Prediction of academic performance prior to intersections within a multi-tiered school system

Diagnostic information is a centrepiece of educational decision making. Far-reaching decisions like placements within multi-tiered school systems may have a huge long-term impact on the achieved level of education. Therefore, such decisions should be substantiated or complemented by objective and prognostically valid information. To this end, we assessed academic self-concept, reading comprehension, orthographic abilities, and geometric and problem-solving skills prior to the selection of subsequent school forms in Grade 4 in order to model the pedagogical decisions of the teachers (Lenhard, Hasselhorn, & Schneider, 2011 Lenhard, W., Hasselhorn, M., & Schneider, W. (2011). Kombiniertes Leistungsinventar zur allgemeinen Schulleistung und für Schullaufbahnempfehlungen in der vierten Klassen (KLASSE 4) [Combined performance inventory for the determination of school performancy and schooling recommendations in Grade 4]. Göttingen, Germany: Hogrefe. [Google Scholar]). The article describes the longitudinal results of an independent sample of 76 students and how well their academic performance was predicted 18?months later by the psychometric approach compared to teacher recommendations. Standardized tests had a high prognostic validity and predicted the choice of higher educational levels in subsequent school years. Teachers were more successful in determining grouping decisions for students with lower educational attainments.     

Editorial

WAPOR's Berlin conference in September 2007 has produced importantnews for this journal. The WAPOR Council and the PublicationsCommittee Chair have nominated Peter Neijens of the Universityof Amsterdam as Editor, along with Wolfgang Donsbach and MichaelW. Traugott, who will continue their work for the journal. TheEditors then decided to charge Peter Neijens with the responsibilitiesof the journal's Managing Editor. At the time of writing, Peter     

The Max Planck Guest Laboratory at the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology

It has become a unique link between Europe and China in the field of modern biology and has fulfilled its purpose not only in science education, but also with respect to establishing reliable contacts between Europe and China.     

The effects of age,study time,and importance of text units on strategy use and memory for texts

European Journal of Psychology of Education - This study investigated study behavior and recall of a narrative text as a function of the reader’s age, study time, and importance level of text...     

Differential effects of home and preschool learning environments on early language development

The present study is based on longitudinal data from a German early childhood education and care (ECEC) governmental initiative assessing children's grammatical and vocabulary development between 2;6 and 4;0 years (N = 1,331), quality of the home learning environment and quality of the preschool setting. Results showed that the quality of the home learning environment predicted development in grammatical skills, but not in receptive vocabulary at age 4, while the effects of preschool process quality showed similar relative impacts on both language outcomes. Further analyses revealed effects of accumulated advantages of preschool quality for children from medium‐ and high‐quality home learning environments in their vocabulary development. The results are compared with previous findings from the German ECEC context and discussed with respect to implications for policy efforts to improve ECEC quality and ways in which both learning environments act together on children's development.     

The impact of early metalinguistic competencies and memory capacity on reading and spelling in elementary school: Results of the Munich Longitudinal Study on the Genesis of Individual Competencies (LOGIC)

This paper reports on a longitudinal study dealing with the development of literacy in young children. A total of 163 children were first tested during their last year in kindergarten using a variety of tasks that tapped phonological processing, memory capacity, early literacy, and intelligence. Children’s word decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling skills were assessed in elementary school several years later. As a main result, all of the predictor domains had a significant impact on the acquisition of literacy in elementary school, although the contribution of each domain differed as a function of the criterion measure. An attempt to identify children-at-risk using a kindergarten screening test provided encouraging results. Nonetheless, it was shown that whereas group predictions of reading and spelling performance can be quite accurate, the individual prognosis of school problems is far from perfect.     

he Challenges of Teaching Good Information Processing to Learning Disabled Students

A MODEL of good information processing is sketched, describing how metacognitive knowledge influences strategy selection and use. Three factors pose particular problems for learning disabled students as they attempt to acquire metacognitive knowledge and to use study strategies productively: neurological impairments; deficiencies in general world knowledge; and negative beliefs, attitudes, and styles that limit self‐efficacy. Creating an educational atmosphere that explicitly builds conceptual (domain‐specific) knowledge and teaches positive beliefs about learning potential is essential in promoting metacognitively‐oriented instruction.     

Can self-report data on deficits in reading and spelling predict spelling disability as defined by psychometric tests?

Questionnaire data concerning spelling and reading self-assessment, habits, and school history were obtained for 79 adults (54 women and 25 men). The items were used to predict affectedness as defined on the basis of psychometric tests. For this purpose, two different discriminant analytical approaches (linear discriminant analysis and hierarchical classification with CART) were compared using a cross-validation design. 86.8–92.6% of the learning sample and 87.5–88% of the cross-validation sample were classified correctly. The CART model was preferred due to a balanced relation of sensitivity and specificity. Our results support the conclusion that self-report data are appropriate to substitute psychometric tests if these cannot be administered.