Promising Practices for Providing Alternative Media to Postsecondary Students with Print Disabilities

For postsecondary students with disabilities influencing reading performance, printed class materials pose a substantial barrier and have a negative impact on academic achievement. Digital technologies offer alternative ways of accessing print materials for students with print‐related disabilities. Alternative media is a broad term that encompasses a variety of formats into which printed text is converted. Alternative media, together with assistive computer technologies designed to read aloud the text, provide a means to access textual information and bypass the difficult reading process. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of model programs and pertinent research on the use of alternative media by postsecondary students with print disabilities; we will identify promising practices for students whose disabilities negatively influence reading performance.     

A cross-cultural investigation of teachers’ and reporting officers’ self-ratings on teaching and leadership skills across Singapore and Bahrain

Self-rating bias is particularly likely in organizational behavior research as individuals tend to inflate their expertise, skills and character. This study aims to examine how two culturally diverse groups of teachers and their reporting officers respond to self-ratings of their own teaching skills and leadership skills respectively. It is posited that such response may be culturally based. To ensure validity of comparisons, analyses were done using linear Rasch measures in logits rather than the non-linear raw scores. No significant differences were found between the perceptions of Singaporean teachers and their reporting officers on teaching and leadership skills. The Bahraini data however revealed teachers’ perceptions of own teaching skills were significantly higher than that of their reporting officers. The opposite is true for the Reporting officers’ perceptions of our leadership skills. Bahraini teachers’ perceptions of their own teaching skills were also found to be significantly higher than that of their Singaporean counterparts. The findings support the notion that individuals’ thinking and behavior is influenced by how they process social and cultural information.     

Lotka's law: A testing procedure

Instead of the commonly accepted inverse square law, Lotka's original formulation was based on a more general inverse power law: xⁿ·y = c. The exponent and the constant must be estimated from the given set of author productivity data. A step-by-step outline is presented for testing the applicability of Lotka's law. Steps include the computation of the values of the exponent and the constant based on Lotka's method, and the test for significance of the observed frequency distribution against the estimated theoretical distribution derived from Lotka's formula.     

Developing a comprehensive model of risk and protective factors that can predict spelling at age seven: findings from a community sample of Victorian children

The paper reports on a study designed to develop a risk model that can best predict single-word spelling in seven-year-old children when they were aged 4 and 5. Test measures, personal characteristics and environmental influences were all considered as variables from a community sample of 971 children. Strong concurrent correlations were found between single-word spelling and single-word reading while expressive language and, to a lesser extent, receptive language were less strongly correlated. Predictors of single-word spelling at ages 4 and 5 were dominated by child-related factors such as letter knowledge, a history of speech impairment and expressive language along with maternal word reading ability. Based on the strength of the predictive factors identified at both age 4 and 5, our results provide initial support for using a targeted model for screening pre-schoolers at risk of not mastering spelling in a timely manner.     

Does culture influence how consumers process negative celebrity information? Impact of culture in evaluation of negative celebrity information

This study investigates the relationship between cultural orientation (individualistic or collectivistic culture) and consumers' attribution styles (dispositional and situational attributions) as well as the consequences of attribution styles on brand evaluation and purchase intention. The study also examines how people perceive different types of negative celebrity information (self-oriented and other-oriented negative information) and how their identification with a celebrity endorser affects their response to negative information. The findings suggest that culture influences how consumers – having been exposed to negative celebrity information – make attributions. Dispositional attributions lead to more negative brand evaluation as well as to negative purchase intention. Other-oriented negative information leads to, among Korean consumers, more negative brand evaluation. Finally, the study found that consumers highly identified with a celebrity endorser are less likely to be influenced by negative celebrity information.