FOURTH GRADERS' PERFORMANCE ON A STATE-MANDATED ASSESSMENT INVOLVING TWO DIFFERENT MEASURES OF READING COMPREHENSION

This study examined fourth graders' performance on two reading comprehension measures, involving a question-answering format and a cloze format, which were part of a state-mandated assessment. Word-level reading skills and oral language comprehension were important to success on both formats, but word accuracy had a stronger relationship to the cloze than to the question-answering measure. Language comprehension related strongly to both formats. The cognitive profiles associated with poor reading comprehension varied, but most often involved a specific difficulty in accuracy of pseudoword decoding. The results suggest that test format should be considered in interpreting reading comprehension performance and underscore the need to assess specific component abilities in reading.     

The White House Conference: tips or taps for counselors?

Counselors cannot continue to drift complacently in the shallows of their traditional roles. Whatever their work setting, they must heed the symbolic cries of their clients who feel alienated from family, school, work, institutions, and even from themselves, and find solace in meaningless or destructive outlets. If the counseling profession has a future, it will be concerned with humanizing environments where children, youth, and adults live, learn, work, and play; serving as advocates for all persons of all ages; and responding positively to the complexities of living which confront everyone. These priorities, highlighted by the 1970 White House Conference on Children, seem to have implications for the survival of all counseling.     

Conceptual Art and the Acquaintance Principle

The Acquaintance Principle has been the subject of extensive debate in philosophical aesthetics. In one of the most recent developments, it has become popular to claim that some works of conceptual art are counterexamples to it. It is further claimed that this is a genuinely new problem in the sense that it is a problem even for versions of the Acquaintance Principle modified to deal with previous objections. I argue that this is essentially correct; however, the claim as it stands needs some work. I draw attention to, and defend, two assumptions on which the claim rests but which have so far gone unrecognized. I also address an objection that has recently been made to the claim and threatens to raise further complications for it. In doing this, we arrive at a fuller, more robust version of the initial claim.