The battered-child syndrome

The battered-child syndrome, a clinical condition in young children who have received serious physical abuse, is a frequent cause of permanent injury or death. The syndrome should be considered in any child exhibiting evidence of fracture of any bone, subdural hematoma, failure to thrive, soft tissue swellings or skin bruising, in any child who dies suddenly, or where the degree and type of injury is at variance with the history given regarding the occurrence of the trauma. Psychiatric factors are probably of prime importance in the pathogenesis of the disorder, but knowledge of these factors is limited. Physicians have a duty and responsibility to the child to require a full evaluation of the problem and to guarantee that no expected repetition of trauma will be permitted to occur.     

Learning objectives for science practicals at traditional and distance universities

This study is designed to determine whether, and to what extent, the perceived importance of objectives of undergraduate practicals in the Natural Sciences is dependent upon the type of institute at which practicals are given. The two dimensions used in this research to discriminate between types of institutes are type of education offered (face‐to‐face versus correspondence) and type of programme offered (monodisciplinary versus interdisciplinary). For this reason, distance universities throughout the world (DUs) and more traditional, residential universities (RUs) in The Netherlands were compared. Special attention has been paid to the Open university of The Netherlands (OuN). The results show that RUs and DUs approach practicals in a very similar manner with both of them differing in a number of respects with the OuN. Implications of this research for the use of practicals in a curriculum in the Natural Sciences are presented.     

Evaluating item response theory linking and model fit for data from PISA 2000–2012

ABSTRACT

Based on concerns about the item response theory (IRT) linking approach used in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) until 2012 as well as the desire to include new, more complex, interactive items with the introduction of computer-based assessments, alternative IRT linking methods were implemented in the 2015 PISA round. The new linking method represents a concurrent calibration using all available data, enabling us to find item parameters that maximize fit across all groups and allowing us to investigate measurement invariance across groups. Apart from the Rasch model that historically has been used in PISA operational analyses, we compared our method against more general IRT models that can incorporate item-by-country interactions. The results suggest that our proposed method holds promise not only to provide a strong linkage across countries and cycles but also to serve as a tool for investigating measurement invariance.     

Morphological structure: Latin and Greek roots and affixes as upper grade code strategies

Some students in the upper elementary grades and high schools may benefit from extended decoding and spelling instruction. These students, because of their age level and reading selections, require strategies going well beyond phonics. For these older readers, including adults, learning about morphological structure may provide the strategies needed to decode and spell multisyllabic words found often in literature and content area texts. In this paper, literature providing a rationale for such instruction is reviewed, and a curriculum and instructional plan is described.