The employment styles of school principals recruiting beginning teachers

In New Zealand, school principals (headteachers), sometimes with a sub-committee of the school board of trustees, interview and hire their own teachers. This research examined whether school principals exhibit different styles in recruiting beginning teachers. A small group of principals was interviewed and items reflecting their views were then developed and put on cards. The cards were sorted by people familiar with educational vocabulary to enable category setting using Kirkland and Bimmler's GOPA technique. Seventy-one principals then prioritized the items. A k-means algorithm was used to cluster principals with similar responses. Analysis of the clusters suggests that recruiting styles do exist. General compatibility emerged as being most important. This suggests that having schools appoint their own staff may lead to greater diversity between schools and greater conformity within them.     

Comprehensive reading instruction for students with intellectual disabilities: Findings from the first three years of a longitudinal study

This longitudinal experimental study investigated the reading progress of students with IQs ranging from 40 to 69 (i.e., range for students with mild or moderate mental retardation or intellectual disabilities [ID]) across at least two academic years, as well as the effectiveness of a comprehensive reading intervention for these students across the same period of time. Participants were 59 elementary students who were randomly placed into treatment and contrast groups. Students in the treatment condition received daily, comprehensive reading instruction in small groups of 1–4 students for 40–50 minutes per session across two or three academic years. Measures of phonemic awareness, phonics, word recognition, comprehension, and oral language were included. Findings indicate that students with IQs in the ID range made significant progress on multiple standardized measures of reading. Furthermore, significant differences between the treatment group and contrast group were found on several measures, including progress‐monitoring measures of phoneme segmentation, phonics, and oral reading fluency. Results demonstrate that, on average, students with ID, even those with IQs in the moderate range, learn basic reading skills given consistent, explicit, and comprehensive reading instruction across an extended period of time. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Do students with and without lexical retrieval weaknesses respond differently to instruction?

Deficits in phonological processing are theorized to be responsible for at least some reading disabilities. A considerable amount of research demonstrates that many students can be taught one of these phonological processes-phonemic awareness. However, not all students have responded favorably to this instruction. Research has suggested that these nonresponders may be unable to retrieve phonological codes quickly from long-term memory. The purpose of this study was to examine whether such a deficiency, which we refer to as lexical retrieval weakness, blunts the effectiveness of combined phonemic awareness and decoding training. To this end, we compared the effectiveness of phonemic awareness and decoding training for students with and without severe lexical retrieval weaknesses. All students in both groups demonstrated poor phonemic awareness. The results suggested that students with relatively strong lexical retrieval skill responded more favorably to beginning reading instruction than did students with weak lexical retrieval skill. In other words, lexical retrieval weakness may influence reading development independently of the effects of phonemic awareness. Implications for instruction are discussed.     

The influence of decodability in early reading text on reading achievement: a review of the evidence

The purpose of this review is to synthesize the existing research on decodability as a text characteristic examining how reading decodable text impacts students?? reading performance and growth. The results are organized into two sections based on the research designs of the studies: (1) studies that described student performance when reading texts of varying decodability levels, and (2) studies that compared the reading performance of students after participation in a treatment that manipulated decodable text as an independent variable. Collectively the results indicate that decodability is a critical characteristic of early reading text as it increases the likelihood that students will use a decoding strategy and results in immediate benefits, particularly with regard to accuracy. The studies point to the need for multiple-criteria text with decodability being one key characteristic in ensuring that students develop the alphabetic principle that is necessary for successful reading, rather than text developed based on the single criterion of decodability.     

Tracking of Gross Motor Coordination From Childhood Into Adolescence

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to analyze tracking and stability of motor coordination in children from age 6 years to ages 9 and 13 years. Method: Data were from the Copenhagen School Child Intervention Study. Motor coordination (MC) was measured using the körperkoordinationstest für Kinder (KTK) test. The crude performance score on every item was converted into a standardized “score” based on the original German reference study, which was used to generate a total standardized motor coordination (MQ) score. The MQ scores, which represented children's level of gross MC, were classified as low (MQ score < 85), normal (MQ score = 85–115), or high (MQ score>115). Pearson correlation was used to calculate the tracking coefficients of each KTK element and MQ score, and weighted kappa was used to analyze maintenance in MC classification groups. Mixed-effects logistic regression analyses were performed to examine the odds of remaining in the low MC group over time based on body mass index (BMI), weight, and height tertiles. Results: Tracking coefficients among the MQ score and each KTK element at different ages were moderate (r>.35). Children in the highest BMI and weight tertiles had a 5.44 and 5.15 times greater chance to be in the lower MC classification group during the 7-year follow-up, respectively, in comparison with children in their lowest tertiles. Conclusion: MC tracked moderately through childhood to early adolescence. Because heavier children had a greater chance to be in the lower MC group at older ages, intervention may be useful at earlier ages for those with lower MC and disadvantageous weight status.     

The Efficacy of an Early Literacy Tutoring Program Implemented by College Students

Absctract. This article describes a two‐year study addressing the effectiveness of a highly structured, systematic tutoring intervention implemented by minimally trained college students with two cohorts of at‐risk first‐grade readers. Participants were 61 first‐grade children in Cohort 1 and 76 first‐grade children in Cohort 2. Tutors participated in three one‐hour training sessions and received occasional on‐site assistance. Individual tutoring sessions were scheduled for three to four times each week for one school year, with each cohort receiving approximately 10–14 hours of instruction across 44 sessions. The curriculum included a game to teach phonemic awareness and letter‐sound correspondence, structured word‐study activities, reading of leveled books, and simple comprehension strategies. Significant differences were found on measures of phonemic awareness and nonsense word reading for both cohorts. For Cohort 1, but not Cohort 2, significant differences were also detected for real‐word identification. Our results support using tutors to provide additional assistance and instruction in early reading, even when tutors are not professionally trained teachers.