The Effects of One versus Two Years of Intensive Reading Intervention Implemented with Late Elementary Struggling Readers

We examined the effectiveness of a researcher‐provided reading intervention with 484 fourth graders with significant reading difficulties. Students were randomly assigned to one year of intervention, two years of intervention, or a business‐as‐usual comparison condition (BAU). Students assigned to two years of intervention demonstrated significantly greater gains in reading fluency compared to students who received one year of intervention and the BAU group. Students in both the one‐ and two‐year groups demonstrated similar and significantly larger gains in word reading in comparison to the BAU group. There were no statistically significant differences between the three groups on standardized measures of reading comprehension. We discuss these results in the context of research with late elementary and secondary students targeting reading comprehension.     

A machine learning approach for Arabic text classification using N-gram frequency statistics

In this paper a machine learning approach for classifying Arabic text documents is presented. To handle the high dimensionality of text documents, embeddings are used to map each document (instance) into R (the set of real numbers) representing the tri-gram frequency statistics profiles for a document. Classification is achieved by computing a dissimilarity measure, called the Manhattan distance, between the profile of the instance to be classified and the profiles of all the instances in the training set. The class (category) to which an instance (document) belongs is the one with the least computed Manhattan measure. The Dice similarity measure is used to compare the performance of method. Results show that tri-gram text classification using the Dice measure outperforms classification using the Manhattan measure.     

Examining agreement and longitudinal stability among traditional and RTI-based definitions of reading disability using the affected-status agreement statistic

Rates of agreement among alternative definitions of reading disability and their 1- and 2-year stabilities were examined using a new measure of agreement, the affected-status agreement statistic. Participants were 288,114 first through third grade students. Reading measures were Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills Oral Reading Fluency and Nonsense Word Fluency, and six levels of severity of poor reading were examined (25th, 20th, 15th, 10th, 5th, and 3rd percentile ranks). Four definitions were compared, including traditional unexpected low achievement and three response-to-intervention-based definitions: low achievement, low growth, and dual discrepancy. Rates of agreement were variable but only poor to moderate overall, with poorest agreement between unexpected low achievement and the other definitions. Longitudinal stability was poor, with poorest stability for the low growth definition. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

On the interplay between normalisation,bias, and performance of paper impact metrics

We evaluate article-level metrics along two dimensions. Firstly, we analyse metrics’ ranking bias in terms of fields and time. Secondly, we evaluate their performance based on test data that consists of (1) papers that have won high-impact awards and (2) papers that have won prizes for outstanding quality. We consider different citation impact indicators and indirect ranking algorithms in combination with various normalisation approaches (mean-based, percentile-based, co-citation-based, and post hoc rescaling). We execute all experiments on two publication databases which use different field categorisation schemes (author-chosen concept categories and categories based on papers’ semantic information).In terms of bias, we find that citation counts are always less time biased but always more field biased compared to PageRank. Furthermore, rescaling paper scores by a constant number of similarly aged papers reduces time bias more effectively compared to normalising by calendar years. We also find that percentile citation scores are less field and time biased than mean-normalised citation counts.In terms of performance, we find that time-normalised metrics identify high-impact papers better shortly after their publication compared to their non-normalised variants. However, after 7 to 10 years, the non-normalised metrics perform better. A similar trend exists for the set of high-quality papers where these performance cross-over points occur after 5 to 10 years.Lastly, we also find that personalising PageRank with papers’ citation counts reduces time bias but increases field bias. Similarly, using papers’ associated journal impact factors to personalise PageRank increases its field bias. In terms of performance, PageRank should always be personalised with papers’ citation counts and time-rescaled for citation windows smaller than 7 to 10 years.     

A computer science and robotics integration model for primary school: evaluation of a large-scale in-service K-4 teacher-training program

Education and Information Technologies - Integrating computer science (CS) into school curricula has become a worldwide preoccupation. Therefore, we present a CS and Robotics integration model and...     

Seeking balance between the past and the present: Vietnamese refugee parenting practices and adolescent well-being

This qualitative study examines the resources that Vietnamese refugee parents use in raising their adolescent youth in exile and how they, and their adolescents, regard their experiences of different parenting styles. The study is based on 55 semi-structured interviews and several focus groups performed with a small sample of Vietnamese refugee parents and their adolescent children. Three main themes from the interviews were identified: the role of the extended family and siblings in bringing up children; language acquisition and cultural continuity and, finally, religion and social support. Our findings suggest extended kin are involved in the raising of adolescent children, providing additional family ties and support. Parents regarded Vietnamese language acquisition by their youth as facilitating both communication with extended kin and cultural transmission. Several parents stressed the importance of religious community to socialising and creating a sense of belonging for their youth. Vietnamese refugee parents seek a balance between Vietnamese values and their close extended family social networks, and the opportunities in Norway to develop autonomy in pursuit of educational and economic goals. Together these parenting practices constituted a mobilization of resources in support of their youth. These findings may have important implications for future research on resiliency and the role of these strategies as protective factors mediating mental health outcomes. They may also have implications for treatment, in terms of the types of resources treatment can access and for prevention strategies that maximize key cultural resources for Vietnamese refugee youth.     

Implementation Effects of a Program for the Training of Coaching Skills with School Principals∗

In this study, the implementation effects of a program for the training of coaching skills to Dutch primary school principals are described. Coaching is a form of in‐class support intended to provide teachers with feedback on their own functioning, and thereby to stimulate self‐reflection and self‐analysis in order to improve instructional effectiveness. To assist school principals in their attempts to coach teachers, a training program was designed and evaluated. Based on the pre‐ and post‐training ratings of coaching conferences, a significant treatment effect was found for the coaching skills concerned with the development of autonomy (empowerment), feedback, and agreement on classroom observational goals. The pre‐ and post‐training ratings from the coached teachers themselves showed a significant treatment effect for the coaching skills concerned with the development of improvement plans. Although the training provided for the school principals was directed at the coaching functions of consulting and confronting, the majority of the school principals conducted coaching conferences that emphasized predominantly the function of consulting.

     

Book reviews

What are the possibilities and/or limitations for becoming subjects differenciated from previous categorizations, such as “troublemaker”, to which certain students are subjected? This is the question analyzed in this paper, based on observations of, and narratives and perspectives of, two 15-year-old ethnic minority boys at a school in Denmark. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and their concepts of “smooth” and “striated” spaces, I explore spaces where energies are mobilized through ongoing generated and created relations, and how spaces where this does not seem possible, tend to trap and thereby limit the person being categorized. Through the analyses, I will show how repetitive, limiting categorizations in and over time tend to “stick” to the boys being categorized, and how the sticky categorizations obstruct their future possibilities for change and viable lives within the school.     

Parental satisfaction with programmes provided for children with learning difficulties in Oman

This study aimed to explore parental satisfaction with programmes provided for children with learning difficulties (LD) in Oman. A sample was collected from 299 parents who filled out an electronic self-reporting questionnaire during the second semester of 2021. The researchers designed a 19-item questionnaire that was distributed over two domains: 14 items on parent satisfaction and five items on parent co-operation. The results revealed that parents' overall satisfaction with the effectiveness of the LD programmes in which their children were enrolled was high. The results also indicated statistically significant differences among the mean scores on parents' satisfaction over the age variable groups, in favor of the younger group, followed by the middle group, and lastly the older group. There were also statistically significant differences among the mean scores on parents' satisfaction according to the province locations, in favor of the capital city of Oman, Muscat, and its peripheral provinces, followed by the western provinces, and lastly, the eastern provinces. The study recommends conducting similar studies to investigate the satisfaction of school principals, specialists, teachers and children with LD to determine the effectiveness of Oman's LD programmes.