Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

Effects of Self-Correction on the Acquisition, Maintenance, and Generalization of the Written Spelling of Elementary School Children

We examined the effect of self-correction on the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of written spelling of elementary school students attending an after-school clinic. Six students registered for remedial tutoring participated. During self-correction, students initially learned four proofreading marks and a procedure for using them that were subsequently applied as the students compared their spelling to a model. Results showed a functional effect between self-correction and improved student performance on target words. Using the self-correction procedure, the students spelled at least 98% of the target words accurately, maintained at least 85% of the correctly spelled words, and generalized at least 70% of the words at home, in context, and with word variations. Questionnaires administered to the students, their parents, and teachers indicated that students preferred self-correction. Parents noticed academic improvements in their child's spelling performance as well as positive changes in attitude toward school. Most teachers did not notice changes in spelling performance or attitude.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

EFFECTS OF EXPLICIT TIMING ON MATHEMATICS PROBLEM COMPLETION RATES IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN THIRD-GRADE ELEMENTARY STUDENTS

A multiple baseline design was used to evaluate the effects of Van Houten and Thompson's (1976) explicit timing procedure on problem completion rates and accuracy levels in African-American third-grade students. During the explicit timing phase, students were told that they were being timed and were instructed to circle the last problem completed at each 1-min interval. Results showed that the explicit timing procedure increased problem completion rates. A decreasing trend in percentage of problems correct also occurred. Exploratory data analysis suggested that decreases in accuracy were not caused by the explicit timing procedure and did not occur in students who had attained high levels of preintervention accuracy. Discussion focuses on recommendations for educators who wish to use timing procedures to increase students' rates of accurate responding.