The impact of national educational policies on student achievement: a European study

This paper investigates the impact of national policies for improving teaching and the school learning environment (SLE) on student achievement. In each participating country (i.e., Belgium/Flanders, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Ireland, and Slovenia), a sample of at least 50 schools was drawn and tests in mathematics and science were administered to all Grade 4 students (N = 10,742) at the beginning and end of school year 2010–2011. National policies were measured through (a) content analysis of policy documents, (b) interviews with policymakers, and (c) head-teacher questionnaires. Multilevel analyses revealed that most aspects of national policies for teaching and SLE were associated with student achievement in each subject irrespective of the source of data used to measure them. Implications are, finally, drawn.     

What’s the Technology For? Teacher Attention and Pedagogical Goals in a Modeling-Focused Professional Development Workshop

This paper explores the role that technology can play in engaging pre-service teachers with the iterative, “messy” nature of model-based inquiry. Over the course of 5 weeks, 11 pre-service teachers worked in groups to construct models of diffusion using a computational animation and simulation toolkit, and designed lesson plans for the toolkit. Content analyses of group discussions and lesson plans document attention to content, representation, revision, and evaluation as interwoven aspects of modeling over the course of the workshop. When animating, only content and representation were heavily represented in group discussions. When simulating, all four aspects were represented to different extents across groups. Those differences corresponded with different planned uses for the technology during lessons: to teach modeling, to engage learners with one another’s ideas, or to reveal student ideas. We identify specific ways in which technology served an important role in eliciting teachers’ knowledge and goals related to scientific modeling in the classroom.     

The role of achievement strategies on literacy acquisition across languages

We examined the importance of children’s achievement strategies in different literacy outcomes in three languages varying in orthographic consistency: Chinese, English, and Greek. Eighty Chinese-speaking Taiwanese children, 51 English-speaking Canadian children and 70 Greek children were assessed on measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, reading fluency, and spelling. The children’s use of a task-focused versus task-avoidant achievement strategy in the classroom context was rated by their teachers. The results indicated that the teacher-rated task-focused behavior was a significant predictor of spelling and to a lesser extent of reading fluency and that its effects were comparable across languages.     

Reading and Spelling Development Across Languages Varying in Orthographic Consistency: Do Their Paths Cross?

We examined the cross-lagged relations between reading and spelling in five alphabetic orthographies varying in consistency (English, French, Dutch, German, and Greek). Nine hundred and forty-one children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2 and were tested on word and pseudoword reading fluency and on spelling to dictation. Results indicated that the relations across languages were unidirectional: Earlier reading predicted subsequent spelling. However, we also found significant differences between languages in the strength of the effects of earlier reading on subsequent spelling. These findings suggest that, once children master decoding, the observed differences between languages are not related to the direction of the effects but to the strength of the effects from reading to spelling. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Different RAN components relate to reading at different points in time

The present 10-year longitudinal study examined how rapid automatized naming (RAN) components—articulation time and pause time—relate to reading fluency. Seventy-five Greek-speaking children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 10 and were assessed five times (in Grades 1, 2, 4, 6, and 10) on RAN (digits and objects) and reading fluency (word reading efficiency, phonemic decoding efficiency, and text reading fluency). The results indicated first that a substantial amount of variance in reading fluency was accounted for by what articulation time and pause time shared. In addition, the unique contribution of pause time to reading fluency decreased across time and the unique contribution of articulation time increased across time. Viewed in conjunction with the developmental changes in the RAN components, our findings suggest that the RAN tasks are processed and executed in different ways across time.     

Cognitive processing skills and developmental dyslexia in Chinese

The purpose of the present study was twofold: (a) to examine the extent to which Chinese dyslexic children experience deficits in phonological and orthographic processing skills and (b) to examine if Chinese dyslexia is associated with deficits in Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive (PASS) processing. A total of 27 Grade 4 children with dyslexia (DYS), 27 Grade 4 chronological age (CA) controls, and 27 Grade 2 reading age (RA) controls were tested on measures of phonological awareness, rapid naming, phonological memory, PASS, reading accuracy, and reading fluency. The results indicated that the DYS group performed significantly poorer than the CA and RA groups on both measures of phonological awareness and on a measure of orthographic processing but comparably to the RA group on a measure of rapid naming and both measures of phonological memory. In regard to the PASS processing skills, the DYS group performed worse than the CA controls on Successive and Simultaneous processing but comparably to the RA group on all PASS processing skills. Implications of these findings for early identification and intervention of reading difficulties are discussed.     

A Learning Experience in Inquiry-Based Physics with Immersive Virtual Reality: Student Perceptions and an Interaction Effect Between Conceptual Gains and Attitudinal Profiles

Journal of Science Education and Technology - The integration of immersive virtual reality (VR) in authentic science classrooms can result in a totally new learning experience for the students....     

Examining an Extended Home Literacy Model: The Mediating Roles of Emergent Literacy Skills and Reading Fluency

We examined the developmental relationships between home literacy environment (parent teaching, shared book reading) and emergent literacy skills (phonological awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary, rapid naming speed) in kindergarten, reading accuracy and fluency in Grade 1, and reading comprehension in Grades 2 and 3 in a sample of Canadian children learning to read English (N = 214). Results from a latent variable model showed that parent teaching predicted letter knowledge and phonological awareness, and shared book reading predicted vocabulary and rapid naming speed after controlling for family socioeconomic status. Moreover, both parent teaching and shared book reading contributed indirectly to reading accuracy and fluency in Grade 1, which then mediated the effects of home literacy environment on reading comprehension in Grades 2 and 3. The results suggest that the effects of home literacy environment on later reading development are distributed via more pathways than previously thought.