Effects of Different Listening-While-Reading Rates on Comprehension in Secondary Students with Reading Deficits

Abstract

Effects of instructing students to read silently as another person reads aloud (listening-while-reading) on comprehension in secondary students with learning disabilities were examined. Two separate treatment conditions were implemented. During student rate listening-while-reading, (SLWR), experimenters read aloud at rates that approximated each student's oral reading rate. During fast rate listening-while-reading, (FLWR), experimenters increased their reading rates. A silent reading (SR) control condition was also implemented. Following each intervention the students answered five literal and five inferential questions. SLWR resulted in lower inferential accuracy than FLWR and SR. Discussion focuses on future research and implications for accommodating secondary students with reading skills deficits in general education classrooms.     

Family business: A fertile ground for research on time,teams and positive organizational study

Further reflecting on the study of organizational behaviour (OB) in family business (FB), this rejoinder piece discusses and integrates the points raised in the three thoughtful commentaries and our original article. We start by highlighting the general agreement between us and the commentators on three points: (1) that family firms are theoretically distinct from non-family firms due to significant involvement of kinship ties in the enterprise; (2) there is paucity of research at the interface of OB and FB and (3) there is an abundance of interesting research questions at this interface with the potential to benefit both domains of study. Next, we discuss and elaborate on the research possibilities on time, teams and positive organizational study, suggested by the commentators. An illustrative list of interesting research questions at the OB–FB interface that extend and enrich our agenda for future research is shared. We conclude that not only is FB a promising context for behavioural scholars to investigate, the timing is perfect for such investigations.     

A gift that takes its toll: Emotion recognition and conflict appraisal

Individuals' attributions about conflict influence their behaviour: Appraising conflict as relationship-oriented rather than task-oriented increases individuals' likelihood to engage in conflict-escalating behaviour. This study analysed to what extent emotion recognition influences people's conflict appraisal in teams. Seventy individuals assigned to teams reported on their team conflicts once a week over the course of 2.5 months. The results show that team members high in emotion recognition tend to make more relationship-oriented conflict attributions. At the same time, they make less task-oriented conflict attributions. This tendency towards relationship-oriented attributions was moderated by team-level agreeableness and extraversion: Individuals high in emotion recognition perceived more relationship conflict the lower the average level of agreeableness and extraversion in their teams.     

Team adaptation: A fifteen-year synthesis (1998–2013) and framework for how this literature needs to “adapt” going forward

Organizations increasingly operate within dynamic environments that require them to adapt. To respond quickly and effectively to acute or on-going change, many organizations use teams to help them remain competitive. Accordingly, the topic of team adaptation has become more prominent within the broader organizational team literature. Given the wealth of knowledge that has been accumulated, we consider what has been learned to date. However, even with the increased attention to team adaptation within the literature, not all teams are created equal in terms of their capacity for adaptability. Thus, we review factors that serve as antecedents of team adaptation, the process of adaptation, and the resulting adaptive outcomes. Finally, we suggest future directions for research and practice as we introduce a conceptual framework, whereby the focus of a team’s adaptation process is impacted by the type and severity of the disruption or trigger that gives rise to the need for adaptation.     

When team members’ values differ: The moderating role of team leadership

Integrating theory and research on values, diversity, situational strength, and team leadership, we proposed that team leadership moderates the effects of values diversity on team conflict. In a longitudinal survey study of national service teams, we found significant, but opposite, moderating effects of task-focused and person-focused leadership. As predicted, task-focused leadership attenuated the diversity–conflict relationship, while person-focused leadership exacerbated the diversity–conflict relationship. More specifically, task-focused leadership decreased the relationship between work ethic diversity and team conflict. Person-focused leadership increased the relationship between traditionalism diversity and team conflict. Team conflict mediated the effects of the interactions of leadership and values diversity on team effectiveness.     

A fugue in four voices: sounding themes and variations on the reflecting team

In this account of an on-going reflecting team, a group of 4 therapists describe how they preserve multiple perspectives, yet join their voices to create coherent, meaningful reflections. This reflecting approach emphasizes developing a theme and creating variations on this theme, in a manner resembling a musical fugue. In addition, the practicalities of creating and sustaining a reflecting team in a private practice context are described.     

First,get your feet wet: The effects of learning from direct and indirect experience on team creativity

How does prior experience influence team creativity? We address this question by examining the effects of task experience acquired directly and task experience acquired vicariously from others on team creativity in a product-development task. Across three laboratory studies, we find that direct task experience leads to higher levels of team creativity and more divergent products than indirect task experience. Moreover, our results show that the difference in team creativity between direct and indirect task experience persists over time. Finally, our findings demonstrate that transactive memory systems fully mediate the effect of direct task experience on team creativity. Teams who acquired task experience directly are more creative because they develop better transactive memory systems than teams who acquired experience vicariously. We discuss how our findings contribute to understanding the effects of prior experience on team creativity, and the role of transactive memory systems in creative tasks.     

Looking into the One‐way Mirror: A Pilot Study on the Impact of Reflecting Teams on Family Members

Reflecting Teams (RTs) are an internationally recognized clinical consultation methodology, first developed by Tom Andersen in 1985. Over the last three decades, family therapists around the world have used RTs to enhance treatment. However, this innovation to family therapy practice is not well‐standardized nor evaluated. The pilot study described in this article is an attempt to expand on the previous studies on RTs, and quantitatively examines RTs conducted with family therapy participants at a university medical center psychiatric institute. Preliminary analyses indicate that after participating in a single RT, family members may feel more hopeful, believe they can better support each other in times of stress, have more confidence in working together, and resolve conflicts. Additionally, the analyses suggest that family members may feel better understood and have more ideas about how to have a conversation with their family members, even though, after the RT, they may not view their family differently. These preliminary results suggest that further studies should explore the influence of RTs on family functioning.     

Personality characteristics that are valued in teams: Not always “more is better”?

This study investigates the relationships between personality traits and contributions to teamwork that are often assumed to be linear. We use a theory‐driven approach to propose that extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness have inverted U‐shaped relationships with contributions to teamwork. In a sample of 220 participants asked to perform a creative task in teams, we found that extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness were curvilinearly associated with peer‐rated contributions to teamwork in such a way that the associations were positive, with a decreasing slope, up to a peak, and then they became negative as personality scores further increased. We replicated the results concerning the non‐linear association between extraversion, conscientiousness and peer‐rated contributions to teamwork in a sample of 314 participants engaged in a collaborative learning exercise. Our results support recent claims and empirical evidence that explorations of personality–work‐related behaviours relationships should move beyond the linearity assumptions. We conclude by discussing the implications of our research for personnel selection.     

A comparison of bounded diffusion models for choice in time controlled tasks

The Wiener diffusion model (WDM) for 2-alternative tasks assumes that sensory information is integrated over time. Recent neurophysiological studies have found neural correlates of this integration process in certain neuronal populations. This paper analyses the properties of the WDM with two different boundary conditions in decision making tasks in which the time of response is indicated by a cue. A dual reflecting boundary mechanism is proposed and its performance is compared with a well-established absorbing boundary in the cases of the WDM, the WDM with extensions, and the WDM with prior probability. The two types of boundary influence the dynamics of the model and introduce differential weighting of evidence. Comparisons with Ornstein-Uhlenbeck models are also done, and it is shown that the WDM with both types of boundary achieves similar performance and produces similar fits to existing behavioural data. Further studies are proposed to distinguish which boundary mechanism is more consistent with experimental data.