Improved Social Communication Abilities and Reduced Autism Severity in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Highly Sensitive Mothers

SYNOPSIS

Objective . To explore whether maternal sensitivity is associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) severity in children with and without ASD. Design . The samples consisted of 25 Mexican dyads of children with ASD (aged 3.1-6.9 years) and their mothers (aged 20-47 years) and 24 Mexican dyads of children without ASD (aged 3.4-6.7 years) and their mothers (aged 24-45 years). Maternal sensitivity and ASD severity symptoms were scored from 2-h videos of mother-child daily interactions. Results . A between-group comparison showed a trend toward less severe ASD in children with highly sensitive mothers, specifically in the Nonverbal Communication subdomain. Conclusions . Greater maternal sensitivity is associated with improved social ability in children with ASD.     

Students with special educational needs and cooperative learning in the ordinary classroom: some learnings from teaching practice

This article presents the results of a study to determine the strategies used by teachers to include students with special educational needs in regular classrooms, primarily using Cooperative Learning strategies. It aims to identify the factors of inclusive learning in order to enhance the participation and learning of all students in the classroom and in their cooperative teams. A qualitative case study was carried out in the context of the teachers participating in a postgraduate course ‘expert in cooperative learning’ offered by the University of Alcalá (Spain), over a period of six years (2011–2017), involving the participation of 176 professional teachers. All the participants attended an annual university continuous training course on cooperative learning. Document analysis, in-depth interviews and a questionnaire designed ad hoc were used. The conclusions include the importance of cooperative work in facilitating inclusive education, with a variety of different strategies used to respond to all students' needs, and those with special educational needs in particular, and the coordination required between teachers and special educational needs specialists to implement those strategies.     

Determinants of Research Productivity in Spanish Academia

This article aims to widen the empirical evidence about the determinants of Spanish academics’ publication productivity across fields of study. We use the Spanish Survey on Human Resources in Science and Technology addressed to Spanish resident PhDs employed in Spanish universities as academics. Productivity is measured as the total number of publications in a three‐year period. We show how personal and academic variables explain differences in productivity within universities and fields of studies and across fields of research. Female workers report lower productivity than their male counterparts, but family responsibilities do not explain this gender gap. The type of contract and tenure or rank do not seem to have any influence on productivity. Researchers seeking professional promotion rather than altruism or personal satisfaction are more productive and young scholars publish more than their older counterparts. Additionally, we find a certain research‐teaching trade‐off and some nuances in the predictors of publication productivity across birth cohorts and fields of study. Finally, international cooperation is one of the most relevant determinants of the number of publications, regardless of the birth cohort. The institutional context in the Spanish research system as regards requirements for promotion and the assessment of research outcomes may contribute to the understanding and interpretation of our results.     

利用网络优势,建构高校现代写作教学新模式

传统的高校写作教学已经不适应时代发展的需要,只有转变教学观念,更新教学内容,改进教学方式,才能促进高校写作教学的发展,才能提高高校学生的写作能力和写作水平。     

Irish student teachers’ beliefs about self,learning and teaching: a longitudinal study

This paper explores the beliefs about self-as-teacher, learning and teaching of preservice elementary teachers during a three-year undergraduate programme. Using a qualitative grounded theory analysis, the study examined the initial beliefs or personal theories of 27 preservice teachers during their first Semester. Longitudinal data were gathered from 7 of these students over the three-year duration of their teacher education programme through iterative interviews and reflective journal analysis. The findings demonstrate expansion in preservice teachers’ understandings of the teacher’s role, the value of reflective practice, the differential needs of learners and approaches to pedagogy. Findings point to lacunae in preservice teachers’ capacity for critical reflective practice and demonstrate how classroom management concerns can cause preservice teachers to adopt more cautious and traditional pedagogical approaches, despite their espoused commitment to child-centred principles.     

Three measures of returns to education: An illustration for the case of Spain

In this article, in a context of wage equations with sample selection, we propose a novel interpretation of the partial effects linked to education as additional measures of returns to education that complement the traditional one, which is directly obtained from the estimation of the wage offer equation. Using European Household Panel data for Spain these partial effects were calculated. The results show that there are incentives in Spain for investing in education not only because it means an increase in wages but also because it raises the probability of obtaining any wage at all.     

Opportunities to notice: Chinese prospective teachers noticing students’ ideas in a distance formula lesson

This paper investigates the noticing of six Chinese mathematics prospective teachers (PSTs) when looking at a procedural error and responding to three specific tasks related to that error. Using video clips of one student’s procedural error consisting of exchanging the order of coordinates when applying the distance formula, some variation was found in how PSTs attended to, interpreted, and responded to this error. A more important finding is represented by the inconsistent responses that individual PSTs provided to the three related tasks. This finding suggests that, to some extent, prior learning experience, beliefs, and orientations inform what PSTs notice. But the finding also suggests the centrality of selecting tasks that provide accurate representations of PSTs’ emerging professional noticing. Implications for teacher educators are discussed.     

Comparing Automatic and Manual Measures of Parent–Infant Conversational Turns: A Word of Caution

The Language ENvironment Analysis system (LENA) records children’s language environment and provides an automatic estimate of adult–child conversational turn count (CTC). The present study compares LENA’s CTC estimate to manually coded CTC on a sample of 70 English-speaking infants recorded longitudinally at 6, 10, 14, 18, and 24 months of age. At each age, LENA’s CTC was significantly higher than manually coded CTC (all ps < .001, Cohen’s ds: 0.9–2.05), with the largest discrepancies between the two methods observed at younger ages. The Limits of Agreement Analyses confirm wide disagreements between the two methods, highlighting potential problems with automatic measurement of parent–infant verbal interaction. These findings suggest that future studies should validate LENA’s CTC estimates with manual coding.