Systematic academic instruction for students with EBD: the construction and use of a tool for teachers

Educating students with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties requires a thorough systematic approach with the focus on academic instruction. This study addresses the development of a tool, consisting of two questionnaires, for measuring systematic academic instruction. The questionnaires cover the Plan‐Do‐Check‐Act cycle and academic versus behavioural instruction. The questionnaires are both practically oriented as well as theoretically well founded. The reliability turned out to be acceptable (0.76) to high (0.89). Observation scales were developed to determine the validity of both questionnaires. Moderate correlations between questionnaires and observation scales were found (0.31, 0.32). Bland–Altman plots offered us valuable information about the differences between questionnaires and observation scales, supplying us with important issues for further research. It is concluded that the questionnaires might be a valuable tool for assessing teachers' systematic academic instruction.     

Computer support for curriculum developers: CASCADE

This paper examines research on a family of computer-based tools, CASCADE (Computer ASsisted Curriculum Analysis, Design and Evaluation), designed to assist in the complex task of curriculum development. It begins with discussion of curriculum developers and their activities, followed by examination of how the computer can offer support for their tasks. The main elements of four related systems for computer supported curriculum development are discussed and approaches to designing tools of this nature are considered. Following an overview of main findings, this article concludes with thoughts on fruiful directions for research on computer supported curriculum development, emphasizing the need for increased attention to implementation and impact studies.     

Predicting Adolescents’ Bullying Participation from Developmental Trajectories of Social Status and Behavior

The aim of this study was to determine how trajectory clusters of social status (social preference and perceived popularity) and behavior (direct aggression and prosocial behavior) from age 9 to age 14 predicted adolescents’ bullying participant roles at age 16 and 17 (n = 266). Clusters were identified with multivariate growth mixture modeling (GMM). The findings showed that participants’ developmental trajectories of social status and social behavior across childhood and early adolescence predicted their bullying participant role involvement in adolescence. Practical implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.     

Cognitive preferences: A validation study

In 1964 Health introduced the cognitive preference construct and used it to evaluate a new science curriculum. Since then the construct, adapted from research on cognitive styles, has been used in many research and evaluation studies. More recently, however, a number of questions have been raised concerning the validity of findings and analytical techniques employed in these studies. Ultimately the validity of the cognitive preference construct itself is being questioned.In this article a framework for examining validity evidence for the cognitive preference construct is developed; the literature on cognitive preferences in the context of this framework is reviewed, and the validity evidence developed in one recent study is presented and discussed.     

Learning paths in synthesis writing: Which learning path contributes most to which learning outcome?

Instructional Science - This paper presents a secondary analysis of data collected during an intervention study in which students learnt to synthesise pairs of texts presenting opposite views on...     

Stepping into other people’s shoes proves to be a difficult task for high school students: assessing historical empathy through simulation exercise

In 2011, the Finnish National Board of Education assessed the learning outcomes of history with a study whose results raised doubts about the fulfilment of the goals of history education. This article seeks to expand awareness about Finnish adolescents’ understanding of historical empathy. The study assessed twenty-two 16–17-year-old high school students’ ability to understand predecessors’ actions in particular historical situations. The study also examined how well a simulation exercise works as a tool of empathy teaching and evaluation. Students participated in the simulation and afterwards the students were interviewed. They also participated in a survey that measured their attitudes before and after the exercise, and wrote an essay at the end of the course. The results of the study show that most of the high school students did not reach the goals set for history teaching. The weak performance of students is explained by the strong tradition of history teaching which has been continuing in Finnish schools despite the curriculum reform. Teaching still concentrates on passing a meta-narrative on to students who have not yet enough experience of explaining historical events from a multiperspective point of view.     

An aptitude–treatment interaction approach to writing-to-learn

In this article, we propose to link the study of writing-to-learn to the theory of aptitude–treatment interaction (ATI). In an experimental study we examined the effects of a course on “Writing-to-learn about literary stories” consisting of writing tasks adapted to either a planning or a revising writing strategy. We hypothesized that the effects of writing-to-learn tasks depend on the interaction between students' preferred writing strategy and the type of writing instruction, matching or mismatching students' writing strategy. Our match hypothesis was in the main confirmed: results indicated that adapting writing tasks to students' writing strategies increases their learning in the field of literature.     

Developmental Pathways to Preference and Popularity in Middle Childhood

This study examined the associations between children's early life experiences with parents, ego resiliency and ego undercontrol, and peer group social status in a longitudinal, multimethod study from infancy to middle childhood. Participants were 129 children (52% boys) who were followed from 15 months of age to 9 years and their primary caregivers from the Nijmegen Longitudinal Study on Infant and Child Development. The measurements included observations of parent–child interaction, teacher ratings of ego resiliency and ego undercontrol, and peer‐reported social status. Quality of parental interactive behavior was associated with ego resiliency and ego undercontrol. Ego resiliency and ego undercontrol were uniquely related to preference and popularity. The findings provide insight into the developmental pathways leading to the two distinct types of social status.     

Processing of expository and narrative texts by low- and high-comprehending children

The present study investigated comprehension processes and strategy use of second-grade low- and high-comprehending readers when reading expository and narrative texts for comprehension. Results from think-aloud protocols indicated that text genre affected the way the readers processed the texts. When reading narrative texts they made more text-based and knowledge-based inferences, and when reading expository texts they made more comments and asked more questions, but also made a higher number of invalid knowledge-based inferences. Furthermore, low- and high-comprehending readers did not differ in the patterns of text-processing strategies used: all readers used a variety of comprehension strategies, ranging from literal repetitions to elaborate knowledge-based inferences. There was one exception: for expository texts, low-comprehending readers generated a higher number of inaccurate elaborative and predictive inferences. Finally, the results confirmed and extended prior research by showing that low-comprehending readers can be classified either as readers who construct a limited mental representation that mainly reflects the literal meaning of the text (struggling paraphrasers), or as readers who attempt to enrich their mental representation by generating elaborative and predictive inferences (struggling elaborators). A similar dichotomy was observed for high-comprehending readers.     

Knowing what we don’t know: cognitive correlates of early spelling of different target types

Reading and Writing - Although research on cognitive correlates of spelling has been conducted, these studies generally do not distinguish between different types of targets that need to be...