The comparative efficacy of two approaches to teaching sixth graders opinion essay writing

Children in sixth grade randomly assigned to a teacher-made writing procedure anchored in the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) model and training procedures were predicted to surpass children assigned to the comparison condition on dependent measures of writing clarity, organization, and cogency. The prediction was generally substantiated. The results suggest that the rate of change among individual children in the SRSD condition was faster than among children in the comparison condition on measures of clarity and organization. On the measure of cogency, findings showed that the rate of change among individuals in the SRSD condition compared to the comparison condition approached but did not reach statistical significance. Variance in growth parameters on the measure of writing clarity was statistically significant; however on the measure of organization, there was no substantive variation in individual growth parameters. Social validity data from all the children and teachers indicated the training was well received. The results are taken to support the efficacy of the SRSD model and training procedures.     

The Library as Center of Meaning

Libraries can further increase their relevancy by becoming centers of community meaning even more directly than they already are, making visible to a community what matters to it and how it understands itself and its world. This function can be advanced by libraries adopting platforms that gather anonymized usage information and make it accessible not only to users but to the global of community of developers who can do unprecedented things with it, including intersecting it with information from communities near and far so that we can learn from one another at a new scale.     

Long Nav or Short Nav?: Student Responses to Two Different Navigational Interface Designs in LibGuides Version 2

This study used two successive phases of usability testing to evaluate two different versions of a Communication 430 course LibGuide. The first version of this guide had a longer, more visually complex navigation menu, with more course-related research information directly accessible through this menu. The second version had a shorter, less complex menu that offered less directly accessible information. Twenty-four of the 33 students enrolled in the class (73%) tested either one version or the other for usability in completing tasks that simulate course-related research assignments, ultimately indicating they found the longer navigation menu more usable. This paper may be the first to describe the engagement of students enrolled in a course in testing a LibGuide dedicated specifically to that course. As such, it will be of interest to many academic librarians and instructional design professionals.     

Age of acquisition and the completeness of phonological representations

The age of acquisition effect(faster recognition and production of earlierlearnt than later learnt words) is a robustfinding in both picture naming and written wordrecognition and naming. One possibleexplanation of this effect is the PhonologicalCompleteness Hypothesis of Brown and Watson[(1987) Memory & Cognition 15: 208–216], which proposes that early acquired wordsare recognised and produced faster than lateacquired words because they have lessfragmented phonological representations. Thoughoften cited, this hypothesis has never beentested experimentally. The present study setout to test this hypothesis using aphonological segmentation task. If earlyacquired words are stored in a more completeform, then adult participants should be slowerto segment early words than late acquiredwords. In addition, if the AoA effect is aconsequence of the quality of an individual'sphonological representations then there shouldbe a clear relationship between phonologicalskill (as measured by the phonologicalsegmentation task) and the magnitude of the AoAeffect size. In order to assess therelationships between phonological skill andthe AoA effect in adults, participants werealso given a word and nonword naming task. Theword naming task manipulated AoA andspelling-sound consistency. The results of thesegmentation task failed to provide any supportfor Brown and Watson's (1987) phonologicalcompleteness hypothesis. Phonological skill wasfound to predict the size of the AoA effect inthe word naming task, but not the size of theAoA effect in the segmentation task.     

Mediating ‘School Direct’: The enactment of a reform policy by university-based teacher educators in England

The period 2010 to 2014 is widely acknowledged as a time of highly significant education reform in England, including of Initial Teacher Education (ITE). The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government introduced a programme of ‘school-led’ education policies, of which ‘School Direct’ was intended to shift the balance of power, resources and modes of training teachers away from universities towards schools. Through an analysis of interviews with leaders of ITE in universities in two English regions, we examine the mediations of the School Direct policy from a socio-cognitive and activity-theoretical perspective. We identify three emotional frames for perceiving School Direct within the policy environment, drawing on the Vygotskian concept of perezhivanie. We also identify two policy enactment activities that involved bargaining within and rebrokering relationships between universities and schools. Consequently, we argue that the mediations of School Direct reported by the university leaders in our sample can be understood as limited appropriations of the policy within a highly charged emotional context where institutional risks were felt to be ever-present. We conclude that these leaders did not believe that School Direct achieved a transformation of ITE on the basis of a reconceptualisation of existing practices. The article contributes both to the scant research literature on School Direct as a significant reform by studying university leaders’ accounts of policy mediation and the socio-cognitively informed literature on policy enactment by foregrounding the emotional-affective dimension of sense-making.