May ERR #4

Early Word Recognition Is Key To Lifelong Reading Skills Says New Study



Children’s early reading experience is critical to the development of their lifelong reading skills a new study from the University of Leicester has discovered.



It found that the age at which we learn words is key to understanding how people read later in life.



The study addresses a 20-year riddle: When researchers investigate reading behaviour in children they find different patterns. Some researchers have found children’s reading mimics that of adults, but others have seen a different pattern of reading behaviour. Psychologists have struggled for twenty years to offer a convincing explanation for why different studies looking at the same topic have found such different results.



Now research by Dr Tessa Webb in the School of Psychology at the University of Leicester sheds new light on the subject by taking into account the age at which words are learnt.



She said: “Children read differently from adults, but as they grow older, they develop the same reading patterns. When adults read words they learned when they were younger, they recognise them faster and more accurately than those they learned later in life.”



In her research children from three different school years read aloud common and rarely used words, with half of the words following spelling to sound rules and the other half not obeying them. Unlike previous studies, Dr Webb made sure her research considered word learning age as well.



She found that children in their first few years at school read the words differently from adults. However, by age 10, they were mimicking the reading pattern of adults. This suggests that the different pattern of results found in children compared to adults may be due to the fact that word learning age was not considered.



This led her to conclude that word learning age is a key aspect of reading that should not be left out of research, lest the results are unsound.



The results of this research could have implications in tackling reading-related disabilities, such as dyslexia, said Dr Webb.



Culture and the Interaction of Student Ethnicity with Reward Structure in Group Learning



This study tests the hypothesis that cultural differences in group orientation predict an interaction between the student variable—ethnicity—and a learning context variable—reward structure—on math performance after group learning. One hundred and thirty-two African-American and European-American female and male fourth and fifth grade students studied math estimation in one of three group learning contexts.



African-American and European-American students performed best in the aggregate in different contexts. Independent ratings of students' group-positive behaviors mirrored the two-way interaction between learning context and ethnicity.



The findings suggest that important student variables interact with the variable elements of group learning and should be studied in greater detail. They also support Boykin's (1994) contention that the cultural context of learning is a critical mediator of children's achievement.





More info:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a909978521~db=all~order=page





Facebook Doesn’t Hurt Grades



A recent draft manuscript suggested that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in college and graduate school (Karpinski, 2009). The report quickly became a media sensation and was picked up by hundreds of news outlets in a matter of days.



This new study argues that the results were based on correlational data in a draft manuscript that had not been published, or even considered for publication. The new paper attempts to replicate the results reported in the press release using three data sets: one with a large sample of undergraduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, another with a nationally representative cross sectional sample of American 14– to 22–year–olds, as well as a longitudinal panel of American youth aged 14–23.



In none of the samples do the authors find a robust negative relationship between Facebook use and grades. Indeed, if anything, Facebook use is more common among individuals with higher grades. They also examined how changes in academic performance in the nationally representative sample related to Facebook use and found that Facebook users were no different from non–users.



Complete report:

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2498/2181





Report: To Close Achievement Gaps, Close Gaps in Life Experiences and Conditions



Five years after a landmark Educational Testing Service (ETS) study identified racial/ethnic and income gaps in 14 life conditions and experiences that are associated with academic success, a new analysis acknowledges little progress in closing the gaps.

Parsing the Achievement Gap II updates ETS’s 2003 Policy Information Center study, Parsing the Achievement Gap: Baselines for Tracking Progress. The updated report identifies 16 factors ranging from birth weight and hunger to lead poisoning, parental involvement, and teacher quality that are related to academic performance. The report then looks at whether these important factors were distributed evenly across different racial/ethnic and income groups.

The new report concludes that while a few of the gaps in the achievement correlates have narrowed and a few have widened, overall, the gaps identified in the previous study remain unaltered and disturbing.

“The undeniable fact is that disparities in life experiences and conditions directly affect, for better or worse, cognitive development and academic achievement,” Paul E. Barton, co-author of the report says. “These 16 correlates span from birth to adolescence and include life experiences in the home before school, during school, after school and in the summer.”

Barton and co-author Richard J. Coley, however, make it clear that these 16 factors include school experiences as well as before-school and out-of-school experiences, and emphasize that the results should in no way diminish the profound importance of schools and their quality as keys to raising achievement and closing gaps.

Coley, Director of the ETS Policy Information Center explains, “Analyzing these correlates will help to further our understanding of what causes achievement gaps and how we can successfully address them. The correlates are best viewed as three clusters of factors—school factors, factors related to the home and school connection, and factors that are present both before and beyond school.”

A few of the report findings include:

School Factors

• Teacher preparation – Minority and low-income students are less likely to be taught by certified teachers and more likely to have math teachers with neither a major nor a minor in mathematics. The gap in students having teachers prepared in the subjects they teach widened between White and Hispanic students and remained about the same for the other populations.

• Fear and safety at school – Minority students are more likely to report issues of fear and safety at school. The gaps widened for students reporting the presence of street gangs and fights in school, and remained unchanged for students reporting feeling fearful in school.

Home and School Connection

• Parent participation – White students’ parents are more likely to attend a school event or to volunteer at school. The gap in parents volunteering in schools remained unchanged; the gap in parents attending school events narrowed.

Before and Beyond School

• Hunger and nutrition – Minority and low-income children were more likely to be food insecure. The White-Black gap was unchanged; the White-Hispanic gap narrowed.

• Excessive television watching – Minority and lower socioeconomic status children watch more television. The gap was unchanged between White and Black students; the gap widened among students whose parents have different education levels.

Barton and Coley conclude, “…the finding that these critical gaps in the life and school experiences of minority and low-income children still mirror gaps in school achievement as they did five years ago is very troubling and shows how much work there is to do and how early we need to start. And we have to start with a clear recognition of the depth of the causes of achievement gaps, and expand the scope of our efforts to eliminate them both inside and outside the schools.”

In addition to closing gaps in “beyond school” conditions, Coley emphasizes that we still need to improve the quality of children’s teachers and schools. Only by improving conditions both inside and outside of schools will we successfully close achievement gaps.



Complete report:

http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICPARSINGII.pdf
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