Effectiveness of a “Grass Roots” Statewide Enrichment Program for Gifted Elementary School Children

Enrichment programs provide learning opportunities for a broader or deeper examination of curricular or extracurricular topics and are popular in gifted education. Herein, we investigated the effectiveness of a statewide extracurricular enrichment program for gifted elementary school children in Germany. The program implemented a ”grass roots“ strategy by which local units developed and offered the enrichment courses, which spanned a broad array of topics. The courses targeted different outcomes, including students' cognitive abilities, school achievement, interests, creativity, self-control, self-concept, and social competencies. We compared third-grade students attending the enrichment program (N =423) with nonattending third-grade students (N = 2,328) by means of a propensity score analysis. Specifically, we controlled for potential selection effects and estimated the average causal effect of the enrichment program for children attending the program. The findings revealed positive program effects on academic achievement but not on the other targeted outcomes.     

Overregularization in language acquisition.

Children extend regular grammatical patterns to irregular words, resulting in overregularizations like comed, often after a period of correct performance ("U-shaped development"). The errors seem paradigmatic of rule use, hence bear on central issues in the psychology of rules: how creative rule application interacts with memorized exceptions in development, how overgeneral rules are unlearned in the absence of parental feedback, and whether cognitive processes involve explicit rules or parallel distributed processing (connectionist) networks. We remedy the lack of quantitative data on overregularization by analyzing 11,521 irregular past tense utterances in the spontaneous speech of 83 children. Our findings are as follows. (1) Overregularization errors are relatively rare (median 2.5% of irregular past tense forms), suggesting that there is no qualitative defect in children's grammars that must be unlearned. (2) Overregularization occurs at a roughly constant low rate from the 2s into the school-age years, affecting most irregular verbs. (3) Although overregularization errors never predominate, one aspect of their purported U-shaped development was confirmed quantitatively: an extended period of correct performance precedes the first error. (4) Overregularization does not correlate with increases in the number or proportion of regular verbs in parental speech, children's speech, or children's vocabularies. Thus, the traditional account in which memory operates before rules cannot be replaced by a connectionist alternative in which a single network displays rotelike or rulelike behavior in response to changes in input statistics. (5) Overregularizations first appear when children begin to mark regular verbs for tense reliably (i.e., when they stop saying Yesterday I walk). (6) The more often a parent uses an irregular form, the less often the child overregularizes it. (7) Verbs are protected from overregularization by similar-sounding irregulars, but they are not attracted to overregularization by similar-sounding regulars, suggesting that irregular patterns are stored in an associative memory with connectionist properties, but that regulars are not. We propose a simple explanation. Children, like adults, mark tense using memory (for irregulars) and an affixation rule that can generate a regular past tense form for any verb. Retrieval of an irregular blocks the rule, but children's memory traces are not strong enough to guarantee perfect retrieval. When retrieval fails, the rule is applied, and overregularization results.     

Counsellor ethnic differences and perceived counselling effectiveness

The purpose of the present study was to examine how counsellor race influences client evaluation of counselling effectiveness. It was predicted that ethnic minority counsellors would be perceived less favorably than the Caucasian counsellor. Three groups of secondary school students viewed a 10-minute videotaped stimulus interview, with different introductions for the stimulus counsellor's race (Caucasian, Native Indian, and East Indian). The dependent measure, perceived counselling effectiveness, was obtained and compared among counsellor races by analysis of variance. The results showed that the ethnic minority counsellors were perceived more favorably than the Caucasian counsellor. No differential effect was found in client perception of non-verbal behaviors. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Where Youth Live,Learn, and Play Matters: Tackling the Social Determinants of Health in Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health

Abstract

The body of evidence supporting a relationship between the social determinants of health and adolescent sexual and reproductive health is vast. To advance health and have a greater impact on adolescent health outcomes, sexual and reproductive health practitioners need to take into account the relationships, community, and society within which adolescents live, learn, and play. With this review, we aim to provide practitioners with a clear understanding of the value of adopting a more comprehensive approach and we provide concrete recommendations for actualizing social determinants of health through programs and services. Recommendations are provided for each of the five social determinants of health categories outlined by Healthy People 2020, including Neighborhood and Built Environment, Economic Stability, Health and Healthcare, Social and Community Context, and Education.     

Research in the Netherlands on a theory of child abuse: A preliminary report

A three-factor theory of child abuse has been developed which includes: (1) a high level of parental aggression; (2) a low level of parental inhibition of overt aggression; and (3) the focusing of parental aggression on the child. In the theory each factor is the outcome of a subfactor “path.” A high level of parental aggression is the outcome of seven subfactors. A low level of parental inhibition of overt aggression is the outcome of three subfactors. The focusing of parental aggression on the child is the outcome of ten subfactors. The theory posits that the type of child abuse that occurs is determined by the ratio of total parental aggression to total parental inhibition of overt aggression. High numerical values of the ratio result in battering. Lower numerical values result, in descending order, in non-organic failure to thrive, physical neglect and emotional abuse. The theory and 50 hypotheses derivable from it are being tested on a sample of 150 child-abuse families and 150 control families.     

Delayed Understanding and Staying in Phase: Students’ Perceptions of their Study Situation

Findings are presented from a study of undergraduate students’ experiences of understanding in first-year engineering. At the end of their first year of study 86 Swedish students of electrical engineering and computer science were asked to reflect in writing on their experiences of studying and learning. Fifteen of them also took part in interviews which explored in some detail their experiences of understanding in relation to perceived constraints of the teaching-learning environment. The analyses of the students’ written accounts and the interview data focused on the students’ experiences of studying and of understanding in relation to course work in engineering. The majority of the students reported problematic first-year experiences and testified to a sensation of ‘falling out of phase’ with their studies. This sensation was frequently coupled with a lag in coming to understand course material, which may be characterised in terms of delayed understanding. The notion of delayed understanding is discussed in relation to ideas about students’ perceptions of the learning environment and the impact that those perceptions might have on students’ opportunities to reflect on learning material and develop a solid understanding of course material in engineering education. In conclusion, it is suggested that the the notion of delayed understanding captures the complications of a study situation in which a perceived lack of time to reflect on learning material obstructs students’ understanding of course material in engineering, and also points up a more general aspect of learning observing that time to reflect on previous experiences is an essential component of the process of coming to understand learning material in a particular educational setting.     

Orthographic knowledge predicts reading and spelling skills over and above general intelligence and phonological awareness

It is widely accepted that general intelligence and phonological awareness contribute to children’s acquisition of reading and spelling skills. A further candidate in this regard is orthographic knowledge (i.e., the knowledge about permissible letter patterns). It consists of two components, word-specific (i.e., the knowledge of the spelling of specific words) and general orthographic knowledge (i.e., the knowledge about legal letter patterns of a writing system). Among German students, previous studies have shown that word-specific orthographic knowledge contributes to both reading and spelling. The results regarding general orthographic knowledge and its contribution to reading and spelling are inconsistent. The major goal of the present study was to determine the incremental predictive value of orthographic knowledge for reading and spelling skills among German elementary-school children (N = 66), over and above the contribution of general intelligence and phonological awareness. The second goal was to examine whether there is a difference between the two subtypes of orthographic knowledge in the amount of their respective contribution to reading and spelling performance. The results show that word-specific as well as general orthographic knowledge contribute to both reading and spelling performance, over and above intelligence and phonological awareness. Furthermore, it reveals that both word-specific and general orthographic knowledge explain more variance of spelling compared to reading. Possible explanations for these results, limitations, and implications of the study are being discussed.

     

An experimental comparison of the effectiveness of computers and humans as search intermediaries.

An experimental computer intermediary system, CONIT, that assists users in accessing and searching heterogeneous retrieval systems has been enhanced with various search aids. Controlled experiments have been conducted to compare the effectiveness of the enhanced CONIT intermediary with that of human expert intermediary search specialists. Some 16 end users, none of whom had previously operated either CONIT or any of the four connected retrieval systems, performed searches on 20 different topics using CONIT with no assistance other than that provided by CONIT itself (except to recover from computer/software bugs). These same users also performed searches on the same topics with the help of human expert intermediaries who searched using the retrieval systems directly. Sometimes CONIT and sometimes the human expert were clearly superior in terms of such parameters as recall and search time. In general, however, users searching alone with CONIT achieved somewhat higher online recall at the expense of longer session times. We conclude that advanced experimental intermediary techniques are now capable of providing search assistance whose effectiveness at least approximates that of human intermediaries in some contexts. Also analyzed is the cost effectiveness of current intermediary systems. Finally, consideration is given to the prospects for much more advanced systems which would perform such functions as automatic data-base selection and the simulation of human experts, and thereby make information retrieval more effective for all classes of users.     

Verwaltungsgerichthof

Rechtssprechung

Verwaltungsgerichthof     

Simulating variation in order to learn classroom management

Classroom management is an important part of learning to be a teacher. The variation theory of learning provides the insight that it is important to vary the critical aspects of any task or subject that is to be learned. Simulation technology is useful in order to provide a controlled environment for that variation, and text as a medium gives the opportunity to control exactly what aspects are presented to the learner. This study shows that text-based simulation has the potential to help the learner discern critical aspects of classroom management.