Assessing Students' Opportunity to Learn: Teacher and Student Perspectives

How can we assess the opportunity that students have to learn the material they find on tests? How do students' perceptions of opportunity to learn differ from their teachers?     

Significant signs: a case study of citation practices in educational research

Citations have a central role in the dynamic process of knowledge development and as measures of research performance – yet little is known about their role in educational research or the qualities they are assumed to measure. Based on a citation context analysis, this study shows how a paradigmatic reference within classroom research has been used in 90 articles in educational research journals. Four types of content and four citation functions were identified in the immediate context of the citation symbols. Surprisingly, no critical citations or discussions of the validity of the cited study were found. The results are discussed in relation to the conditions for communication within a field without disciplinary cohesion.     

Can higher education stimulate entrepreneurial intentions among engineering and business students?

This paper approaches the issue of higher entrepreneurship education in motivating young people to start their own business as a viable alternative to the successful integration of university graduates on the labour market. The fundamental question of this research is if, currently, entrepreneurship education influences students’ entrepreneurial intentions and to what extent. The research results, based on the statistical analysis of data collected through a questionnaire distributed to Romanian business and engineering bachelor students in the final year, highlight that business students assessed the effectiveness of higher entrepreneurship education and its positive influence on entrepreneurial intentions to a greater extent than the engineering students. Furthermore, entrepreneurial intentions of engineering students are influenced positively much more by entrepreneurial family background than by entrepreneurship education. The findings provide important highlights for future research, in order to identify the most effective ways of approaching, modernising and expanding entrepreneurship education, aiming to increase entrepreneurial intentions among students, regardless of the graduated field of study.     

Does More Intensive Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Follow-Up Service Result in Better Outcomes? A Cost-Effective Analysis

Little is known about the relative cost-effectiveness of the many different types of early intervention services provided to medically fragile infants and their families. This study compared two intensities of services for such infants and their families: (a) a coordinated and comprehensive system of early intervention services initiated prior to discharge from the NICU and designed to transition infants to community-based services were compared with the effects of services (high intensity); and (b) a more traditional hospital follow-up consisting of medical checkups and referrals following discharge (low intensity). High-intensity services resulted in five times more community-based early intervention hours for families and infants when compared with low-intensity services. Annual costs of the high-intensity group were approximately triple the costs of the low-intensity group ($10,814 versus $3,032 per child per year), but there were only a few statistically significant differences on measures of child and family functioning between the groups at 6-, 12-, 18-, and 24months' corrected age. Implications of these findings for research and practice are given.     

心路历程--关于爱情

Dear Friends,I recently learned that February 14th is celebrated inChina as qing ren jie.In America we call this Valentine’sDay and dedicate it to romantic love.Because of this I havebeen asked to devote this month’s column to Love.This is avery complicated subject,and not easy to write about.Thereare no experts.Terms are ambiguous,and there are wide cu-tural differences in our approach to the subject of Love.     

Phonological Analysis Skills, Verbal Working Memory, and Reading Ability in Second-Grade Children

This study tested the hypothesis that phonological analysis skills make a unique contribution to reading ability against the hypothesis that one latent phonological factor underlies the assocations among analysis skills, verbal working memory skills, and reading achievement. Hierachical multiple regression analyses examined the unique contributions of phonological analysis and verbal working memory measures to the prediction of 3 measures of concurrent reading ability in 68 second-grade children (mean age 7 years 4 months). Phonological analysis and verbal working memory measures each accounted for unique variation in each of the 3 reading measures. In addition, phonological analysis measures, but not verbal working memory measures, were particularly strong predictors of pseudoword reading skills. These results suggest that, although phonological analysis and verbal working memory skills share a substantial amount of common variance, phonological analysis and verbal working memory tasks do tap somewhat different reading-related skills.