Fostering the Development of Reading Skill through Supplemental Instruction: Results for Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Students

This paper reports the effects of a two-year supplemental reading program for kindergarten through third grade students that focused on the development of decoding skills and reading fluency. Two hundred ninety-nine students were identified for participation and were randomly assigned to the supplemental instruction or to a no-treatment control group. Participants' reading ability was assessed in the fall, before the first year of the intervention, and again in the spring of years 1, 2, 3, and 4. At the end of the two-year intervention, students who received the supplemental instruction performed significantly better than their matched controls on measures of entry level reading skills (i.e., letter-word identification and word attack), oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The benefits of the instruction were still clear two years after instruction had ended with students in the supplemental-instruction condition still showing significantly greater growth on the measure of oral reading fluency. Hispanic students benefited from the supplemental reading instruction in English as much as or more than non-Hispanic students. Results support the value of supplemental instruction focused on the development of word recognition skills for helping students at risk for reading failure.     

Treating the Diploma Disease in Kenya: a modest counter‐proposal

In the 20 years which have elapsed since Ronald Dore's celebrated diagnosis, the ‘diploma disease’ has continued to take its toll. In many countries, pupils still prepare for major national examinations by ritualised learning, involving the rote memorisation of large quantities of poorly understood factual material. Dore proposed a radical cure: students should no longer be selected for scarce and highly valued opportunities in further education or employment on the basis of their scores in achievement‐based examinations. Instead other instruments—aptitude tests, school quotas, or even lotteries—should be used. The argument of this paper is that reform of examinations is a more viable alternative. It is not examinations per se that are the problem, but rather examinations of low quality. The most pervasive weakness of many national examinations is their propensity to focus on the testing of passive, inert knowledge: they require candidates to do no more than reproduce what they have remembered, in unchanged form. Good examinations, by contrast, test active ideas: they require candidates to think about what they know, and to restructure it in some way. Such examinations can be supportive, not subversive, of attempts to improve pedagogy. The fact that an education system employs achievement‐based examinations to allocate scarce opportunities does not mean that passive pedagogy and ritualised learning—the twin indicators of the diploma disease—are inevitable.     

CONFERENCE FEEDBACK : A NOTE ON NON‐RESPONDERS

This is a report of a small study of non‐response to an evaluation questionnaire. Evidence is provided in support of the view that non‐response is independent of the questions. Some practical advice is provided for conference evaluators.     

The interaction of conditioned taste aversions and schedule-induced polydipsia: Availability of alternative behaviors

Animals poisoned following exposure to saccharin subsequently avoided the schedule-induced consumption of saccharin. While this suppression was transient for subjects who had access only to the saccharin solution during the free-food presentations, recovery of schedule-induced saccharin consumption was significantly retarded for subjects who had concurrent access to saccharin and a running wheel. It has been suggested that the transient suppression of schedule-induced polydipsia by conditioned taste aversions results from the pellet-induced tendency to drink within the schedule-induced polydipsia procedure. That access to the running wheel reduces schedule-induced polydipsia in general and prolongs the suppression of schedule-induced polydipsia by taste aversions supports this view.     

College and university planning in an era of contraction

Drawing from published case studies of U.S. institutions and from case studies conducted in the U.K., the author assesses the causes and characteristics of decline among institutions of higher education and the various types of institutional planning responses. Planning under conditions of instability and decline is held to be significantly different from planning under conditions of growth in that the politics of planning are more intensive and highly defensive. Changes in the standards for organizational consensus in planning under decline are also discussed. The problems and advantages inherent in developing strategic contingency plans as opposed to developing strategic planning policies are noted.The author concludes with a summarization of the contrasting planning styles characteristic of U.S. institutions, U.K. polytechnics and U.K. universities, noting that the model and success of recent University Grants Committee selective cuts among many institutions is more likely to be transferred to the polytechnic sector than across the Atlantic to U.S. institutions.     

Remembering Activities Performed Versus Imagined: A Comparison of Children with Mental Retardation and Children with Normal Intelligence

CHILDREN with mental retardation and children with normal intelligence were asked to perform a series of tasks or to only imagine performing them. They were then asked to remember which tasks had been performed and which had been imagined at an immediate interview and after an eight week delay. There were no overall differences between the two groups in the number of correct responses. However, all children gave more correct responses to specific probes than to open‐ended probes and remembered activities performed better than those imagined. Performance was more accurate for both groups at the immediate interview than at the delayed interview. Responses to questions about activities neither performed nor imagined were good for both groups of children to the initial questions but decreased significantly in response to a follow‐up probe. Accuracy of responses to these misleading questions decreased over the eight week delay.     

A Resource for Eliciting Student Alternative Conceptions: Examining the Adaptability of a Concept Inventory for Natural Selection at the Secondary School Level

The Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection (CINS) is an example of a research-based instrument that assesses conceptual understanding in an area that contains well-documented alternative conceptions. Much of the CINS’s use and original validation has been relegated to undergraduate settings, but the information learned from student responses on the CINS can also potentially be a useful resource for teachers at the secondary level. Because of its structure, the CINS can have a role in eliciting alternative conceptions and induce deeper conceptual understanding by having student ideas leveraged during instruction. In a first step toward this goal, the present study further investigated the CINS’s internal properties by having it administered to a group (n?=?339) of students among four different biology teachers at a predominantly Latino, economically disadvantaged high school. In addition, incidences of the concept inventory’s use among the teachers’ practices were collected for support of its adaptability at the secondary level. Despite the teachers’ initial enthusiasm for the CINS’s use as an assessment tool in the present study, results from a principal components analysis demonstrate inconsistencies between the original and present validations. Results also reveal how the teachers think CINS items may be revised for future use among secondary student populations.     

Conditioning of the nictitating membrane response of the rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) as a function of length and degree of variation of intertrial interval

The study involved three experiments. The first, a parametric investigation of nictitating membrane conditioning with eight constant intertrial intervals (ITIs) between 5 and 120 sec, orthogonal to interstimulus intervals (ISIs) of 250 and 750 msec plus three temporal conditioning control groups, revealed that performance improved rapidly with increasing ITI but stabilized at relatively low ITI values. At 750-msec ISI, a decrement in performance was found at 60-sec ITI. Experiment II, using constant ITIs of 45–75 sec in 5-sec steps, at 750-msec ISI confirmed the trend toward a performance decrement around 60 sec, although the trend was weak and highly variable. Experiment III evaluated the differences in performance between constant and variable ITI, using three ITI values and three conditions of variation at each value. Findings were discussed in terms of differences in conditioning resulting from both length and degree of variation of ITI and some subtle effects which may emerge only when constant ITIs are used.