The Role of Passage Topic Knowledge in Typical and Poor Comprehenders' Recall

This dissertation examines the role of topic knowledge (TK) in comprehension among typical readers and those with Specifically Poor Comprehension (SPC), i.e., those who demonstrate deficits in understanding what they read despite adequate decoding. Previous studies of poor comprehension have focused on weaknesses in specific skills, such as word decoding and inferencing ability, but this dissertation examined a different factor: whether deficits in availability and use of TK underlie poor comprehension. It is well known that TK tends to facilitate comprehension among typical readers, but its interaction with working memory and word decoding is unclear, particularly among participants with deficits in these skills. Across several passages, we found that SPCs do in fact have less TK to assist their interpretation of a text. However, we found no evidence that deficits in working memory or word decoding ability make it difficult for children to benefit from their TK when they have it. Instead, children across the skill spectrum are able to draw upon TK to assist their interpretation of a passage. Because TK is difficult to assess and studies vary in methodology, another goal of this dissertation was to compare two methods for measuring it. Both approaches score responses to a concept question to assess TK, but in the first, a human rater assigns a score whereas in the second, a computer algorithm, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Landauer & Dumais, 1997) assigns a score. We found similar results across both methods of assessing TK, suggesting that a continuous measure is not appreciably more sensitive to variations in knowledge than discrete human ratings. This study contributes to our understanding of how best to measure TK, the factors that moderate its relationship with recall, and its role in poor comprehension. The findings suggest that teaching practices that focus on expanding TK are likely to improve comprehension across readers with a variety of abilities.

Reminiscences, 1755-1762: including the Louisburg and Quebec campaigns, manuscript, 1792

Autograph diary, in the hand of British officer Lt. Governor Henry Hamilton, written in Bermuda.

Transfer of Pattern Recall Skills May Contribute to the Development of Sport Expertise

Superior recall of domain-specific patterns is well established as a defining attribute of expert performers. Recent studies on the developmental histories of expert team ball sport players (e.g. Baker, Côté, & Abernethy, 2003a) also suggest that experts characteristically receive exposure to a wide range of sports in their developing years and that this related sports experience may reduce the amount of sport-specific training needed to become an expert. This study examined whether the facilitation of expertise associated with other sport experience might arise from positive transfer of pattern recall skills from one sport to another. Expert netball, basketball and field hockey players and experienced non-experts performed a recall task for patterns of play derived from each of these sports. Experts from sports different to those shown in the presented pattern consistently outperformed non-experts in their recall of defensive player positions, suggesting some selective transfer of pattern recall skills may indeed be possible

La place des emotions dans les campagnes du Front national et du Mouvement democrate pour les elections europeennes der 2014 = The place of emotions in the campaigns of the National Front and democrat movement for the 2014 European elections. Bruges Political Research Papers 43/2015.

No abstract.

Caesar's Gallic campaigns

"Revised and modernized version of Caesar's own story of his conquest of Gaul."--Foreword.

Populist hand-book for Kansas; a compilation from official sources of some facts for use in succeeding political campaigns.

Mode of access: Internet.

Lincoln, Nebraska ASAP telephone survey: a study in the effectiveness of a public information liquor campaign on alcohol and highway safety. Final report.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Office of Driver and Pedestrian Programs, Washington, D.C.

Minty and the cavalry. A history of cavalry campaigns in the western armies.

Includes rosters of officers of the 4th Mich., 7th Pa., 4th U.S. and 9th Pa. cavalry. A dozen or more other regiments were, at one time or another attached to the brigade.

Memoirs and services of the Eighty-third regiment, county of Dublin, from 1793 to 1907, including the campaigns of the regiment in the West Indies, Africa, the Peninsula, Ceylon, Canada, and India.

This Memoir ... was originally arranged and prepared for publication from September, 1793 ... to September, 1863, by Brevet Major Edward William Bray ... The later history ... has been collected from the Authentic Records preserved in the Regimental Orderly Room.