The study "Using Software to Enhance the Writing Skills of Students with Special Needs" examines the impact of assistive technology on the writing skills of students with disabilities. This research compared students' writing outcomes using word prediction and talking word processor tools to their handwritten work samples.
Jennifer Cullen, Dayton Ohio Public Schools, Stephen B. Richards and Catherine Lawless-Frank; University of Dayton, performed the study to measure the impact of assistive technology writing tools on 5th graders' writing skills over a 7-week period at an urban elementary school. Don Johnston's Co:Writer® word prediction program and Write:OutLoud® talking word processor were chosen as the writing accommodations to support students during their daily district-mandated writing activities. The study demonstrated that the technology helped students improve their writing outcomes in four key measures: writing rubric scores, accuracy, spelling and number of words written.
Ben Johnston, Director at Don Johnston, said, "A high percent (65%) of students referred for learning disabilities have a writing disability. (Mayes, Calhoun, Crowell, 2000). Many of these students have physical, cognitive, or learning differences and can't reach their potential with conventional writing tools. This study demonstrates that students can thrive in the right environment provided they have the right tools. Over 20% of school districts use Co:Writer and Write:OutLoud as accommodations to support students who struggle in writing. We are pleased that more research is being done to match students to the right learning environment where they can excel."
In 2006, JSET published another study on the "Impact of Word Prediction Software on the Written Output of Students with Physical Disabilities", Volume 21, No. 3, prepared by Pat Mirenda and Kirsten Turoldo at the University of British Columbia and Constance McAvoy, Special Education Technology-British Columbia (SET-BC) Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This research examined the impact of Co:Writer on the written output of 24 students with physical disabilities. The study included surveys from students, teachers and adults after observing ten-minute writing samples in three modalities: handwriting, word processing, and word processing with Co:Writer. Two-thirds of students and over half of the adults believed that Co:Writer helped students spell better; use a wider variety of words; write faster; produce neater, easier-to-read work; and write more correct sentences. Another two-thirds believed that Co:Writer helped students write more with less fatigue and frustration and read what they had written. This research concluded that using word processing and Co:Writer together resulted in higher percentages of legible words, correctly spelled words, correct word sequences; and longer lengths of consecutive sentence sequences than by writing by hand alone.
Additional research and case studies about the benefits of assistive technology to support students with disabilities can be found at the Don Johnston website at www.donjohnton.com and at the Journal of Special Education Technology's website http://www.tamcec.org/jset/index.htm.
Resource Links:_Download this case study at: http://www.donjohnston.com/pdf/cowriter/cow_wol_research_study.pdf
Watch Co:Writer demo: http://www.donjohnston.com/media/flash/product_demo/cowriter/index.html.
Read a summary of this and other Co:Writer research and case studies: http://www.donjohnston.com/products/cowriter/research.html.
Potential Benefits for System-Wide Public School Consolidation
What are the potential benefits of a system-wide public school consolidation? This is the question asked by the Rockbridge County, Virginia Board of Supervisors to County Administrator Claire Collins resulting in the publication of the white paper, entitled "Joint Schools, School Facilities and Superintendents: An Alternative Approach to Address Community Public Education".
The white paper highlights historical and current trends for consolidating public education. In areas of the United States with declining student populations, local governments are increasingly turning to school consolidation as a cost-saving measure. Consolidation of schools in the City of Williamsburg and James City County in Virginia reflects national trends with state laws guiding the methods of consolidation. Here in Rockbridge County, the City of Lexington and county have long shared a high school. According to Collins, "the consolidated high school is a model for regional cooperation and benefits the community".
The paper also addresses lessons learned from consolidations with emphasis on the highly complex, sensitive and emotional nature of addressing consolidated schools. Acquiring professional consulting services is recommended as no two consolidations are the same. Hire a professional consulting firms eliminates emotional ties and helps in identifying areas for financial savings and process improvement according to Collins.
Special appreciation is extended to the school divisions in the Rockbridge region, James City County, Virginia, Management Analysis, Incorporated located in Vienna, Virginia and Virginia Association of Counties for assistance and information on school consolidation. The white paper may be viewed in its entirety at:
http://www.co.rockbridge.va.us/whitepaper/Joint%20Schools%20White%20Paper2.pdf
Infants Draw on Past to Interpret Present, Understand Other People's Behavior
University of Washington psychologists have learned that 10-month-old infants use their prior exposure and understanding of familiar actions by a person to unravel novel actions. However, this ability is limited by the location in which the new action is performed.
"Infants' understanding of and exposure to familiar actions can boost their understanding of ambiguous action sequences. Their ability to draw on the past to interpret the present represents an important advance in their developing understanding of other people's behavior," said Jessica Sommerville, a UW assistant professor of psychology who is also affiliated with the university's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.
Although the research was conducted on infants, she believes the findings apply across all ages.
“Providing advance information about the ultimate goal or objective of what you are trying to teach before delivering the actual content helps people learn. College instructors and school teachers are often instructed to highlight the goal of a lecture, course or lesson in advance to facilitate learning. Our work demonstrates that this phenomenon is present in infancy. Advance information about an individual’s goals helps infants understand and learn from another person’s actions within the first year of life.”
UW researchers conducted two experiments to test how well infants can use prior information.
In the first, 48 typically developing infants took part in a two-phase experiment. During the first phase, infants received information about which of two objects a research assistant desired. Across five trials, infants consistently saw the assistant reach for, grasp and pick up one of two plastic toys ( a green frog or a red fish) while saying “Wow!” For the second phase, the infants were randomly divided into same- and different-room conditions.
Half the babies stayed in the same room, but the setup was slightly different. This time the frog and fish each sat out of reach of the assistant on top of distinctly different colored cloths. Infants watched as the assistant used the cloth supporting the toy that she had previous desired to retrieve the target toy. Infants’ visual attention to these events was measured, and after infants’ attention declined they participated in novel test trials. The test trials varied. Some of them featured a change in the toy the assistant went after while others featured a change in the cloth that was used by the assistant. The procedure was the same for the different-room group, except these infant receive the second phase in another room.
Prior research suggests that 10-month-old infants do not spontaneously recognize the meaning behind the cloth-pulling sequence. They apparently don’t understand that a person pulls the cloth to retrieve the desired out-of-reach toy. The UW researchers wanted to know if the infants could use information from the first phase to identify the assistant’s intention in the second phase. They used infants’ visual attention to the novel test events to gauge infants’ understanding of the cloth-pulling sequence. Infants in the same-room condition showed heightened attention to a change in the toy that the assistant retrieved rather than a change in the cloth she used. This suggests that the infants understood that the assistant pulled the cloth in order to obtain her desired toy, and were surprised when her intention changed, according to Sommerville.
In contrast, infants in the different-room condition did not distinguish between the two test events.
The second experiment was virtually identical to the first, except half of the infants were taken out of the testing room for 30 seconds after the first phase, matching the time it took the different-room group to switch rooms in the first experiment. Then they returned to the same room. This time both groups of infants looked significantly longer at the change in the toy the assistant pulled with the cloth.
“Our findings suggest that infants use prior information about a person’s goals and desires to understand novel or ambiguous action. But they also suggest that infants may be limited in their ability to generalize this information to new contexts at 10 months of age,” said Sommerville. “Alternately, infants may be able to generalize information across a change in context, but they may be more reluctant to generalize expectations about others’ behavior than are older children or adults.”
She said the research also has practical applications that parents could use when they want to teach their children something
“Our work suggests that children’s learning may benefit if they are provided with information about the desired end result of a game or activity before starting it. For example, if a parent wants to show a child how to operate a jack-in-the-box it might be helpful to show the desired outcome (the jack popped out of the box), and then demonstrate the step that are necessary to achieve that result.”
The findings are published on-line in the journal Developmental Science.
School Infrastructure Funding Need: A State-by-State Assessment and an Analysis of Recent Court Cases
“School Infrastructure Funding Need: A State-by-State Assessment and an Analysis of Recent Court Cases,” is an external study that tracks the current level of school infrastructure funding in all 50 states. The report shows that total school infrastructure funding need is substantial, totaling some $254.6 billion. “School Infrastructure Funding Need” also makes policy recommendations to address the funding need at the federal and state level.
Full report:
http://www.aft.org/topics/building-conditions/downloads/BMMB_Funding.pdf
“The Obama Effect”: Test-Taking Performance Gap Virtually Eliminated During Key Moments of Obama’s Presidential Run
New research by Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management professor Ray Friedman finds that the presidential run of Barack Obama has had a strong positive impact on the test-taking achievement of African Americans.
Documenting what Friedman and his co-authors call the “Obama Effect,” the study found the performance gap between black and white Americans in a series of online tests was dramatically reduced during key moments of the 2008 presidential campaign, when Obama’s accomplishments garnered the most national attention.
“Our results document compelling evidence of the power that real-world, in-group role models like Obama can have on members of their racial or ethnic community,” said Friedman.
In the study, tests were administered to a total of 472 participants using questions drawn from Graduate Record Exams (GREs) to assess reading comprehension, analogies and sentence completion. The tests took place at four distinct points over three months during the campaign: two when Obama’s success was less prominent (prior to his acceptance of the nomination and the mid-point between the convention and election day) and two when it garnered the most attention (immediately after his nomination speech and his win of the presidency in November).
The nationwide testing sample of 84 black Americans and 388 white Americans – a proportion equivalent to representation in the overall population – matched for age and education level. It revealed that white participants scored higher than their black peers at the two points in the campaign where Obama’s achievements were least visible. However, during the height of the Obama media frenzy, the performance gap between black and white Americans was effectively eliminated. In addition, researchers pinpointed that black Americans who did not watch Obama’s nomination acceptance speech continued to lag behind their white peers, while those who did view the speech successfully closed the gap.
As part of the study, Friedman – along with David M. Marx of San Diego State University and Sei Jin Ko of Northwestern University – also examined whether Obama’s success reduced negative racial stereotypes. For example, participants were asked whether they were concerned that poor performance on the exam would be attributed to their race. The results indicate that blacks were concerned that they faced negative stereotypes about academic achievement whether Obama was prominent or not, but when Obama was prominent they were able to overcome that concern and perform better on the test.
According to Friedman, other research has shown that such historical stereotypes are an underlying reason for lagging test-taking performance by black Americans.
“Obama as a role model did not have an immediate impact on black Americans’ concerns about such stereotypes,” said Friedman. “However, our findings give us reason to believe that the influence of extraordinarily successful role models like Obama will help to drive improved performance and, over the longer-term, to dispel negative stereotypes about African Americans, bringing us closer to a ‘post-racial’ world.”
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