Letter Processing and the Formation of Memory Representations in Children with Naming Speed Deficits

The ability to recognize letter patterns within words as a single unit is important for fluent reading. This skill is based on previously established memory representations of common letter patterns. The ability to form these memory representations may be impaired in some poor readers, particularly readers with naming speed deficits (NSD). This study explored factors that influence letter processing and the subsequent formation of memory representations of letter strings in children with and without a NSD. Children were presented with a letter string, followed by a probe unit that was either a single letter, a two-letter cluster, or a repetition of the whole string. Children indicated whether or not the probe had been present in the preceding string. Two factors were manipulated: (a) amount of time to process the initial letter string, and (b) level of orthographic structure present in the letter string. Results indicated that overall, children with NSD performed less accurately than children without NSD. However, children with NSD showed no differential benefit in performance as a result of longer time to process a letter string. In addition, all readers were able to make use of the orthographic structure in a letter string to aid performance. Implications of results for establishing memory representations of letter strings are discussed.     

L.A. Stories: Aggression in Preschoolers' Spontaneous Narratives after the Riots of 1992

64 inner-city preschoolers' spontaneous story narratives that were examined directly after the Los Angeles riots of 1992 were compared with narratives told by a matched comparison group of 128 children living in other U.S. cities who had no direct exposure to the riots. Narratives were coded for length, complexity, overall thematic content, character behavior in the stories, number of aggressive words, and story outcome. Children were given language and pre-academic skill assessments, their classroom behavior was observed, and teachers rated children's social competence. Results indicated that there were significant group differences in the story narratives. Children who were directly exposed to the riots told more narratives with aggressive thematic content, aggressive words, unfriendly figures who engaged in physical aggression, and mastery of situations with aggression than did the comparison group of children who had no direct exposure to the riots. The findings suggest that children's narratives reflected their exposure to the violence and their expression of that experience.     

Letter Names and Alphabet Book Reading by Senior Kindergarteners: An Eye Movement Study

The study monitored the eye movements of twenty 5‐year‐old children while reading an alphabet book to examine the manner in which the letters, words, and pictures were fixated and the relation of attention to print to alphabetic knowledge. Children attended little to the print, took longer to first fixate print than illustrations, and labeled fewer letters than when presented with letters in isolation. After controlling for receptive vocabulary, regressions revealed that children knowing more letters were quicker to look at the featured letter on a page and spent more time looking at the featured letter, the word, and its first letter. Thus, alphabet books along with letter knowledge may facilitate entrance into the partial alphabetic stage of word recognition.     

Child sexual abuse prevention: Evaluation of a teacher training model

Teachers are potentially helpful resource persons for large numbers of sexually abused children who may have difficulty disclosing abuse, particularly to family members. In the present study, the effectiveness of a 6-hour teacher training workshop on child sexual abuse prevention was evaluated. Responses of 26 female elementary teachers who participated in the workshop were compared to responses of 19 control teachers on several pre-, post-, and follow-up measures. Relative to controls, trained teachers demonstrated significant increases from pre- to post-testing in knowledge about child sexual abuse and pro-prevention opinions. On a post-only vignettes measure, trained teachers were better able than control teachers to identify behavioral indicators of abuse and suggest appropriate interventions for hypothetical sexually abused children. Over a 6-week follow-up period, trained teachers read more about child abuse than control teachers but did not differ on other behavioral dimensions such as reporting suspected abuse cases. Further research will examine the effects of additional teacher training over an extended follow-up period.     

Characterizing engineering faculty's teaching approaches

In this paper, we identify several approaches engineering faculty use to teach engineering topics. We report results from an exploratory study, consisting of 16 faculty interviews from five diverse institutions of higher education. We focus specifically on engineering faculty because the engineering faculty teaching culture is not well explored, even though there are many ongoing projects to reform engineering education. The results from this study contribute to efforts currently underway to improve teaching and learning in engineering education, as well as in higher education. Results from this study highlight the disciplinary nature of teaching in the engineering domain. Furthermore, our results can serve as a foundation to compare teaching approaches in other disciplines, or to potential changes in engineering teaching practices.     

Collaborative Curriculum Development: an encounter of different professional knowledge systems

Abstract

Teachers and educationalists working together in curriculum development is still rather unusual. The article reports on a project of collaborative curriculum development and uses it as a case‐study that reveals more general insights. The authors describe and interpretatively analyse collaborative curriculum development as the encounter of different professional knowledge systems. This encounter implies certain tensions and specific difficulties, but at the same time it offers rich opportunities to benefit from the ‘complementary competence’ of the different collaborating professionals. The authors conclude that collaborative curriculum development not only improves the quality of the curriculum outcomes, but at the same time constitutes a powerful means for teachers' professional development. The article is intended to contribute to a more balanced understanding of collaborative curriculum development, by explicitly describing its positive potential and its eventual pitfalls.     

An Application of Generalizability Theory to Evaluate the Technical Quality of an Alternate Assessment

Although federal regulations require testing students with severe cognitive disabilities, there is little guidance regarding how technical quality should be established. It is known that challenges exist with documentation of the reliability of scores for alternate assessments. Typical measures of reliability do little in modeling multiple sources of error, which are characteristic of alternate assessments. Instead, Generalizability theory (G-theory) allows researchers to identify sources of error and analyze the relative contribution of each source. This study demonstrates an application of G-theory to examine reliability for an alternate assessment. A G-study with the facets rater type, assessment attempts, and tasks was examined to determine the relative contribution of each to observed score variance. Results were used to determine the reliability of scores. The assessment design was modified to examine how changes might impact reliability. As a final step, designs that were deemed satisfactory were evaluated regarding the feasibility of adapting them into a statewide standardized assessment and accountability program.     

Young children's enactments of human rights in early childhood education

This paper explores ways in which human rights become part of and affect young children's everyday practices in early childhood education and, more particularly, how very young children enact human rights in the preschool setting. The study is conducted in a Swedish preschool through observations of the everyday practices of a group of children aged between 1 and 3 years. With a child view based on human rights theory and childhood sociology, an action-based methodology for seeking children's perspective is used to analyse the observation data. Three rights areas are identified in which children frequently deal with human rights in their actions and where they enact a range of possible rights holder positions: ownership, influence and equal value. These rights areas, and the children's various enactments of the rights, are reflected against the preschool context as a co-constructor to the actions of the participants.     

Relational ways of being an educator: trauma-informed practice supporting disenfranchised young people

Despite complex reasons for disengagement and exclusion from conventional schooling, all children have a right to education that is of a high quality. Disenfranchised young people require alternatives for re-engaging in education. This necessitates a rethinking of what it means to be an educator in alternative education settings and how to relate to young people who have experienced exclusion and failure in conventional school settings. Relational ways of being an educator are vital to support the creation of lifelong learners, not merely school completers. Flexible learning programmes offer a model of re-engagement in which relational ways of being an educator are prioritised. This article explores key aspects of trauma-informed practice and relational pedagogy in a network of flexi schools in Australia. Relational pedagogy can redress the impact of trauma and social exclusion experienced by young people. In flexi schools educator identities are challenged and changed by a willingness to explore and understand the impact of trauma on young people's development and capacity to learn. A commitment to trauma-informed practice and relational pedagogy requires educator identities to be co-constructed and negotiated in relationship with young people and colleagues. These shifts in educators' sense of identity in the flexi schools context are explored.