Learning a transparent orthography at five years old: reading development of children during their first year of formal reading instruction in Wales

This study compared the early reading development of five‐year‐old children who were learning to read either English (an opaque orthography) or Welsh (a shallow orthography). The children were being educated in Welsh and English‐speaking primary schools in Wales during their first year of formal reading instruction. Teaching methods in both schools emphasised phonics. The reading, letter recognition and phonological awareness skills of the children were tested at three points in the year (November 1998, March 1999 and June 1999). By March, the children who were learning to read in Welsh were performing better than the English‐speaking group at word recognition. The English‐speaking children showed some improvement in their ability to read regular words across the three test phases, but no significant improvement in their ability to read irregular words. The children learning to read in Welsh also performed better on a phoneme counting task in March and June than the English‐speaking children. Both groups performed similarly on tests of letter recognition throughout the year. The results suggest that a transparent orthography facilitates reading acquisition and phoneme awareness skills from the earliest stages of reading development onward.     

Engaging Undergraduates in Feminist Classrooms: An Exploration of Professors’ Practices

This article reports the results of a feminist action research project that sought to ascertain professors’ best practices for engaging undergraduates in feminist classrooms. In semi-structured interviews, professors recommended assigning readings from a variety of positionalities; creating a safe space for class discussion; relying on data to respond to student resistance; and including issues related to diversity, human identity, and social justice at a curricular level. The article concludes with a discussion of the author's experience implementing this advice in his own teaching for two years.     

The Effects of a Fluency Intervention Program on the Fluency and Comprehension Outcomes of Middle‐School Students with Severe Reading Deficits

Despite advances in the science of teaching reading, there still exists a small percentage of students who fail to make the expected progress in reading‐related skills, notwithstanding attempts at intervention. Even if these struggling readers learn to decode adequately, fluency remains a problem for many, and little is known about the effectiveness of fluency interventions for older students with severe reading deficits. This study used a randomized experimental design to test the efficacy of a fluency intervention program on the word‐identification and reading‐comprehension outcomes of 60 middle‐school students with severe reading delays. Results showed that students in the experimental group made more progress on standardized tests of reading fluency than students in the control group. No gains were seen in reading comprehension.     

Heart Rate Holter Monitoring of 6- and 7-Year Old Children with Insulin Dependent Diabetes Mellitus Cardiovascular and Short Term Metabolic Response to Exercise: A Pilot Study

Abstract

This study examined whether gender and/or training were related to the exercise-induced changes in plasma concentrations of growth hormone (GH), prolactin (PRL), triiodothyronine (T₃), and thyroxine (T₄). Twenty subjects (male and female 10-km runners; untrained males and females) ran on a treadmill for 30 win at 80% of previously determined maximum heart rate. Blood samples were taken through an indwelling catheter from an antecubital vein at ?30, 0, +15, +30 min of the test and 30 min of recovery. Reded temperature rose significantly (p < .01) at +15 and +30 min with concomitant rise in GH concentration, but PRL, T₃, and T₄ were not affected by the exercise. We concluded that a 30-min run at 80% of maximum heart rate is associated with higher concentrations of GH but not of PRL, T₃, and T₄ Neither training state nor gender affected the aforementioned results.     

Academic Research Journals in Medical Sociology,Medical Anthropology,and Contemporary Social Medicine: A Focus on Public and Global Health

A bibliography of 31 academic journals in medical sociology, medical anthropology, and contemporary social medicine with a focus on public and global health is provided. Along with basic identifying information, the bibliometric measures of Eigenfactor, Article Influence Score, SCImago Journal Rank, and H-index have been specified for each journal when available. Brief annotations along with both Library of Congress and medical subject headings are supplied. Though some limitations are acknowledged, this bibliography serves as a valuable tool for locating and selecting a wide range of periodical scholarship devoted to the social and cultural features of health and medicine.     

‘Doing research was inspiring’: building a research community with teachers

This paper reports on a mixed-methods study related to K–12 teachers’ understandings of what research is, and what enables or inhibits teacher use of research in the classroom towards informing their instructional practices. In a collaboration exemplifying school board and university partnerships, we examined the nature of associations between teachers and education research(ers). Our findings indicated that teachers felt both connected and disconnected to research practices in education. Participants suggested ways to establish and sustain better links and collaborations among the communities of teaching and research. This paper emphasizes the importance of universities, schools and teachers working together to conduct meaningful research and apply current knowledge in the field of education.     

Nativity Shifts,Broken Dreams,and the New Latino South's Post-First Generation

For game three of the 2013 NBA finals, 11-year-old Sebastian de la Cruz, a musical prodigy born and raised in the great state of Texas, opened the June game with a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner—a la mariachi. As the applause faded for the El Charro de Oro's [The Golden Mariachi's] performance, an outburst of racialized twittering hit the cloud. Although we watched the series of events that surrounded Sebastian de la Cruz's performances from thousands of miles away and despite the geographic distance between San Antonio and our communities, we recognized the hit-and-run commentary as all too familiar. In Georgia and the Carolinas, increasingly corrosive rhetoric surrounds Latino immigration—creating great obstacles to academic achievement including the navigation of a postcolonial nativist American landscape of K-12 education that continues to fail minoritized youth. Or, as Flores and Loss (2010) surmised, “Immigration policies and practices have been, and continue to be, riddled with contradictions. Close to the center of this sometimes bloody and always controversial issue is a fundamental, indeed enduring, question: Who is an American and what sorts of education should all Americans enjoy?” (p. 403). With these questions in mind, we argue that given an ongoing Latino nativity shift marked by 2010 Census analyses, the continued framing of post-first generation Latinos as perpetual foreigners whose academic achievement depends simply on the remediation of their English language proficiency is symptomatic a “national myopia” (P. R. Portes &; Salas, 2014). We conclude with the overarching proposition that educational policy paradigms for Latino achievement in and beyond the shifting demographics of the U.S. South need to be grounded in additive models of cultural identity development that advance inter-culturally distributed cognitions, attitudes, and affective-behavioral patterns that result in achieving broader, richer identities across a variety of social contexts.     

Can Middle School Students with Serious Reading Difficulties Help Each Other and Learn Anything?

This investigation was intended to examine the effects of teaching middle school students with learning disabilities and mild mental retardation to tutor one another in reading comprehension strategies. All students were reading significantly below grade level and many students exhibited behavior problems in addition to their primary disability area. Students were randomly assigned to a tutoring or traditional reading instruction condition. Within the tutoring condition, students were matched into tutoring dyads, trained in the tutoring procedures, and taught specific reading comprehension strategies. Reciprocal tutoring was employed, such that students assumed roles of both tutor and tutee during daily reading periods. Performance on reading comprehension tests following tutoring yielded significant performance advantages for students involved in tutoring. Observational, survey, and interview data revealed that students enjoyed tutoring more than their traditional instruction, appeared to see the value and benefits of the tutoring, and wanted to include tutoring as part of their other classes, such as science and social studies. Findings are discussed with respect to the strengths and challenges associated with the use of tutoring to provide strategic instruction to students with special learning needs.