Spelling of Inflected Verb Morphology in Children with Spelling Deficits

Children with spelling deficits demonstrate significant difficulty using inflectional morphology in their writing. This study investigated whether phonological deficits account for these pronounced difficulties or if they are more accurately explained by limitations in morphological or orthographic awareness. Twenty–six 11—13–year–old children with spelling deficits, 31 younger spelling–level–matched children, and 31 age–matched children were asked to spell a series of verbs with past tense and progressive markers in dictated sentences and in list form. Performance on spelling tasks was compared to performance on phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness tasks. Results suggest that children with spelling deficits have significant difficulty including inflections as well as spelling inflections and base words. Difficulty was most pronounced in a sentence context. Ability to spell inflectional forms was related to variation in morphological awareness in children with spelling deficits and to variation in orthographic awareness in spelling–level–matched children.     

Build It and They Will Come? Patron Engagement Via Twitter at Historically Black College and University Libraries

This study is a social media analysis on the use of Twitter at Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCU) libraries. While information science researchers have begun examining how libraries use social media, the vast majority of these studies are situated at large flagship research-intensive universities. Additionally, there currently exist deficiencies in research on social media deployment at HBCU libraries. We leverage, the IBM Watson's analytic engine, to systemically examine over 23,000, tweets over an eighteen-month period, around a set of objective measures including propagation of retweets and sentiment to assess follower engagement. The analysis found little evidence of follower engagement with library generated content. However, we observed a substantial volume of library tweets coalesced around institutional boosterism, rather than library related phenomena. This non-library related content represented the vast majority of retweets, but paradoxically was propagated by non-followers. Additionally, tweets relating to institutional boosterism produced the most positive sentiment within the data.     

Student use of a computer

Sans résumé

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Student use of a computer

     

Girls’ bodily activities in physical education How current fitness and sport discourses influence girls’ identity construction

Girls’ identity constructions are influenced by the dominant sport, health and beauty discourses in their society. Recent research indicates that sport and health discourses embedded in physical education (PE) compete for influence. Some of these studies have illustrated how these discourses inform girls’ social construction of body ideals and femininities, as well as their choices among physical activities. Our purpose in posing the question, ‘How are girls’ identity construction in PE influenced by current fitness and sport discourses?’ is to explore their identity construction and how they negotiate within the PE discourse as embodied subjects, as well as how they use their body as an object of display. This study is based on fieldwork among 10th grade students (15-year-olds) in a school in Oslo, Norway. The methods used include participant observation, informal conversations with the students and two group interviews. We hope that our findings concerning how sport and fitness discourses influence the students’ concepts of both the ideal body and their choices among bodily activities in PE will contribute to the debate on the future of PE. In particular, the girls’ embrace of the fitness discourse in PE is relevant to a question of great current concern: How should schools and PE teachers meet and relate to the fitness discourse in contemporary society? We believe that if left unchallenged and permitted to deepen its influence on PE, this discourse may well ensure that body modification becomes the primary purpose of PE.     

Unconscious and unnoticed professional practice within an outstanding school for children and young people with complex learning difficulties and disabilities

This article describes a three‐year project undertaken at Pear Tree School for children and young people with severe and multiple and profound learning difficulties. Lesley Sullivan, the school's head teacher, believed that much of the value within the work of this outstanding school went unidentified by existing approaches to planning, monitoring and evaluation. Richard Crombie, educational psychologist, was engaged to work on the project. Also involved were Kate Walker and Rebecca Warnock, deputy head teachers, as well as the whole staff, children and some parents. The project takes as its starting point that essential, but very often unnoticed and unconscious, professional practice is rooted in implicit processes learnt experientially. We set ourselves the task of finding meaningful frameworks for identifying and developing that practice. This meant close observation within and outside school coupled with feeding back to staff, and their subsequent engagement with and use of explanatory frameworks.     

Information Technology and Special Needs in Education

Abstract

The paper discusses some theoretical and practical problems in using information technology to help people with special needs with some aspects of education. The paper reports the progress on two projects and some findings from a recent survey on Information Technology and Special Needs.     

Comparison of oil and egg tempera paint systems using time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry

Time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) is quickly becoming a critical tool in the field of art conservation. This technique provides high-resolution spatial maps of both inorganic and organic components located within cross-sectional samples collected from works of art. With recent advances in surface analysis, ToF-SIMS can now be used to identify specific amino acids present in protein-containing materials as well as fatty acids in drying oils. For example, the detection of the ion fragment associated with the amino acid hydroxyproline can be used to confirm the use of animal glue in a paint sample. As an analytical technique, ToF-SIMS avoids the need for derivatization/silylation reagents, with no interference by the presence of pigments. Furthermore, the layered systems that are often encountered in historical paint samples remain intact throughout the analytical procedure. This allows for the co-localization of organic and inorganic species in specific layers (e.g. egg yolk paint atop a glue ground). Because of this ability to localize the analytical signal to approximately 6?µm or less, the mass spectral information can be used to produce mass-resolved and spatially-resolve images which can be correlated to previous studies of the same samples. In this study, ToF-SIMS was used to analyze a paint cross section obtained from a painting attributed to Raphael, and another from a painting by the Sienese artist Matteo di Giovanni.     

Visually Framing Press Freedom and Responsibility of a Massacre: Photographic and Graphic Images in Charlie Hebdo's Newspaper Front Pages Around the World

This research examines 441 front-page images published in 367 newspapers on the day following the shooting in Paris of 12 people at or near the Charlie Hebdo office. The aim of this study is to understand how mainstream media visually framed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo massacre and how these visual frames coalesced to represent collective narratives about press freedom. Through a collaborative visual analysis, this study attempts to understand how the selected visual frames worked to communicate the causes, effects, and responses to the massacre and also to press freedom—an ideological construct that news media had a vested interest in advancing.