The Growth of Phonological Awareness by Children With Reading Disabilities: A Result of Semantic Knowledge or Knowledge of Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences?

According to the Lexical Restructuring Model (Metsala & Walley, 1998 Metsala, J. L. and Walley, A. C. 1998. “Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representation: Precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability”. In Word recognition in beginning literacy, Edited by: Metsala, J. L. and Ehri, L. C. 89–120. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.  [Google Scholar]), children move from holistic representations of words, to syllabic representations, and finally to phonemic representations through a restructuring process driven by their developing lexical base. In contrast, the psycholinguistic grain size theory put forth by Ziegler and Goswami (2005) Ziegler, J. C. and Goswami, U. 2005. Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: A psycholinguistic grain size theory.. Psychological Bulletin, 131: 3–29. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] suggests that the awareness of individual phonemes is not possible without direct literacy instruction. The purpose of this study was to examine whether semantic knowledge and/or knowledge of grapheme/phoneme correspondences influenced the acquisition of word-blending skills by a sample of children with a reading disability. Participants were 211 second-grade and third-grade students from public elementary schools who were assigned to a reading intervention. Hierarchical Linear Modeling techniques were used to model individual growth curves of word-blending skills. Overall, findings support the psycholinguistic grain size theory of reading and suggest that instruction in the relationship between orthographic patterns and their corresponding sounds is necessary for the development of phonological awareness.     

Indigenizing Education and the Phenomenology of Place

In this essay Justin Pack responds to Vine Deloria, Jr., and Daniel Wildcat's call to “indigenize education” by exploring what that entails both in his own life and for his teaching. Recognizing the power of place in Native American metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics is essential to the project of indigenizing education, according to Pack. He recounts how reading Deloria and Wildcat's Power and Place: Indian Education in America as a graduate student radically changed his perception of and relation to place, instilling in him the insight that knowing the history of a place is key to gaining a sense of one's connection to place. This realization, in turn, influenced Pack's approach to teaching. He came to understand that passing his changed perception and experience of place along to his students helped their development of critical thinking skills by exposing them to a metaphysics radically different from Western epistemology and ethics and by opening a path for them to recover a deeper sense of what it means to be in a place. Ultimately, Pack's aim in the essay is to demonstrate the potential for teaching Native American philosophy to function as a disruptive force in the classroom.     

The Validity of Global Press Ratings

This study examines year-by-year correlations between Freedom House and Reporters Sans Frontières' (RSF) press freedom scores for countries over a 13-year period (2002–2014). The goal of the study is to test the hypothesis that, further into the age of digital disclosure, as press abuses and harassment of journalists are more widely reported, press freedom ranking systems are gradually becoming more precise and, therefore, correlations between the two indices will strengthen over time. To further assess concurrent validity of the indices, correlations between both indices and scores on the United Nations Human Development Index are also provided. The study also examines changes in the indices' rankings of countries over time within six world regions: the Middle East and North Africa, the Americas, Western Europe, Eastern Europe/Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. In so doing, this study adds a degree of understanding to the validity of two press freedom indices that are routinely cited in journalistic reportage and trade journals, as well as many scholarly publications. Results suggest that the two organizations' scoring of press freedom has become significantly more correlated in the years 2002–2014, and the primary cause of the increased agreement is that RSF's ratings became substantially more aligned with Freedom House's scores during this period. Both indices' ratings are significantly correlated with countries' United Nations Human Development Index scores.     

“More alike than different”: learning about diversity from people with disabilities

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Health Communication, Intercultural Communication

Objectives: After completing this semester-long activity students, should be able to (1) apply course concepts (i.e., stereotypes, identity, listening, language, and conflict) to diverse real-world scenarios; (2) explain the utility of intergroup contact theory in relationship to communication and social diversity; (3) critically reflect on social diversity explored through communication behaviors; and (4) develop communication competence toward diverse others, specifically persons with disabilities (PWDs).     

Preparing International Counselor Educators Through Online Distance Learning

Online learning has emerged as a significant teaching medium, influencing how higher education is conducted in the U.S. and globally. While widely accepted in select disciplines, distance learning as the method for counselor preparation is often met with skepticism or resistance in the counseling profession. The purpose of this paper is to argue for the confluence of distance and global training in counselor education and training, and to illustrate that confluence through examining the teaching and learning process of doctoral students in a distance PhD program accredited by the U.S. Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs.     

Behavioral variability is controlled by discriminative stimuli

Previous research has demonstrated that behavioral variability can be modified by reinforcers contingent on it, but there has been no convincing evidence of discriminative stimulus control over such variability. We therefore rewarded 20 rats for variable response sequences in the presence of one stimulus and provided equal rewards independently of sequence variability in the presence of a second stimulus. We found that sequence variability was significantly higher during the first stimulus than during the second, with the greatest difference occurring immediately following onset of the stimuli. Removing the discriminative stimuli caused levels of variability to converge. These experiments provide strong evidence that behavioral variability can be controlled by discriminative stimuli, which may be important for general theories of operant behavior and their applications.     

School-based bullying experiences as reflected by adults with visual impairments

The purpose of this study was to describe the reflections of adults with visual impairments regarding bullying experiences during their school-based education. An interpretative phenomenological analysis research approach was used and 11 participants (aged 20–35 years; seven women, four men) participated in this study. The sources of data were semi-structured audiotaped telephone interviews and reflective field notes. Thematic development was undertaken utilizing a three-step analytical process guided by the research approach. Based on the data analysis, three interrelated themes were constructed: (a) “It would be when they knew there weren't teachers watching”: bullying experiences in unowned and unstructured spaces; (b) “Going through the motions”: feelings about verbal, social, and physical victimization; and (c) “They had their own insecurities”: understanding the bullies and bystanders. The emerged themes provide a unique insight into the way in which those with visual impairments experienced bullying in schools and the meaning they ascribed to those experiences.