The relationship between rapid naming and word spelling in English

A study of the concurrent relationships between naming speed, phonological awareness and spelling ability in 146 children in Years 3 and 4 of state‐funded schools in South‐East England (equivalent to US Grades 2 and 3) is reported. Seventy‐two children identified as having normal phonological awareness but reduced rapid automatised naming (RAN) performance (1 standard deviation below the mean) participated in the study. A group of 74 children was further identified. These children were matched on phonological awareness, verbal and nonverbal IQ and visual acuity, but all members of this group showed normal RAN performance. RAN made a significant unique contribution to spelling performance. Further analyses showed that participants with low naming performance were significantly poorer spellers overall and had a specific difficulty in spelling irregular words. The findings support the view that RAN may be indexing processes that are implicated in the establishment of fully specified orthographic representations.     

Perceptions of affective communication and teaching effectiveness at different times in the semester

This report describes a study designed to assess the relationship of teachers’ affective communication with student evaluation of effectiveness at two times during a semester. Two questions were addressed: (1) Do student evaluations of affect and effectiveness change and (2) Does the relationship between affect and effectiveness change? The data suggests that there are moderate, but significant changes toward more negative perceptions from midterm and the end of the semester. The data also indicates that affect is significantly related to effectiveness overtime. Suggestions for future research are suggested.     

Anthropometric characteristics as discriminators of body-building success.

A total of 36 non-elite male body builders were observed at the time of competition. Their mean physical characteristics (+/- S.D.) were: age, 24.6 +/- 4.8 years; height, 174.4 +/- 6.7 cm; bodyweight, 80.3 +/- 11.0 kg. Their body composition values were: percentage body fat, 9.3 +/- 1.6%; fat-free mass, 72.8 +/- 9.8 kg. The mean somatotype for all subjects was: endomorphy, 2.3 +/- 0.6; mesomorphy, 6.2 +/- 0.9; ectomorphy, 1.2 +/- 0.6. The body proportions (cm) included: biacromial diameter/bi-iliac diameter, 1.463 +/- 0.132; torso length/height, 0.468 +/- 0.018; chest circumference/abdominal circumference, 1.345 +/- 0.059. The body builders in the present study were younger, had lower bodyweights, lower fat-free mass, lower mesomorphy ratings, smaller circumferences, and smaller skeletal dimensions than elite body builders reported in the scientific literature. When the body builders in the present study were divided into successful and unsuccessful groups based on actual competition results, a multiple-discriminant analysis found that biacromial diameter/bi-iliac diameter, torso length/height, chest circumference/abdominal circumference, percentage body fat, height, and bodyweight accounted for 80.6% of the explained variance. These data indicate that the success of a body builder can be accounted for in large part by easily obtained physical variables.     

Exploiting Manual Indexing to Improve Collection Selection and Retrieval Effectiveness

Vocabulary incompatibilities arise when the terms used to index a document collection are largely unknown, or at least not well-known to the users who eventually search the collection. No matter how comprehensive or well-structured the indexing vocabulary, it is of little use if it is not used effectively in query formulation. This paper demonstrates that techniques for mapping user queries into the controlled indexing vocabulary have the potential to radically improve document retrieval performance. We also show how the use of controlled indexing vocabulary can be employed to achieve performance gains for collection selection. Finally, we demonstrate the potential benefit of combining these two techniques in an interactive retrieval environment. Given a user query, our evaluation approach simulates the human user's choice of terms for query augmentation given a list of controlled vocabulary terms suggested by a system. This strategy lets us evaluate interactive strategies without the need for human subjects.     

Facilitating student well-being: relationships do matter

Background: Alongside academic and vocational goals, schools are increasingly being called upon to address student well-being. Existing evidence suggests that strong relationships and a sense of connectedness in school communities are important for fostering subjective well-being. However, identifying the specific nature of such relational dynamics, and accommodating the ‘personal’ within school cultures increasingly dominated by ‘performance’ narratives, remains a problematic task.

Purpose: This paper draws on Honneth’s recognition theory to offer fresh insight into how relationships act to facilitate and limit the experience of well-being at school. We suggest that such an approach holds considerable potential for developing teachers’ understanding of the tacit and explicit ways they and their students experience being cared for, respected and valued and the ways in which such actions impact on well-being.

Design and methods: The paper reports the qualitative findings from a large mixed-method study, involving students and staff across primary and secondary schools in three regions of Australia. The qualitative phase involved focus groups with 606 primary and secondary students and individual interviews with 89 teachers and principals.

Results: Across the focus groups and interviews, students and teachers placed substantial emphasis on the importance of relationships, while reporting differences in their views about which relationships support well-being. Alongside this, there were differences in the importance teachers and students placed on each of the three strands of Honneth’s recognition theory (translated for this study as being cared for, respected and valued) for influencing student well-being.

Conclusions: The findings affirm the critical role that relationships play in promoting well-being in the context of schools. Using recognition theory to analyse students’ and teachers’ views and experiences of well-being provides much greater insight into how these relationships are enacted – this being through the mutual experience of being cared for, respected and valued – within the context of schools.     

Does the PMSP connectionist model of single word reading learn to read in the same way as a child?

The Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg and Patterson (1996) connectionist model of reading was evaluated at two points early in its training against reading data collected from British children on two occasions during their first year of literacy instruction. First, the network's non‐word reading was poor relative to word reading when compared with the children. Second, the network made more non‐lexical than lexical errors, the opposite pattern to the children. Three adaptations were made to the training of the network to bring it closer to the learning environment of a child: an incremental training regime was adopted; the network was trained on grapheme–phoneme correspondences; and a training corpus based on words found in children's early reading materials was used. The modifications caused a sharp improvement in non‐word reading, relative to word reading, resulting in a near perfect match to the children's data on this measure. The modified network, however, continued to make predominantly non‐lexical errors, although evidence from a small‐scale implementation of the full triangle framework suggests that this limitation stems from the lack of a semantic pathway. Taken together, these results suggest that, when properly trained, connectionist models of word reading can offer insights into key aspects of reading development in children.     

Another look at the “C” in CBM: Does it really matter if curriculum‐based measurement reading probes are curriculum‐based?

This study investigated differences between two types of reading probe material to monitor students' oral reading fluency over time. Thirty‐six second‐grade students participated in this study. Twice each week for 5 weeks, participants read two passages from each of two sources. One source was the curriculum in which the child was being instructed at school, and the second source was the “Tests of Reading Fluency,” a set of generic (curriculum‐independent) passages. Standardized curriculum‐based measurement administration and scoring procedures were used. Level and rate of improvement (slope) of oral reading fluency were the dependent measures. Level and slope data were analyzed using two, two‐tailed t‐tests. Also, readability of passages was calculated using two readability formulas. Correlational analyses were used to examine the relation between the readability and reading fluency. Correlations among readability and words read correct were not significant. Results of the analyses examining level and slope indicated that students read significantly more words correct in the generic reading passages than in the curriculum‐based passages. However, rate of progress was not significantly different. These results suggest that practitioners could use either set of passages to gauge students' reading progress over time. Implications for future research and practice are discussed. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.