimination and child and family outcomes.     

Iraqi,Syrian, and Palestinian Refugee Adolescents' Beliefs About Parental Authority Legitimacy and Its Correlates

This study examined intra‐ and interindividual variations in parental legitimacy beliefs in a sample of 883 Arab refugee adolescents (M_age = 15.01 years, SD = 1.60), 277 Iraqis, 275 Syrians, and 331 Palestinians in Amman, Jordan. Confirmatory factor analyses showed distinct latent factors for moral–conventional, prudential, and personal legitimacy items. Older adolescents rated legitimacy lower for personal issues, but higher for prudential issues. Beliefs were associated with socioeconomic status (fathers' education, family size), particularly for personal issues, but were more pervasively associated with displacement‐related experiences. Greater war trauma was associated with less prudential legitimacy for all youth and more authority legitimacy over moral–conventional issues for Syrian youth. Greater hopefulness was associated with more authority legitimacy over all but personal issues.     

The Relations Between Early Working Memory Abilities and Later Developing Reading Skills: A Longitudinal Study From Kindergarten to Fifth Grade

This study investigated the relations of early working‐memory abilities (phonological and visual‐spatial short‐term memory [STM] and complex memory and episodic buffer memory) and later developing reading skills. Sixty Hebrew‐speaking children were followed from kindergarten through Grade 5. Working memory was tested in kindergarten and reading in Grades 1, 2, and 5. All memory measures, but phonological STM, correlated with reading up to Grade 5. Regression analyses (with intelligence quotient controlled) demonstrated that phonological complex memory predicted all reading skills in Grade 1, and accuracy in Grade 2. The rather understudied visual‐spatial memory predicted comprehension in Grades 2 (STM) and 5 (complex memory). The results point to an important role of the phonological complex memory in early assessment, and suggest a long‐lasting role of early visual‐spatial memory in predicting variance in reading. Whether this role of the visual‐spatial memory is unique to the Hebrew orthography because of its visual features requires, however, further investigation.     

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.     

Predicting persistence from the student adaptation to college questionnaire: Early warning or siren song?

With the currently dwindling traditional applicant pool, retention is higher education's holy grail of the nineties. Western Psychological Services is marketing its new Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ) as providing early evidence of poor adjustment and potential attrition. While the SACQ closely parallels Tinto's model of institutional departure, no previously published research addresses its ability to differentiate persisters from nonpersisters. Using discriminant analysis, the present study examined (1) the extent to which the SACQ accurately predicts student departure for a private, comprehensive university; (2) SACQ items distinguishing nonpersisters; (3) use with an incoming class; and (4) evidence linking the SACQ with intervention strategies. The paper will appeal to a wide audience, especially those concerned with enrollment management and assessment.Presented at the Thirty-first Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, San Francisco, May 26–29, 1991.     

Economics of Education. The Need to go Beyond Human Capital Theory and Production-Function Analysis

Human capital theory takes for granted that an individual's demand of education will automatically be transformed into real human capital: there is no supply constraint or, said differently, educational systems can be assimilated to 'neutral' black boxes mechanically transforming input into output. This optimistic view of human capital production was rapidly abandoned. In the late 1960s some economists began to revise the assumption that the black box's functioning was neutral with regard to human capital production. Supply-side economics of education appeared first under the form of production-function analysis. It was initially believed that the information delivered by such input/output approach would help policy makers and administrators choose the most productive 'mix' of inputs. But the major conclusion of this line of research is that there is apparently no clear and undeniable relation between both expenditure per student and the specific resources they can buy (teachers' degrees and experience, smaller student-teacher ratios) on the one hand, and student achievement on the other hand. This probably means that further conceptual development is necessary to overcome the current analytical - and also political - deadlock. This paper argues that one promising way consists of introducing organisational assets as well as non-monetary inputs into the production function paradigm.