ATHENS,gateways, and portals: components of the Distributed National Electronic Resource

The Distributed National Electronic Resource is a central plank of the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee's strategy. We outline the background and definitions of the DNER and discuss some of the issues to be investigated and the collaboration required between stakeholders and their partners.     

Curriculum and Society: Rethinking the Link

This article argues that the link between educational curricula and society as a whole has become critically uncertain. This crisis is linked to a number of factors related to the post-modern world view, including: the disappearance of grand utopian social visions of the kind that used to underpin educational policy; the lack of adequate theoretical tools; and the way in which academics are exposed to a multitude of different cultural norms. The author argues that this situation calls for a fundamental re-thinking of the link between curriculum and society, based on a more flexible and pluralistic approach.     

School Enrolment Patterns in Rural Ghana: A comparative study of the impact of location,gender, age and health on children's access to basic schooling

The aim of this article is to discuss the results from three censuses conducted on school age children in rural Ghana which reveal contemporary patterns in enrolment. The data provide a profile of the school age population in basic education and contribute novel quantitative data on children out of school. The article examines the age at first enrolment, the gender disparities between classes, the classes where children drop out, and the proportion of children who never enrol in school. The stark contrast in enrolment between the disadvantaged north and the south of the country is also confirmed. Qualitative data from focus group discussions with parents, teachers and children highlight the major obstacles confronting education-these include a diversity of factors such as child labour, health, location and gender. Suggestions of policy options needed to increase access and attainment to schooling include reducing the over-age entry, increasing female access and participation, adapting culturally sensitive strategies, collecting better statistical data, improving the health of school age children and lessening the gap between the north and south of the country.     

Part and whole practice: chunking and online control in the acquisition of a serial motor task

A four-component aiming movement was used to examine the relative effectiveness of part and whole practice. Following a pretest, participants were assigned to one of three practice groups. Participants in a "Whole" group practiced the four components together as a unit. A "No Overlap" group practiced the first two and last two components of the task, alternating every fifth trial. An "Overlap" group practiced the transition between the second and third components on every trial by alternating practice of the first three and last three components every five trials. Participants in all groups improved significantly from pretest to immediate posttest and maintained their performance over a 24-hr delay. Contrary to the "chunking hypothesis," participants in the No Overlap group improved as much as those in the other two groups. Kinematic data indicated that participants in all three groups learned to use response-produced feedback earlier in the individual movement trajectories. Moreover, participants appeared to acquire a general ability to make transitions between movement components rather than specific transitions. The results suggest that segmented or segmented "overlap" practice regimes may benefit learning movement sequences of short duration.     

Analyzing the cross-cultural transfer of professional practices through organizational stories

Portions of this article were presented at the annual Conference of the Southern Anthropology Society, Atlanta, GA, April 1994.     

“If there are no records,there is no narrative”: the social justice impact of records of Scottish care-leavers

In 2004, the Scottish Parliament commissioned an independent review of abuse in children’s residential establishments between 1950 and 1995. In 2007, the review’s findings were published in a report entitled Historical Abuse Systemic Review: Residential Schools and Children’s Homes in Scotland 1950 to 1995, also known as the Shaw Report. In this article, the Shaw Report provides the jumping off point for a case study of the social justice impact of records. Drawing on secondary literature, interviews, and care-related records, the study identifies narratives that speak to the social justice impact of care records on care-leavers seeking access to them; it also assesses the potential of the surviving administrative records to serve as a foundation on which to construct historical narratives that speak more generally to the experience of children in residential care.     

The role of prosodic sensitivity in children's reading development

While the critical importance of phonological awareness (segmental phonology) to reading ability is well established, the potential role of prosody (suprasegmental phonology) in reading development has only recently been explored. This study examined the relationship between children's prosodic skills and reading ability. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses examined the unique contribution of word‐level and phrase‐level prosodic skills to the prediction of three concurrent measures of reading ability in 81 fourth‐grade children (mean age 9.3 years). After controlling for phonological awareness and general rhythmic sensitivity, children's prosodic skills predicted unique variation in word‐reading accuracy and in reading comprehension. Phrase‐level prosodic skills, assessed by means of a reiterative speech task, predicted unique variance in reading comprehension, after controlling for word reading accuracy, phonological awareness and general rhythmic sensitivity. These results add to the growing body of evidence of the importance of prosodic skills in reading development.