Psychometric Properties of the Book Readings for An Affective Classroom Education (BRACE) Coding System

Abstract

In the present study, the relation between children’s emotion knowledge and preschool teachers’ book reading behaviors during shared book reading in the classroom was examined. A new coding system, the Book Readings for an Affective Classroom Education (BRACE), was developed to capture teachers’ macro-level book reading behaviors (i.e., dialogic reading) and micro-level use of emotion language (i.e., emotion coaching) during shared book reading. Results showed good reliability and validity of the BRACE. Further, teachers’ dialogic reading and emotion coaching behaviors during shared book reading positively predicted child emotion knowledge in Spring (T2), after controlling for children’s initial level of emotion knowledge in Fall (T1). In addition, a significant interaction between teachers’ book reading style and child emotion knowledge at T1 on emotion knowledge at T2 indicated that teachers’ effective book reading style was especially beneficial to children who had lower emotion knowledge at the beginning of the school year.     

COMPREHENSION INSTRUCTION IN A READING CLINIC: COMPARISON OF CLINIC AND CLASSROOM PRACTICES

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine middle school students’ (grades 4 to 8) metacognitive knowledge about science reading, science text, and science reading strategies. The 52 subjects were selected from 532 students who completed a survey instrument designed to determine students’ knowledge about science reading, science text, and science reading strategies. The stratified randomly sampled students were interviewed using five structured protocols. The protocol items were based on 21 strategic characteristics of successful readers of science text and three domains of metacognitive knowledge: declarative, procedural, and conditional. Quantitative analyses reveal surface level metacognitive knowledge about 20 of 21 strategies explored and similar levels of knowledge across the three metacognitive domains. A qualitative analysis indicates that average middle school students’ metacognitive knowledge of science reading, science text, and science reading strategies is similar to that of younger and poorer readers of narrative text.     

Évaluation de la compréhension écrite de récits chez l’enfant de 7 à 10 ans : vers des profils de compreneurs

IntroductionThe aim of the study was to investigate reading comprehension skills in 7 to 10-year-old children and to present a new tool for assessing reading comprehension skills in elementary school children. Two aspects of text comprehension were assessed: literal comprehension skills and inference generation (with two subtypes of inferences, coherence inferences and knowledge-based inferences).MethodTwo narratives of varying length and complexity have been constructed and presented to 498 French-speaking children from second grade to fifth grade.ResultsThe results showed an evolution of performance with school level. Children's scores also depended on the type of comprehension skill evaluated (literal versus inferential) and difficulty of texts. Furthermore, cluster analysis yielded five profiles that clearly differ on children's ability to respond to either literal questions, coherence inferential questions, or knowledge-based inferential questions.ConclusionThe existence of different profiles of comprehenders is discussed in terms of theoretical implications. Finally, some limitations and way of improvement are presented.     

Predicting Reading Comprehension in Arabic-Speaking Middle Schoolers Using Linguistic Measures

Abstract

This study aimed at examining the contribution of various linguistic components to reading comprehension (RC) in the seventh and ninth grades and to compare this contribution between two groups: children with typical development and those with reading disorders (RD). This was done by testing the relative contribution of phonological awareness, morphological knowledge, vocabulary, and syntactic knowledge to RC in both groups. The regression analysis indicated that the linguistic components explain between 60 and 56% of the variance in RC in the seventh and ninth grades among the typical group and between 74 and 79% in the same grades among those with RD. While phonological awareness and morphological knowledge contribute to RC only among the RD group, the contributions of vocabulary and syntactic knowledge were found to be significant in both groups. The results are discussed in light of previous findings in the literature with theoretical and pedagogical implications.     

Multisensory letter integration and implicit learning of reading with 5-year-old children

IntroductionSeveral studies have shown that adults can memorize an audio-visual association in response to an incidental presentation. Moreover, a motor experience of the letter-shape promotes letter knowledge and reading acquisition.ObjectiveIn order to develop optimal learning designs for children, we evaluate the effect of the implicit learning of grapho-phonemic correspondences on decoding abilities (study 1). The action performed on the letter-shape in this type of learning was then also investigated with regard to the emergence of multisensory knowledge (study 2).MethodsA paradigm inspired by studies conducted with adults was tested in 5-year-old children (study 1). A classical design pre-test/learning/post-test was used in the study 2. During the learning, the child was asked to explore the letter shape. An incidental presentation of the corresponding sound was simultaneously proposed to the child.ResultsResults indicated that (1) implicit learning was efficient on the discrimination of grapho-phonemic correspondences in young children and (2) the motor action amplified audio-visual integration within a single memory trace.ConclusionThese results are discussed in the light of knowledge emergence in long-term memory and the benefit of an implicit training at the beginning of reading acquisition.     

HOW ELEMENTARY STUDENTS REFERRED FOR COMPENSATORY READING INSTRUCTION PERFORM ON SCHOOL‐BASED MEASURES OF WORD RECOGNITION,FLUENCY, AND COMPREHENSION

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to examine how elementary students referred for compensatory remedial reading services performed on several key reading process variables: total word recognition errors while reading brief passages, significant or meaning‐changing errors, comprehension, and reading rate. In order to maximize ecological validity, the students were assessed by the school‐based reading specialist/teacher using assessment materials normally used in diagnostic evaluations of students referred for compensatory reading instruction. Although performance across all variables was below instructional levels for students’ assigned grades, both word recognition variables and comprehension approached instructional levels. Reading rate alone was consistently and significantly below several previously identified standards of performance. We feel that poor performance in rate may be an indicator of fluency problems (including automaticity in word recognition and text phrasing). Suggestions for instruction to overcome difficulties in fluency were presented.     

Elementary Students’ Motivation to Read and Genre Preferences

Abstract

This study examines the psychometric properties of a reading motivation measure with a sample of upper elementary students in the United States (n?=?195). The research explores upper elementary students’ motivation to read, the amount/frequency of their reading in general, and their preferences for different text genres. Factor analyses support the validity and reliability of the SRQ-RM for upper elementary students in the United States, a tool not previously used with this population. This study also included a nuanced assessment of students’ genre preferences, which has implications for reading motivation and effective classroom instruction.     

Lexical orthographic knowledge acquisition in adults: The whole-word visual processing impact

IntroductionOne of the most persistent difficulties in French written language acquisition is lexical orthographic memorization. Both theoretical models and behavioral studies have suggested that simultaneous visual processing of all the letters of a word could be important for the acquisition of its orthographic form.Main goalTwo experiments are conducted to test this whole-word visual processing hypothesis.MethodThe paradigm used in both experiments is a self-teaching paradigm in which adult participants had to read orthographically complex bisyllabic pseudowords in isolation. In one reading condition, all the letters of the item are available at once, in the other the first and second syllables are seen successively. After reading, participants had to spell under dictation and to recognize the written items.ResultsGlobally, the results showed that participants better recall the orthographic form of a word after having read it in the whole-word reading condition. The result of the recognition task, in the second experiment, was in line with the result of the spelling under dictation task.ConclusionThese results, although they should be interpreted with caution, are in line with the whole-word visual processing hypothesis. Applied consequences for orthographic learning and teaching, as for remediation of specific orthographic disabilities, are discussed.     

小学数学教师职业知识的结构与内在关系

本研究以小学数学分数起始教学为媒介,通过自编的小学数学教师职业知识测验,考察了162名小学数学教师在学科知识、一般教育学知识和教育实践知识等三类知识上的表现,并据此探讨了这三类职业知识间的相互关系。研究结果表明,自编的小学数学职业知识测验具有良好的信度和结构效度,教师的学科知识和一般教育学知识能显著地预测其教育实践知识。     

From Self-Culture to College Lecture

Abstract

The Jewish Chautauqua Society (JCS), founded in Philadelphia in 1893 by Reform Rabbi Henry Berkowitz, evolved from an organization dedicated to popularizing Jewish knowledge among Jews to one devoted to teaching non-Jews about Judaism. Emulating the forms of Chautauqua Institution, the Society created reading circles, published textbooks for the study of Judaism, and held annual assemblies for forty years. In 1939, the Society came under the sponsorship of the North American Federation of Temple Brotherhoods, a lay Reform Jewish organization. It expanded the most ambitious of its programs, rabbinically-taught college courses on Jewish studies. Since its inception, the Jewish Chautauqua Society has sought to combat anti-Semitism, dispel prejudice and create “understanding through education” about a minority religious and ethnic component of American society.     

Effects of an early reading intervention based on grapho-syllabic decoding and fluency training in French elementary schools

IntroductionStudies conducted in recent decades have led to the development of instructional interventions to help prevent or eliminate a large proportion of reading difficulties. However, few experiments have been conducted in French schools.ObjectiveAims for this research were to create, implement and evaluate a remediation program for French students with reading difficulties up to the end of elementary school.MethodThis paper examines the effects of a decoding-skills and fluency-based intervention on 133 struggling readers in second- to fifth-grade. Depending on the nature of their reading difficulties, students were given a year-long training based either on grapho-syllabic conversion — focusing on syllable units, rather than phonemic units, is considered a promising way of helping French-speaking beginning readers — or on repeated reading techniques, used to improve fluency.ResultsIncreases in written-word identification scores were greater for students who followed the program than they were for a control group of 184 students with reading difficulties who did not follow the program.ConclusionThe results show that programs combining early evaluation of written-word identification abilities followed by a year-long series of remediation sessions focusing on specific difficulties can help students progress in written-word identification. However, further research is needed to examine why our program was less effective with children from disadvantaged (“éducation prioritaire”) areas.     

The Right Stuff: Preschoolers Generalize Reliability Across Communicative Domains When Informants Show Semantic (Not Episodic) Knowledge

ABSTRACT

Although preschoolers have strong expectations about the pedagogical nature of pointing gestures (Csibra & Gergely, 2006), more recent work has shown that preschoolers prefer to use informants’ spoken language, not their pointing gestures, to make judgments about their reliability (Palmquist & Jaswal, 2015). Here, we explored children’s inferences about pointers using a standard selective trust paradigm. Specifically, we asked whether 4- and 5-year-olds generalize reliability across communicative domains (from pointing ability to speaking ability). We found that children preferred to make generalizations about pointers’ reliability when they had conveyed semantic, but not episodic, knowledge. Individual differences in theory of mind also predicted children’s willingness to make generalizations about pointers’ reliability. Both sets of results suggest that multiple factors (i.e., the type of knowledge an informant shares and individual differences in children’s cognitive development) affect whether preschoolers generalize others’ reliability across domains.     

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR:

ABSTRACT

Although printed information on secondary reading has expanded, adequate synthesis across types of publications is lacking. This study suggests and tests the hypothesis that professional textbooks serve a major role in broad synthesis of information for secondary reading. Research results from the bibliometric analysis of five secondary textbooks indicate: (1) no consistent pattern of reference use by authors, (2) wide author variation in the types of publications cited, (3) predominance of monographic over serial, dissertation, report and research literature citation, (4) referencing of older archival rather than more recent sources, (5) relatively few materials cited which appeared within 1 to 4 years of the publication dates of the five texts, and (6) low percentages of citation overlap and minor referral to a common body of literature by the five authors. According to this Investigation, it appears that individual professional texts do not necessarily reflect the extant information base or state‐of‐the‐art in secondary reading. The authors recommend existing information tools be modified to incorporate more effective perpetual literature synthesis or new tools be created by learned societies to fill the information synthesis gap.     

教师变量对小学生数学学习观影响的多层线性分析

32名小学数学教师与这些教师所教班级的1691名学生参与了本研究.两个测量工具评价了教师的数学学科知识与学科教学知识,对教师的55节数学课进行了录像;并按照学习任务的认知水平与课堂对话的特点进行了编码,采用问卷法测查了学生对数学学习的看法与态度.多水平分析表明:教师的学科教学知识、课堂学习任务的认知水平、课堂师生对话的权威来源与教师运用学生想法的程度对学生数学学习观具有显著预测作用;教师的学科知识对学生数学学习观的预测未达到显著性水平.     

An Intervention Program to Increase Reading Fluency

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of a self-modeling/ self-monitoring intervention to increase oral reading fluency in 5 elementary school students. Initially, students were videotaped reading from grade-appropriate text. The videotape was then edited to create a self-modeling intervention tape of approximately 5-minutes in duration, depicting the students reading in a fluent manner. The edited videotape was shown back to the students on two occasions in order to initiate the self-modeling intervention. Following this, students were videotaped reading 1-minute reading passage probes and these videotapes, without editing, were then shown back to the students during each subsequent session. The videotapes were viewed by the students twice weekly for a period of 4 weeks. To promote self-monitoring, after each passage reading session students were provided with performance feedback in the form of words correct per minute (WCPM) and progress toward their long-term goal. Results indicated increases in growth of oral reading rate overtime with concomitant advances in instructional placement criteria.     

The Teacher of Reading: The First Twenty-Five Years Are the Most Challenging

This study investigated approaches to reading acquisition used in four first grades of a suburban elementary school. Individual teacher interviews established the differences in program emphases. Group A used the basal reader program; Group B, the basal reader and an additional phonics program; Group C, the basal reader and the language experience approach; Group D, the language experience approach and a wide range of supplementary readers and trade books. All groups participated in supportive language arts activities. Nine randomly selected subjects from each class participated‐‐three from each high, middle, and low reading group. Informal reading inventories were individually administered and scored for levels of word recognition in context and reading comprehension. Results support the use of a language experience approach as a viable alternative to the basal reader approach for teaching reading and writing.     

Navigating the insider-outsider hyphen: A qualitative exploration of the acculturation challenges of Aboriginal athletes pursuing sport in Euro-Canadian contexts

ObjectivesThe purpose of this project was to explore the acculturation challenges of Aboriginal athletes (14–26 years) from Canada as they moved off reserves to pursue sport within non-Aboriginal (Euro-Canadian) communities. The project was also aimed at contributing to the acculturation literature in sport psychology through an Indigenous decolonizing methodology.DesignUniversity academics partnered with Aboriginal community researchers from one reserve to facilitate an Indigenous decolonizing methodology rooted in practices from the local culture. The project was articulated as a form of cultural sport psychology.MethodsMandala drawings were used to facilitate conversational interviews with 21 Aboriginal athletes about their experiences relocating off reserves and the acculturation challenges they faced as they attempted to pursue sport within Euro-Canadian contexts. A local Indigenous version of an inductive thematic analysis was then conducted.ResultsThe acculturation challenges of Aboriginal athletes coalesced into two major themes: (a) culture shock (which occurred in relation to the host culture), and (b) becoming disconnected from home (which occurred in relation to the home culture). These themes illustrated how the athletes’ sense of identity and place were challenged and changed, as they (re)negotiated meaningful positions for themselves in and between two cultural realities.ConclusionThis project centralized a culturally resonant mode of knowledge production embracing local Aboriginal ways of knowing. This approach facilitated deeper insights into athletes’ acculturation challenges, which contextualized the complexity and fluidity of the acculturation process.     

Local institutionalization, discontinuity, and German textbooks of psychology, 1816-1854

In the context of social and intellectual developments and the changing role of German universities in the first half of the nineteenth century, which led to the local institutionalization of the discipline of psychology at German universities, the structure and content of textbooks of psychology are discussed. Textbooks in the first half of the nineteenth century had a pedagogical function in training teachers, in socializing students into the field, and in providing students and readers with knowledge about the subject matter, methodology, and topics of psychology. The textbooks, representative of influence, philosophical-psychological orientations, and different decades in the first half of the nineteenth century, are reconstructed with regard to the definition of psychology, the ways of studying the soul, and how to conceptually organize the field. The textbooks by Herbart, Beneke, and Waitz, which were written within a natural-scientific programmatic vision for psychology, are contrasted with the traditional philosophically intended textbooks of Reinhold, Mussmann, George, and Schilling. Fischhaber's textbook for Gymnasien is summarized. Issues regarding the continuity of psychology are discussed, and discontinuous developments in the history of German psychology are identified.     

Participatory Action Research

Abstract

Traditionally, mental health research has been conducted exclusively by professionals with little input and participation from individuals with mental illness themselves. Participatory action research (PAR) provides a more dynamic method of research, giving individuals the opportunity to become activists and advocates by influencing the direction of mental health research. This paper outlines important differences between PAR methodology and traditional research, with an emphasis on the differing roles of persons with mental illness in the two models. PAR is consistent with the recovery movement in several ways: both approaches value self-definition, empowerment, and experiential knowledge. As an example, this paper describes one project that incorporates principles of the participatory action research paradigm.     

The relationship between bible reading and purpose in life among 13–15-year-olds

The relationship between bible reading and perceived purpose in life is explored among a sample of 25,888 13–15-year-olds throughout England and Wales, alongside information about sex, age, personality, belief in God and church attendance. The conclusion is drawn that bible reading makes a small but unique contribution to promoting a sense of purpose in life among this age group.