Enhancing preservice teachers’ professional competence through experiential learning

This report introduces a way of engaging preservice teachers in experiential learning activities to enrich their pedagogical content knowledge and skills. The framework suggested can be applied to instruction in a wide range of disciplines in different contexts. It calls on teacher educators to work on similar experiential learning initiatives to equip novice teachers with the necessary pedagogies and competence for their future careers.     

Effects of removing morphemic information and adding interword spacing on reading in Chinese experienced and inexperienced readers

Two experiments tested the role of morphemic information and interword spacing in reading in experienced and inexperienced Chinese readers. Chinese is normally written in hanzi, or characters, which mostly represent monosyllabic morphemes, but it can also be written in pinyin, or romanised Chinese, which represents phonemes and is word-spaced. While previous research has shown that Chinese readers are slower with pinyin than hanzi materials, this has mostly been explained in terms of lack of proficiency in pinyin reading. The present study aimed at testing whether pinyin reading may be slow because morphemic information is needed for fluent Chinese reading, and phonemic information alone is not sufficient; for this purpose, the study included not only adults but also primary school students, who are experienced pinyin readers and unproficient hanzi readers. Participants performed a sentence-picture verification task. Sentences were written with morphemic or phonemic information (in hanzi or pinyin, respectively), and with interword or inter-morpheme spacing. Removing morphemic information had strong negative effects on all readers, including children. Adding interword spacing had no facilitative effects, and had some negative effects, especially with children. Results reveal the important role of morphemic information in Chinese reading, and fail to support the universality of the facilitative effects of interword spacing.     

How is the discipline of publishing studies accommodated within universities?

This paper offers an overview, both internationally and with a particular concentration on the UK, of how the profession‐orientated discipline of publishing studies (PS) is accommodated and established within those universities where it is offered. It presents a combination of data, gained from a survey of professionals teaching PS, desk research into courses of PS in the UK, and from Heidi and HESA. The findings offer information on the size of the field, the location, the employability of graduates and associated staffing and research support structures. While of interest to publishing studies per se, it should also be relevant to those working within other profession‐orientated disciplines; to those considering the employability of graduating students; and to those considering the value of postgraduate studies.     

Enhancing student self‐worth in the primary school learning environment: teachers' views and students' views

This paper reports the findings from a study of teachers and students' views regarding self‐worth in the primary school learning environment. The revised New Zealand curriculum recognises the importance of self‐worth in students' motivation and ability to learn. While the need to enhance self‐worth in the classroom has been well established in the literature, similarities and differences between teachers and students' understanding of the impact of various classroom interactions on self‐worth has not received the same attention. The purpose of the research reported on in this paper was to provide further insight for teachers, thereby enabling them to strengthen classroom relationships and their students' learning experiences in ways commensurate with enhancing students' feelings of self‐worth.     

Threshold values and Boolean retrieval systems

Several papers have appeared that have analyzed recent developments in the problem of processing, in a document retrieval system, queries expressed as Boolean expressions. The purpose of this paper is to continue that analysis. We shall show that the concept of threshold values resolves the problems inherent with relevance weights. Moreover, we shall explore possible evaluation mechanisms for retrieval of documents, based on fuzzy-set-theoretic considerations.