Spelling deficits in dyslexia: evaluation of an orthographic spelling training

Orthographic spelling is a major difficulty in German-speaking children with dyslexia. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an orthographic spelling training in spelling-disabled students (grade 5 and 6). In study 1, ten children (treatment group) received 15 individually administered weekly intervention sessions (60 min each). A control group (n = 4) did not receive any intervention. In study 2, orthographic spelling training was provided to a larger sample consisting of a treatment group (n = 13) and a delayed treatment control group (n = 14). The main criterion of spelling improvement was analyzed using an integrated dataset from both studies. Repeated-measures analysis of variance revealed that gains in spelling were significantly greater in the treatment group than in the control group. Statistical analyses also showed significant improvements in reading (study 1) and in a measure of participants’ knowledge of orthographic spelling rules (study 2). The findings indicate that an orthographic spelling training enhances reading and spelling ability as well as orthographic knowledge in spelling-disabled children learning to spell a transparent language like German.     

A Behavioral Approach to Building Cognitive Foundations for Effective Thought and Action

This research documents the process and results of an approach to teaching university undergraduates intentional self-development skills designed to promote self-generated goals, routines, and lifestyle choices. These skills may provide effective behavioral foundations for developing metacognitive awareness, intentionality, and individual well-being. The results of six original behavioral interventions, implemented in two James Madison University courses, provide initial support for the effectiveness of these instructional methodologies.     

Are There Economic Incentives for Non‐Traditional Students to Enter HE? The Labour Market as a Barrier to Widening Participation

The expansion of higher education (HE) in the UK has disproportionately benefited young people from relatively rich families: the gap between rich and poor in terms of participation in HE having widened since the 1970s. We explore a neglected possible cause of this class difference: that the labour market fails to provide sufficient incentives for potential entrants from less advantaged backgrounds to enter HE. Most studies of the rewards from participating in HE in the UK suggest that the rates of returns are sufficiently high to provide clear economic incentives to participate. However, until recently, most studies generated estimates of the average rate of return to graduation, which could overestimate returns to marginal entrants, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. In this review we examine the methodological problems faced by more targeted studies of the rates of return to graduation and review their key findings concerning the economic returns to non‐traditional entrants.     

Psychological Adaptation of Turkish Students at U.S. Campuses

The number of Turkish citizens entering the U.S. for their studies is growing more rapidly than almost any other group. The purpose of the current study was to investigate how acculturation factors affect psychological adaptation of Turkish students in the U.S. One hundred and twenty-four Turkish students participated in the study. Regression analyses revealed that social support and self-esteem were predictors of psychological adjustment. Implications suggest that Turkish students, as with other international students as previous research has suggested, should have a strong network of both co-national students and other social connections.     

What student teaching evaluation instruments tell us about emphases in teacher education programs

Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA. April, 1995     

Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace: Honoring Religious Diversity and Modeling Respect for Faiths Through Children’s Literature

Understanding and respecting young children’s religious background is an important way of respecting diversity. Due to the traditional separation of church and state, many professionals tend to ignore the significant influence of religious belief and training during the early childhood years. Sharing high-quality picture books simultaneously enables adults and peers to expand their understandings of different faiths and to communicate their respect for and interest in young children’s religious education. This editorial concludes with a selective list of picture book titles that focus on different faiths that are suitable for children in the primary grades.     

Heterogeneous performances of conceptual dis/continuity: a dialectic reading of Brown and Kloser’s article

We review Brown and Kloser’s article, “Conceptual continuity and the science of baseball: using informal science literacy to promote students science learning” from a Vygotskian cultural-historical and dialectic perspective. Brown and Kloser interpret interview data with student baseball players and claim that students’ conceptual understanding articulated in vernacular genres involves continuities (similarities) with the canonical scientific explanations. In this commentary, we suggest that the authors’ approach presupposes the dichotomy of the formal and the informal, which brings the authors’ attention to continuity into the separation of cognition from language. We propose a Vygotskian approach that points out the problem of theorizing cognition (conceptual understanding) by depending on specific forms of representation (e.g., scientific terms). As alternative, we envision a Vygotskian cultural-historical approach to language, which considers different, irreducible modes of communication as an integrated whole and therefore allows theorizing cognition without dichotomizing it from the concrete ways by which human being communicates. We provide an exemplary analysis of a lecture talk in a university physics classroom and exemplify dialectic theories that explain the development of conceptual understanding. We discuss that this Vygotskian dialectic approach shows that people communicate scientific concepts through hybridization, which does not reproduce a genre self-identically; the continuity of conceptual understanding involves dis/continuity.     

Spacetime coded eigenbeamforming for downlink frequencyselective correlated fading channels

1 Introduction Space-ti me coding (STC)[1-4]is an emerging tech-nique in communications . Multi-input multi-output(MIMO) signals are encoded in both spatial and tem-poral domains .As a result ,diversity and coding gainsare achieved . Most works to date on this subject arebased on two fundamental assumptions . One is thatthe transmitter does not knowthe channel state infor-mation (CSI) ,i.e.,openloop .The otheris that fad-ing from each base station antenna to any mobile an-tenna is indepen…