Using item response theory to describe the Nonverbal Literacy Assessment (NVLA)

The Nonverbal Literacy Assessment (NVLA) is a literacy assessment designed for students with significant intellectual disabilities. The 218‐item test was initially examined using confirmatory factor analysis. This method showed that the test worked as expected, but the items loaded onto a single factor. This article uses item response theory to investigate the NVLA using Rasch models. First, we reduced the number of items using a unidimensional model, which resulted in high levels of test reliability despite decreasing the number of questions, providing the same information about student abilities in less time. Second, the multidimensional analysis indicated that it is possible to view the NVLA as a test with four dimensions, resulting in more detailed information about student abilities. Finally, we combined these approaches to obtain both specificity and brevity, with a four‐dimensional model using 133 items from the original NVLA.     

ICT action school development at Helen Parkhurst Dalton School

The paper presents the progress of the action plan for the improvement of the ICT usage at the Helen Parkhurst Dalton School for secondary education in the Netherlands. At the start of the described action period in 2007, the ICT-usage in education was assessed through a review performed by a group of European inspectors. This assessment formed the basis for a continuous development in the school for promoting and improving the usage of ICT to improve the effectiveness of education. We did this by addressing the observed weaknesses with special measures, and continuing the action plans which were already put in place. We kept loyal to our starting point that technology use has to be determined through a strong vision of education and not that technology determines our philosophy as is sometimes the case. It was determined that the curriculum that should drive the learning, not the technology. In 2009 we carried out an intermediate self-evaluation. We established a new vision for school development for the near future. In this vision there was much room for a growing role of ICT usage. Concrete plans for the future were made. In this paper, the third in a row, we will try to assess the full impact of this implementation for teachers, learners and the quality of the teaching and learning process by comparing the assessment of 2007 with a self evaluation on the same indicators in 2011.     

Paying attention to attention: New economies for learning

Challenging formal education's traditional monopoly over the mass-scale acculturation of youth, the technological infrastructure of the new economy brings in its wake a new " attentional economy" in which any "connected" adult or child owns and controls a full economic share of her or his own attention. For youth who have never known the text-bound world from which their elders have come, new technologies afford them far greater power and greatly expanded rights that enable them to decide for themselves what they can see, think, and do, as their teachers grapple with ways to attract, rather than compel, students' voluntary attention. This paper reviews various formulations of "attentional economy," and it urges the study of popular forms of technologically enabled play. These technologies effectively mobilize, direct, and sustain the engaged attention of youth, whose learning in and through play far exceeds the kind of glazed-eyed button-mashing complained of by those who have made little effort to understand the educative prospects of computer gaming.     

Teachers’ monitoring of students’ text comprehension: can students’ keywords and summaries improve teachers’ judgment accuracy?

We investigated intra-individual monitoring and regulation in learning from text in sixth-grade students and their teachers. In Experiment 1, students provided judgments of learning (JOLs) for six texts in one of three cue-prompt conditions (after writing delayed keywords or summaries or without a cue prompt) and then selected texts for restudy. Teachers also judged their students’ learning for each text, while seeing - if present - the keywords or summaries each student had written for each text, and also selected texts for restudy. Overall, monitoring accuracy was low (.10 for students, ?.02 for teachers) and did not differ between cue-prompt conditions. Regulation, indexed by the correlation between JOLs and restudy selections, was significant (?.38 for students, ?.60 for teachers), but was also not affected by cue-prompt condition. In Experiment 2, teachers judged students’ comprehension of six texts without knowing the students’ names, so that only the keywords and summaries, not prior impressions, could inform judgments. Again, monitoring accuracy was generally low (.06), but higher for keywords (.23) than for summaries (?.10). These results suggest that monitoring intra-individual differences in students’ learning is challenging for teachers. Analyses of the diagnosticity and utilization of keywords suggest that these may contain insufficient cues for improving teacher judgments at this level of specificity.     

Gender differences in mental simulation during sentence and word processing

Text comprehension requires readers to mentally simulate the described situation by reactivating previously acquired sensory and motor information from (episodic) memory. Drawing upon research demonstrating gender differences, favouring girls, in tasks involving episodic memory retrieval, the present study explores whether gender differences exist in mental simulation in children (Grades 4 to 6). In Experiment 1, 99 children performed a sentence–picture verification task measuring mental simulation at sentence level. In Experiment 2, 97 children completed a lexical decision task in which imageability of words was manipulated to measure mental simulation at word level. Only for girls we found faster reaction times for matching versus mismatching sentence–picture pairs (Experiment 1) and high‐imageability versus low‐imageability words (Experiment 2). The results suggest that girls construct more coherent and vivid mental simulations than boys and rely more heavily on these representations. The results emphasize the importance of including gender into reading comprehension research. [Correction added on 13 June 2016, after first online publication: The affiliation of author “Björn B. de Koning” was previously wrong and has been corrected in this current version.]     

Toward Integration: From Quantitative Biology to Mathbio-Biomath?

In response to the call of BIO2010 for integrating quantitative skills into undergraduate biology education, 30 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Program Directors at the 2006 HHMI Program Directors Meeting established a consortium to investigate, implement, develop, and disseminate best practices resulting from the integration of math and biology. With the assistance of an HHMI-funded mini-grant, led by Karl Joplin of East Tennessee State University, and support in institutional HHMI grants at Emory and University of Delaware, these institutions held a series of summer institutes and workshops to document progress toward and address the challenges of implementing a more quantitative approach to undergraduate biology education. This report summarizes the results of the four summer institutes (2007–2010). The group developed four draft white papers, a wiki site, and a listserv. One major outcome of these meetings is this issue of CBE—Life Sciences Education, which resulted from proposals at our 2008 meeting and a January 2009 planning session. Many of the papers in this issue emerged from or were influenced by these meetings.     

The construction of word meaning in a multicultural classroom. Mediational tools in peer collaboration during mathematics lessons

In this article, we examine the construction of word meaning by students during collaborative activities in a multicultural classroom at a Dutch primary school. The analysis is based on recordings of student talk in small groups of four or five students during mathematics lessons. Difficulties with specific terms and expressions frequently arose during group work. Students could easily ask each other about the meaning of difficult words as a part of the collaborative activities they were accustomed to. In the groups with both Dutch and minority children, the minority students addressed their Dutch classmates as language experts. Conversations about language difficulties also occurred in the groups with only minority students. The conversations about word meaning revealed four patterns: (1) ignoring a question about the meaning of a word, (2) showing the meaning using gestures, (3) explaining, or (4) discussing word meaning. In none of the cases were the language problems solved by referring to the everyday meaning of the word. Instead, the conversations focussed directly on the specialised meaning which the word had in the context of the mathematics lesson. This means that the children used the mathematical discourse as a mediational tool for constructing a mathematical meaning of the words.     

试论庄子对其人生哲理的艺术体验

庄子以情体验和艺术领悟来证实自己人生哲理的实践价值。在艺术体难事完成对精神自由的追求，领悟顺任自然，超越世俗的人生乐趣，剥离人对物的功利实用目的，以艺术的审美方式对待外界事物和生活现象。