Cognitive Style and Motor Skill and Sports Performance

A pool of 116 14-18-year-old secondary school pupils who had been given the computer-presented Cognitive Styles Analysis was used to provide two sub-samples to explore the relationship between style and motor skills and sports performance. The Motor Skills sub-sample of 69 (32 males and 37 females) did a battery of motor skills tests. A factor analysis suggested four skills factors - bodily movement, interactive skills, mechanical skills and aiming. All of these except the mechanical skills showed a significant relationship to style. The Sports Performance sub-sample of 99 (46 males and 53 females) were rated on a five-point scale by their teachers on performance in rugby, soccer and cricket for the boys, and hockey, netball and tennis for the girls. Here, there was a significant effect of style for tennis but not for the team games. The findings were discussed in terms of their practical implications.     

Non-Traditional Students in Australian Higher Education: Persistent Inequities and the New Ideology of `Student Choice'

Despite the expansion of access toAustralian higher education in the past decade, theparticipation shares of rural and isolated people andpeople from lower socioeconomic backgrounds havealtered little and remain unacceptably low. Thispaper reports findings from two national studies atthe Centre for the Study of Higher Education that haveexamined student choices about higher education,especially the inhibiting factors still present fornon-traditional students. The discussion focuses onthe dilemmas and challenges for Australianuniversities in balancing the adoption ofentrepreneurial approaches to student recruitment withan unfinished equity agenda. The paper raisesquestions about the new ideology of individual choiceinfluencing university policy and whether or not thiscan be reconciled with social equity objectives.     

The development of self-regulated learning

The purpose of this study is to examine the tendency for the development of self-regulated learning according to grade level. As a means to this end, competing causal models for each grade were set up, and through validity tests for the causal models the most fitting self-regulated learning model for South Korea students could be arrived at. Based on the conceptual model of self-regulated learning proposed by Pintrich (1989), Pintrich and De Groot (1990), and Zimmerman (1989, 1990), which focus on the relationship between motivation and cognition, three causal models were set up. According to the results of a structural analysis for 1,865 elementary, middle and high school students, model П which structures intrinsic value as an exogenous variable, was determined the best-fitting model. In addition, the 30% variance in the 5th grade elementary school students and 32% and 18% variance in middle school and high school students respectively are explained by the test model.     

Electronic signatures: technology developments and legislative issues

Electronic signatures, a means of verifying the identity of the user of a computer system to control access or authorize a transaction, are increasingly being used in electronic commerce. Several technologies can be used to produce electronic signatures, the most prominent being digital signatures, which use cryptographic techniques to provide data integrity and nonrepudiation. Legislation enacted in the 106^th Congress enables the legal recognition of electronic signatures in interstate commerce. Other legislation introduced would promote federal agency use of electronic signatures to enable electronic filing of information.     

Explaining social class differences in growth of reading skills from beginning kindergarten through fourth-grade: The role of phonological awareness,rate of access,and print knowledge

The aim of this longitudinal study was to further ourunderstanding of the reasons for social classdifferences in growth of decoding and readingcomprehension skills from beginning kindergarten throughchildren's fourth grade year. Participants wereenrolled in five public schools in a moderately sizedsouthern American city (n = 197). We examined ifbeginning kindergarten levels of three kinds ofreading related abilities explained social classdifferences in growth of reading skills during thetime periods of beginning kindergarten to children'sfirst-, second-, third-, and fourth-grade years. Thereading related abilities were phonological awareness,rate of access to phonological information inlong-term memory, and print knowledge. We found thatthe reasons for social class differences in growth ofreading skills depended on the time interval that wasconsidered. During the earliest time interval, socialclass differences in growth of decoding skills werecompletely accounted for by performance on the controlmeasures of general verbal intelligence and prior wordreading skills. During the remaining time periods,social class differences in growth of decoding andreading comprehension skills persisted whenperformance on the three kinds of reading relatedabilities and the control measures were accounted for. The greatest attenuation of SES differences in growthof reading skills occurred when beginning kindergartenlevels of print knowledge were taken into account.     

Foreign language learning, hyperlexia, and early word recognition

Children with hyperlexia read words spontaneously before the age of five, have impaired comprehension on both listening and reading tasks, and have word recognition skill above expectations based on cognitive and linguistic abilities. One student with hyperlexia and another student with higher word recognition than comprehension skills who started to read words at a very early age were followed over several years from the primary grades through high school when both were completing a second-year Spanish course. The purpose of the present study was to examine the foreign language (FL) word recognition, spelling, reading comprehension, writing, speaking, and listening skills of the two students and another high school student without hyperlexia. Results showed that the student without hyperlexia achieved higher scores than the hyperlexic student and the student with above average word recognition skills on most FL proficiency measures. The student with hyperlexia and the student with above average word recognition skills achieved higher scores on the Spanish proficiency tasks that required the exclusive use of phonological (pronunciation) and phonological/orthographic (word recognition, spelling) skills than on Spanish proficiency tasks that required the use of listening comprehension and speaking and writing skills. The findings provide support for the notion that word recognition and spelling in a FL may be modular processes and exist independently of general cognitive and linguistic skills. Results also suggest that students may have stronger FL learning skills in one language component than in other components of language, and that there may be a weak relationship between FL word recognition and oral proficiency in the FL.