Contributions of the Home Literacy Environment and Underlying Language Skills to Preschool Invented Writing

This study aimed to enhance our knowledge of the constituent variables affecting invented writing skills in 5-year-olds by investigating the concurrent relationships among home literacy, underlying language skills, and invented writing. The study comprised 111 Norwegian-speaking children (mean age: 5.7 years; 58 girls) and their parents. The children’s language skills were tested individually. The results showed that, on average, children achieved low scores on tests of word writing; however, the within-group variations in the children’s invented writing performances were large. The statistical modeling showed that parental education was significantly related to the home literacy environment, which was, in turn, directly related to both vocabulary and phonological awareness and indirectly related to invented writing skills. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Realizing transformative agency and student identity: meaningful practical activity based formative intervention at grade eight

Cultural Studies of Science Education - Cultural historical activity theory perspectives are drawn in this paper to realize collective transformative agency and the externalization of individual...     

Investigation of differential movement at railroad bridge approaches through geotechnical instrumentation

Railway transitions experience differential movements due to differences in track system stiffness, track damping characteristics, foundation type, ballast settlement from fouling and/or degradation, as well as fill and subgrade settlement. This differential movement is especially problematic for high speed rail infrastructure as the ??bump?? at the transition is accentuated at high speeds. Identification of different factors contributing towards this differential movement, as well as development of design and maintenance strategies to mitigate the problem is imperative for the safe and economical operation of both freight and passenger rail networks. This paper presents the research framework and initial instrumentation details from an ongoing research effort at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Three bridge approaches experiencing recurrent geometry problems were instrumented using multidepth deflectometers (MDDs) and strain gages to identify different factors contributing to the development of differential movements.     

The Dynamics of Metaphors: Class‐Inclusion or Comparison?

In current literature, metaphor is treated as either an instance of implicit comparison or as a nonliteral class‐inclusion statement. I will argue that, contrary to these positions, the notions of comparison and class‐inclusion are not mutually exclusive in character but rather complementary cognitive concepts which entail one another. While initially using the semantic distinction between literal and figurative language, I will argue in the course of this article that metaphor is a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language and that it reflects linguistic pragmatics rather than semantics. The most prominent reasons for resorting to the extraordinary use of language may be found in education, where metaphor serves a heuristic function in the interaction between teacher and student, and in scientific activities, when researchers have at their disposal only a restricted dictionary to describe new phenomena. Executive function, flashbulb memory, and the firing of neurons are examples from cognitive psychology and neuroscience that denominate phenomena that might otherwise not have been adequately expressed. I will conclude that metaphors are both comparisons as well as class‐inclusion statements and that these tropes fulfill not only a heuristic but also an epistemic function in as much as they render comprehensible the acquisition of radically new knowledge.     

Causes of educational segregation in Sweden – school choice or residential segregation

The aims of the study were to examine changes in school segregation across different types of municipalities between 1998 and 2011 in Sweden, and to explore the extent to which these changes are the consequences of school choice. Multilevel models were applied to register data using a counterfactual approach. The results showed that school segregation with respect to migration background and educational achievement had increased over time, while social segregation remained rather constant. The degree of school segregation varied largely across different municipality types, and it was concluded that school choice was a determinant of school segregation. The findings have strong policy implications and are discussed in relation to the recent educational reforms in Sweden.     

Immediate and delayed effects of invented writing intervention in preschool

This study examined the effects of a 10 week invented writing program with five-year-old preschoolers (mean age 5.7 years) on their immediate post intervention literacy skills and also the facilitative effects of the intervention on the subsequent learning to read during the first 6 months of schooling. The study included 105 children (54 girls) from 12 preschools in Norway. The preschools were randomly assigned to the experimental group with the invented writing program, or the control group with the ordinary program offered to preschoolers. The classroom-based programs (40 sessions) were conducted by the children’s regular teachers. The children’s emergent literacy skills were evaluated using a pre-test, a post-test and a follow-up test 6 months later, and the data were analyzed using latent autoregressive models. The results showed that the invented writing group performed significantly better than the control group on the post-test for the measures of phoneme awareness (d = .54), spelling (d = .65) and word reading (d = .36). Additionally, indirect effects were observed on the delayed follow-up tests on phoneme awareness (d = .45), spelling (d = .48) and word reading (d = .26). In conclusion, we argue that invented writing appeared to smooth the progress of emergent literacy skills in preschool, including the subsequent reading development in school. Contextualized in a semi-consistent orthography and a preschool tradition that does not encourage the learning of written language skills, the findings add to our knowledge of how children learn to write and read.     

Scaling of upper-body power output to predict time-trial roller skiing performance

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to establish the most appropriate allometric model to predict mean skiing speed during a double-poling roller skiing time-trial using scaling of upper-body power output. Forty-five Swedish junior cross-country skiers (27 men and 18 women) of national and international standard were examined. The skiers, who had a body mass (m) of 69.3 ± 8.0 kg (mean ± s), completed a 120-s double-poling test on a ski ergometer to determine their mean upper-body power output (W). Performance data were subsequently obtained from a 2-km time-trial, using the double-poling technique, to establish mean roller skiing speed. A proportional allometric model was used to predict skiing speed. The optimal model was found to be: Skiing speed = 1.057 · W ^0.556 · m ^?0.315, which explained 58.8% of the variance in mean skiing speed (P < 0.001). The 95% confidence intervals for the scaling factors ranged from 0.391 to 0.721 for W and from ?0.626 to ?0.004 for m. The results in this study suggest that allometric scaling of upper-body power output is preferable for the prediction of performance of junior cross-country skiers rather than absolute expression or simple ratio-standard scaling of upper-body power output.     

Writing Stories to Enhance Scientific Literacy

In response to international concerns about scientific literacy and students’ waning interest in school science, this study investigated the effects of a science‐writing project about the socioscientific issue (SSI) of biosecurity on the development of students’ scientific literacy. Students generated two BioStories each that merged scientific information with the narrative storylines in the project. The study was conducted in two phases. In the exploratory phase, a qualitative case study of a sixth‐grade class involving classroom observations and interviews informed the design of the second, confirmatory phase of the study, which was conducted at a different school. This phase involved a mixed methods approach featuring a quasi‐experimental design with two classes of Australian middle school students (i.e., sixth grade, 11 years of age, n = 55). The results support the argument that writing the sequence of stories helped the students become more familiar with biosecurity issues, develop a deeper understanding of related biological concepts, and improve their interest in science. On the basis of these findings, teachers should be encouraged to engage their students in the practice of writing about SSI in a way that integrates scientific information into narrative storylines. Extending the practice to older students and exploring additional issues related to writing about SSI are recommended for further research.     

Psychometric Properties of Vocabulary Test Items as a Function of Word Characteristics

In a study of Gustafsson, Wedman and Westerlund (in press), the vocabulary test (WORD) in the Swedish Scholastic Aptitude Test was found to load both on a general factor (G) and a factor reflecting verbal knowledge (Gc'). Word characteristics were gathered in order to investigate if they can account for the variation in items’ loadings on the G and Gc’ factors. The results indicate that items loading highly on the G‐factor tend to involve words which are of Latin origin, relatively frequent, morphologically varied and abstract. Items loading highly on the Gc'‐factor tend to involve words which are of Swedish origin, relatively frequent and particularly so in fiction, and concrete but not nouns. Knowledge about these relations may be used to construct vocabulary tests which to a smaller or larger extent reflect either G or Gc’. The results, although tentative, may also be useful to shed light on the nature of the dimensions of ability.     

The Dimensionality of Language Ability in Four-Year-Olds: Construct Validation of a Language Screening Tool

The Norwegian government recommends a systematic language assessment of all four-year-olds as part of the general health surveillance program for the purpose of identifying children at risk of language delay. This study aimed to investigate the construct validity of the recommended language screening tool called LANGUAGE4 [SPRÅK4] by first examining the dimensionality of the underlying construct of the tool, after which the concurrent convergent validity was established by regressing an external language factor, defined by four standardized language tests, on a single higher-order factor. The findings provide support for a higher-order model with one general language factor, suggesting that a large amount of the variance in LANGUAGE4 is attributable to a single common factor at the second-order level. Furthermore, this single factor explained a considerable amount of the variance in the external language factor. Our findings are interpreted as support for satisfactory construct validity of LANGUAGE4.