Screening for secondary intervention: concept and context

The article by Speece (in this issue) underscores the disappointing accuracy results of early screening for reading difficulties and argues that development conceptualized as rate of learning matters. We respond by emphasizing three points. First, the purpose of early screening could be identifying students not at risk so that instructional objectives can be established for students potentially at risk. Second, monitoring progress in mastering the alphabetic principle is reflected in item-based learning. Third, response to instruction is multilevel and contextualized. These points are illustrated with data from an early reading assessment used widely in Texas and from high-performing/high-poverty schools in Texas that serve as models of multitiered instruction.     

The prevalence of service excellence and the use of business process improvement methodologies in Australian universities

ABSTRACT

Service transformation is an increasingly common pursuit in the higher education sector, with university strategic plans frequently featuring a service excellence objective and the adoption of leaner and more sustainable service models. Previous studies agree that service excellence is intentional not incidental, and systematic not ad-hoc in nature, requiring a planned and structured approach with consistent and repeatable experiences. This study analysed public documents to discover the universities engaged in service excellence and efficiency endeavours and the prevalence of business process improvement (BPI) methodologies as a tool for this purpose. It is concluded that universities are increasingly focused on service excellence, institutional sustainability and BPI methodologies to enable institutional strategic objectives. The study suggests that future studies could focus on investigating and gaining primary evidence on the progress and success of universities in the service excellence and BPI space.     

Cross-linguistic analysis of vocabulary in young children: spanish, dutch, French, hebrew, italian, korean, and american english

The composition of young children's vocabularies in 7 contrasting linguistic communities was investigated. Mothers of 269 twenty-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, and the United States completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and vocabulary size grouping (except for children just learning to talk), children's vocabularies contained relatively greater proportions of nouns than other word classes. Each word class was consistently positively correlated with every other class in each language and for children with smaller and larger vocabularies. Noun prevalence in the vocabularies of young children and the merits of several theories that may account for this pattern are discussed.