Sixth form religion in Northern Ireland: the Protestant profile 1968–1998

The aim of the present study was to build on John Greer’s systematic set of studies concerned with teenage beliefs and values conducted among samples of sixth form students attending County and Protestant voluntary schools in Northern Ireland in 1968, 1978 and 1988. The present study replicated the earlier surveys for a further time in 1998. The results provide a unique snapshot of the persistence of religious affiliation, belief and practice across the latter part of the twentieth century in a nation which has continued to resist the secularisation process so eroding the place of religion in the neighbouring nations of England, Wales and Scotland.     

On the Potential of Discrete Time Survival Analysis Using Latent Variable Modeling: An Application to the Study of the Vascular Depression Hypothesis

Analysis and modeling of time to event data have been traditionally associated with nonparametric, semiparametric, or parametric statistical frameworks. Recent advances in latent variable modeling have additionally provided unique analytic opportunities to methodologists and substantive researchers interested in survival time modeling. As a consequence, discrete time survival analyses can now be readily carried out using latent variable modeling, an approach that offers substantively important extensions to conventional survival models. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, the discussed approach is applied to the study of the increasingly prominent vascular depression hypothesis in gerontology, geriatrics, and aging research, allowing examination of the unique predictive power of depression with respect to time to stroke in middle-aged and older adults.     

Australian Vietnamese Students Learning Mathematics: High Ability Bilinguals and Their Use of Their Languages

Bilingual students have, at times, been thought to be at a disadvantage in learning mathematics because of an assumed interference between their two languages. Earlier research, confirmed again in this study, shows that this is a naive view to take. Although some bilingual students do have a harder time, others seem to be at an advantage. This study explores the use that bilingual students who are succeeding in mathematics make of their two languages. These students seem to have better metalinguistics skills that allow them to self-correct when solving problems, and are perhaps more confident in their approach to solving difficult problems. It also appears that students in this study switched between languages in early years of schooling, but only used English by the time they were completing elementary school. This project was supported by an Australian Research Council Large Grant, an Australian Research Council Small Grant, and by internal research grants from Australian Catholic University.     

An initial study of the diagnostic utility of the emotional and behavioural screener in Lithuania

In schools, screening is an effective method to identify students at-risk for emotional and behavioural disorders. Several intervention programmes such as Positive Behaviour Interventions and Supports, Response to Intervention, and Multi-tiered Systems of Supports call for the use of psychometrically sound screening instruments. This study investigated diagnostic utility of a brief (10-item) screener, the Emotional and Behavioural Screener (EBS) with a sample 312 Lithuanian students. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire was used as a reference point for the investigation. Diagnostic utility statistics (i.e. overall agreement, misleading negatives, sensitivity, specificity and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) were used to evaluate the usefulness and validity of the EBS. The results indicate, that majority of the diagnostic utility statistics thresholds were met; however, some gender differences were found. In sum, the EBS appears to be an accurate screener discriminating students not at-risk and at-risk for emotional and behavioural problems. Study limitations, future research directions and implications are discussed.     

Assessing the Nature of Science: What is the Nature of Our Assessments?

This paper discusses the nature of the instruments used to assess students' and teachers' conceptions of the nature of science during the last four decades. Two salient points emerge from critically reviewing the various research emphases and associated assessment instruments specifically related to the nature of science. The first is to question the validity of much of the research presented on the grounds that (a) assessment instruments are interpreted in a biased manner, and (b) some assessment instruments appear to be poorly constructed. Although such comments are well founded, it is important to note that the research conclusions were unusually uniform regardless of the particular instrument used in an investigation. The second point is a more critical concern about the traditional paper and pencil approach to the assessment of an individual's understanding of the nature of science. Although not a new insight, discrepancies between the interpretation of a written response to a traditional instrument (e.g., multiple choice assessment) and the intent of the respondent have been well documented. It is suggested that the current educational research shift toward more qualitative, open-ended approaches to assessment of individuals' understanding (of any concept) be applied to the assessment of individuals' nature of science conceptions.     

International student demand for higher education in the United States

Foreign students have been attending colleges and universities in the United States at rapidly increasing rates since the late 1960s. Due particularly to demographic changes and cost considerations, U.S. universities have accepted and grown somewhat dependent on these foreign students. This raises the questions of what caused the increased international demand for U.S. education and will that demand continue to grow? We attempt here to provide a theoretical model of educational demand and to test the model employing both time series and cross-sectional data. First, we give background information and a brief literature survey; then we develop the model. Next, we test the model by examining the time series evidence. We then present cross-sectional findings employing the Zellner SUR technique. The paper concludes with policy implications.     

Levels of phonological awareness and learning to read

The paper reports studies of segmentation performance by a Nursery group of children, who had not yet started to learn to read, and by Primary 1 and 2 groups, who were in the early stages of learning by a standard method of whole word acquisition combined with letter-sound learning. Rhyme and alliteration production tasks were applied, together with segmentation tasks requiring division of monosyllabic words or non-words of simple or complex structure into two parts, three parts, or as many parts as possible. Performance was related to the hierarchical model of the syllable which distinguishes a two-dimensional (2D) level (onset/rime), a three-dimensional (3D) level (initial consonants, vowel, terminal consonants) and many-dimensional (nD) level (phonemes). The hypothesis that phonological awareness (PA) normally develops down the hierarchy, from larger to smaller units, predicts that segmentation ability should emerge in the sequence 2D 3D nD. In practice, the reverse of this order was found. The results are discussed in relation to theories of the relationship between literacy development and the different levels of PA.     

The genetic and environmental origins of language disability and ability

This study investigated whether genes affect language impairment to the same extent as they affect differences in language ability following up an earlier study of 579 four-year-old twins with low language performance and their cotwins (Viding et al., in press). The present study selected low-language twins from 6,963 pairs of twins from the Twins Early Development Study assessed for vocabulary and grammar by their parents at 2, 3, and 4 years of age. For impaired groups corresponding to the lowest scoring 5% and 10% at each age, twin concordances and model-fitting analyses indicated substantial genetic influence on the mean difference between affected children and the population (h2g), generally higher than for individual differences for the entire sample (h2).