Academic Language Instruction for Students in Grades 4 Through 8: A Literature Synthesis

Academic language, which is characterized by the words and structure of the language of schooling, is an important teachable component of academic achievement. When compared to other strong predictors of academic achievement (e.g., decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension), academic language is not as well understood or explicitly taught in schools. The purpose of this literature synthesis is to identify the instructional practices that currently have the best evidence to improve academic language and broader academic achievement outcomes. The most prolific study of academic language instruction occurs with English learner samples. In the current study, we sought high-quality empirical intervention studies conducted with English learners. We describe the components of instruction that explicitly address academic language skills, and we describe the impact on outcomes for English learner students as well as their English-only peers.     

Situating Special Educators’ Instructional Quality and Their Students’ Outcomes within the Conditions Shaping Their Work

This investigation examined relationships among special education teachers’ working conditions (e.g., classroom characteristics, administrative support), personal characteristics (e.g., experience, certification status, self-efficacy), instructional quality, and students with disabilities’ reading achievement and behavioral outcomes. Data from the 2004–2005 administration of the Special Education Elementary Longitudinal Study were used. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the fit of models for five latent factors. Hybrid structural models were applied to test the hypothesis that working conditions would be positively associated with special education teachers’ self-efficacy and their instructional quality, which would, in turn, be positively associated with their students’ reading achievement and behavioral outcomes. Although the initial structural equation model tested failed to support the hypotheses, several significant relationships with theoretical and practical significance were discovered. Directions for future research and practical implications are discussed.     

Orthogonal-polynomials-based integral inequality and its applications to systems with additive time-varying delays

Recently, a polynomials-based integral inequality was proposed by extending the Moon’s inequality into a generic formulation. By imposing certain structures on the slack matrices of this integral inequality, this paper proposes an orthogonal-polynomials-based integral inequality which has lower computational burden than the polynomials-based integral inequality while maintaining the same conservatism. Further, this paper provides notes on relations among recent general integral inequalities constructed with arbitrary degree polynomials. In these notes, it is shown that the proposed integral inequality is superior to the Bessel–Legendre (B–L) inequality and the polynomials-based integral inequality in terms of the conservatism and computational burden, respectively. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by an illustrative example of stability analysis for systems with additive time-varying delays.     

Affective and motivational factors of learning in online mathematics courses

We investigated what factors would be related to students' achievement in mathematics courses offered at a virtual high school. This was an attempt to understand why some succeed and some do not as well as to suggest what should be done to help with student success. Seventy‐two students responded to a self‐report survey on motivation (ie, self‐efficacy, intrinsic value), mathematics achievement emotions (ie, anxiety, anger, shame, hopelessness, boredom, enjoyment, pride), and cognitive processes (ie, cognitive strategy use, self‐regulation). A three‐step hierarchical multivariate regression was employed to examine which of the factors predict student achievement. Results showed that motivation accounted for approximately 13% of the variance in student achievement and self‐efficacy was the significant individual predictor of student achievement. However, when achievement emotions were added to the analysis, self‐efficacy failed to predict student achievement and emotions accounted for 37% of the variance in student achievement. Cognitive strategy use and self‐regulation did not explain any additional variance in the final scores. Findings are discussed and implications for future research and development are also suggested.     

Two-step photolithography to fabricate multilevel microchannels

In this paper, we study the variation of the thickness of patterned microchannel features in photoresist (PR) by two-step photolithography. The final PR thickness is determined by the thickness and width of the predefined PR pattern in the first-step lithography and the thickness of the spin-coated PR film in the second-step lithography. Thickness variation is demonstrated to be an important consideration within the critical pattern width that the capillary pressure is still dominant for forming the PR film thickness. With this mechanism of two-step photolithography, we demonstrate its ability to form multilevel channel features and its use to fabricate a cross-flow filter with two different pore sizes as a microfluidic application.