Correlates of early reading comprehension skills: a componential analysis

This study had three main aims. First, we examined to what extent listening comprehension, vocabulary, grammatical skills and verbal short-term memory (VSTM) assessed prior to formal reading instruction explained individual differences in early reading comprehension levels. Second, we examined to what extent the three common component skills, namely vocabulary, grammar and VSTM explained the relationship between kindergarten listening comprehension and early reading comprehension levels. Third, we examined the relative contributions of word-reading and listening comprehension skills to early reading comprehension in Turkish. For this purpose, 56 Turkish-speaking children were followed from kindergarten (mean age = 67.7 months) into Grade 2 (mean age = 90.6 months). The relative role of kindergarten listening comprehension, vocabulary, VSTM and grammatical skills in later reading comprehension tended to vary across time, and they partly explained the relationship between listening comprehension and reading comprehension. Finally, as anticipated, listening comprehension, rather than word-reading , was found to play a more powerful role in children’s reading comprehension levels even during the early primary grades. These results contradicted those reported in English and can be explained by the rapid development of accurate word-reading skills due to the consistency of the grapheme–phoneme relationships of the Turkish orthography.

Reflections on designing a Biology/Humanities interdisciplinary module

This paper uses the reflections of a recent workshop on biology and the humanities subject areas to consider the potential for designing a first year interdisciplinary module that brings together teachers and learners in the Biosciences with their counterparts in English and History. It considers three building blocks of module design: aims and objectives; teaching and learning strategies; and assessment; and provides a commentary on the discussion of interdisciplinarity in the broader literature. The authors argue that interdisciplinary teaching and learning must be transformative, but not in the way many previous advocates of interdisciplinarity have assumed. Rather than transcending disciplines, the authors contend that the aim should be to enhance disciplinary understanding. Learners should emerge from the interdisciplinary module not having lost their identity as biologists, but having enhanced it. They should have become ‘better’ biologists in the sense of having developed a broader, critical understanding of the precepts of their discipline, as a first step to an understanding of biology inflected with a literary and historical awareness.

Reading together: an ethnographic study of a reading group for visually-impaired people

Because reading groups historically have been under-researched (Long, 2003), the literature in this field is limited, presenting this as an interesting area for researchers. A need for further research is also explained by the fact that the traditional model of a reading group has been expanded through recent library policies leading to the development of specific group types such as groups for visually-impaired people (VIPs). To date, there have been no long-term empirical studies of these groups. This thesis, therefore, makes a significant contribution to the literature in this field by providing an in-depth exploration of a VIP reading group. The thesis is an ethnographic study which follows a library-run reading group for visually-impaired people from its formation in September 2007 and concentrates on five of the group members. The methodology for the study is influenced by participatory approaches to research involving disabled people by inviting the participants to participate in the co-creation of knowledge about themselves (French & Swain, 2000, p. 1). It is also influenced by new ethnography’s preference for multi-layered texts by exploring both the individual and collective experiences of the participants. While the participants are defined throughout as readers, visual-impairment plays a role in their experiences. I show that visually-impaired readers and reading groups sit within a complex web of factors which impact on their experiences both as individual readers and as a group. The study also shows that VIP reading groups challenge traditional definitions of reading as a visual activity. The study explores issues of power and concludes that, because ownership of the group lies with the library, this challenges the idea of reading groups empowering their members. Furthermore, offering discrete groups for visually-impaired readers means that the role these groups play in contributing to agendas for social inclusion is problematic. The study concludes by making suggestions as to how these groups might develop to be more inclusive and empowering.

Beyond description to pattern: The contribution of Batesonian epistemology to critical realist research

This paper proposes a limitation to epistemological claims to theory building prevalent in critical realist research. While accepting the basic ontological and epistemological positions of the perspective as developed by Roy Bhaskar, it is argued that application in social science has relied on sociological concepts to explain the underlying generative mechanisms, and that in many cases this has been subject to the effects of an anthropocentric constraint. A novel contribution to critical realist research comes from the work and ideas of Gregory Bateson. This is in service of two central goals of critical realism, namely an abductive route to theory building and a commitment to interdisciplinarity. Five aspects of Bateson’s epistemology are introduced: (1) difference, (2) logical levels of abstraction, (3) recursive causal loops, (4) the logic of metaphor, and (5) Bateson’s theory of mind. The comparison between Bateson and Bhaskar’s ideas is seen as a form of double description, illustrative of the point being raised. The paper concludes with an appeal to critical realists to start exploring the writing and outlook of Bateson himself.

Since we have been a dialogue: Blanchot's 'Entretiens'

At the turn of the 1960s, Maurice Blanchot began publishing texts that he named entretiens, this change in his writing responding to what deconstruction sees as the closure of logocentric or continuous discourse. Paradoxically, this closure does not prevent such discourse, in which philosophical enquiry and technological change are intertwined, from dominating the modern world. By changing his writing, and by reiterating the dialogical form so central to metaphysical tradition since Plato, Blanchot gives voice to the tensions between continuity and its ‘outside’, between philosophy and literature. This is one sense in which his entretiens do not engage in a representation of difference, but instead open themselves to the inflections of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls le partage des voix.

Using mobile devices to enhance undergraduate field research

Mobile devices can enhance undergraduate research projects and students’ research capabilities. The use of mobile devices such as tablet computers will not automatically make undergraduates better researchers, but their use should make investigations, writing, and publishing more effective and may even save students time. We have explored some of the possibilities of using “tablets” and “smartphones” to aid the research and inquiry process in geography and bioscience fieldwork. We provide two case studies as illustration of how students working in small research groups use mobile devices to gather and analyze primary data in field-based inquiry. Since April 2010, Apple’s iPad has changed the way people behave in the digital world and how they access their music, watch videos, or read their email much as the entrepreneurs Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive intended. Now with “apps” and “the cloud” and the ubiquitous references to them appearing in the press and on TV, academics’ use of tablets is also having an impact on education and research. In our discussion we will refer to use of smartphones such as the iPhone, iPod, and Android devices under the term “tablet”. Android and Microsoft devices may not offer the same facilities as the iPad/iphone, but many app producers now provide versions for several operating systems. Smartphones are becoming more affordable and ubiquitous (Melhuish and Falloon 2010), but a recent study of undergraduate students (Woodcock et al. 2012, 1) found that many students who own smartphones are “largely unaware of their potential to support learning”. Importantly, however, students were found to be “interested in and open to the potential as they become familiar with the possibilities” (Woodcock et al. 2012). Smartphones and iPads could be better utilized than laptops when conducting research in the field because of their portability (Welsh and France 2012). It is imperative for faculty to provide their students with opportunities to discover and employ the potential uses of mobile devices in their learning. However, it is not only the convenience of the iPad or tablet devices or smartphones we wish to promote, but also a way of thinking and behaving digitally. We essentially suggest that making a tablet the center of research increases the connections between related research activities.

Transformation through translation: translation policies at Amnesty International

International non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are powerful political players who aim to influence global society. In order to be effective on a global scale, they must communicate their goals and achievements in different languages. Translation and translation policy play an essential role here. Despite NGOs’ important position in politics and society, not much is known about how these organisations, who often have limited funds available, organise their translation work. This study aims to contribute to Translation Studies, and more specifically to investigating institutional translation, by exploring translation policies at Amnesty International, one of the most successful and powerful human rights NGOs around the world. Translation policy is understood as comprising three components: translation management, translation practices, and translation beliefs, based on Spolsky’s study of language policy (2004). The thesis investigates how translation is organised and what kind of policies different Amnesty offices have in place, and how this is reflected in their translation products. The thesis thus also pursues how translation and translation policy impact on the organisation’s message and voice as it is spread around the world. An ethnographic approach is used for the analysis of various data sets that were collected during fieldwork. These include policy documents, guidelines on writing and translation, recorded interviews, e-mail correspondence, and fieldnotes. The thesis at first explores Amnesty’s global translation policy, and then presents the results of a comparative analysis of local translation policies at two concrete institutions: Amnesty International Language Resource Centre in Paris (AILRC-FR) and Amnesty International Vlaanderen (AIVL). A corpus of English source texts and Dutch (AIVL) and French (AILRC-FR) target texts are analysed. The findings of the analysis of translation policies and of the translation products are then combined to illustrate how translation impacts on Amnesty’s message and voice. The research results show that there are large differences in how translation is organised depending on the local office and the language(s), and that this also influences the way in which Amnesty’s message and voice are represented. For Dutch and French specifically, translation policies and translation products differ considerably. The thesis describes how these differences are often the result of different beliefs and assumptions relating to translation, and that staff members within Amnesty are not aware of the different conceptions of translation that exist within Amnesty International as a formal institution. Organising opportunities where translation can be discussed (meetings, workshops, online platforms) can help in reducing such differences. The thesis concludes by suggesting that an increased awareness of these issues will enable Amnesty to make more effective use of translation in its fight against human rights violations.

Introducing Undergraduate Students to Science

Understanding the scientific method fosters the development of critical thinking and logical analysis of information. Additionally, proposing and testing a hypothesis is applicable not only to science, but also to ordinary facts of daily life. Knowing the way science is done and how its results are published is useful for all citizens and mandatory for science students. A 60-h course was created to offer undergraduate students a framework in which to learn the procedures of scientific production and publication. The course`s main focus was biochemistry, and it was comprised of two modules. Module I dealt with scientific articles, and Module II with research project writing. Module I covered the topics: 1) the difference between scientific knowledge and common sense, 2) different conceptions of science, 3) scientific methodology, 4) scientific publishing categories, 5) logical principles, 6) deductive and inductive approaches, and 7) critical reading of scientific articles. Module II dealt with 1) selection of an experimental problem for investigation, 2) bibliographic revision, 3) materials and methods, 4) project writing and presentation, 5) funding agencies, and 6) critical analysis of experimental results. The course adopted a collaborative learning strategy, and each topic was studied through activities performed by the students. Qualitative and quantitative course evaluations with Likert questionnaires were carried out at each stage, and the results showed the students` high approval of the course. The staff responsible for course planning and development also evaluated it positively. The Biochemistry Department of the Chemistry Institute of the University of Sao Paulo has offered the course four times.

Recensionernas retorik : Om könsroller i kulturjournalistiken

At the centre of this study lies the question if normative gender thinking affects the way poetry gets reviewed and how the reviews are written, this in relation to both the gender of the reviewer and the poet. The study crosses three academic fields; gender studies, poetry and journalism, and is based on the cultural studies theory of media affecting and even creating the world around it. The study is based on two types of analysis. One quantitative analysis based on the thematic criticism theory about detail studies that shows bigger patterns, this analysis focuses on how the poet and his/hers work are being treated in the reviews in areas such as how much space they´re given in the newspapers, how they are named by the reviewer and the tendency to quote the reviewed work.  And one qualitative analysis based on the new criticism method of close reading, that focuses on the reviewers way of writing and how that may be connected with theories of gender differences, this both connected to the gender of the reviewers and the poets. The material chosen for this study are all the reviews that were published in the same newspapers and that reviewed two specific poetry works by two specific poets chosen with great sensibility to age and career so that their difference in gender would be the most significant difference between them. The works were chosen based on year of publishing, they were supposed to be published as newly as possible and as close to each other in time as possible. The works I ended up with were Dimman av allt (2001) and Svart som silver (2008) by Bruno K. Öijer and Silverskåp (2000) and Nu försvinner vi eller ingår (2007) by Birgitta Lillpers. The results of this study show several differences in how poetry is being judged and how poetry reviews are being written are connected with the gender of the poets and the reviewer. Lillpers got 35% less space in the newspapers and Öijers poetry got quoted a lot more which confirms that female poetry often is considered as less important than the male poetry, and that men in general tends to be judged as more professional than woman. The male reviewers tended to express themselves with greater certainty than the female reviewers who held a more professional tone in their reviews and focused more on the technical aspects of the poetry. This confirms the theory of the male words are being looked upon as the truth but contradicts the theory of women writing more based on personal experience and of women being less skilled in language techniques. In conclusion, there are differences in how poetry gets reviewed and how the reviews are written that are connected to the genders of the poet and the reviewer but these differences are complex and does not show a clear normative way of thinking about gender

Higher salaries, more teaching, better performance? The effects of the introduction of the minimum salary for teachers in Brazil

De acordo com a literatura empírica, há fortes evidências de que, após o controle de características socioeconômicas dos alunos, a qualidade dos professores é o fator mais importante para explicar o desempenho do aluno em testes padronizados. No entanto, não há consenso sobre como sistemas públicos de ensino podem melhorar a qualidade dos professores. Será que o pagamento de salários mais elevados a professores da rede pública impactam a qualidade dos professores nas escolas públicas? O Governo Federal brasileiro introduziu, em 2009, piso salarial nacional para os professores de escolas públicas, provocando um perceptível aumento exógeno dos salários dos professores municipais. O principal objetivo desta tese é avaliar os impactos de curto prazo da elevação linear e incondicional do salário do professor na qualidade da educação. Devido à ausência de dados secundários sobre o valor do salário-base de professores entre 2008 e 2013, tivemos que realizar um levantamento com as Secretarias Municipais de Educação para reunir informação sobre a estrutura da carreira docente e sobre os salários-bases nesse período. Com base em nossa pesquisa de campo, o primeiro capítulo investiga a conformidade dos sistemas municipais de ensino ao piso salarial nacional para professores de redes públicas. Encontramos que fatores não observáveis/observados são determinantes para explicar a variabilidade salarial verificada entre os municípios e o cumprimento da lei, o que embasa nossa estratégia de identificação com base em métodos de diferença em diferenças, combinados com pareamento com base em escore de propensão. O segundo capítulo centra-se na estimativa do impacto da elevação dos salários dos professores sobre a proficiência dos alunos de 5º ano do ensino fundamental municipal. De acordo com estes resultados, o aumento salarial incondicional não gerou uma expansão da proficiência escolar dos alunos, pelo menos no curto prazo. Embora não tenham sido detectados impactos na aprendizagem dos alunos, alguns mecanismos de transmissão do aumento salarial para melhores resultados educacionais podem já ter sido ativados. Assim, o principal objetivo do terceiro capítulo é avaliar o impacto dos aumentos de salário sobre a qualidade dos professores atuais e dos potenciais futuros professores. Avaliamos o impacto de aumentos de salário sobre o desempenho dos professores no ENADE, uma proxy de sua qualidade, e sobre a atratividade dos cursos de ensino superior associados à carreira docente. Essa atratividade é medida por meio da qualidade dos que entram nos respectivos cursos superiores, de acordo com seu desempenho no Enem. Neste último capítulo, aplicamos modelo de Tripla-Diferenças visando controlar dois tipos de potenciais fatores de confusão: (i) mudanças no desempenho dos professores (potenciais futuros professores) entre grupos de municípios, que foram submetidos ao tratamento e os que não foram tratados, que nada têm a ver com a política; e (ii) as alterações no desempenho de todos os professores (alunos) que vivem no município em que houve a elevação salarial devido à introdução da lei. As estimativas obtidas indicam que a elevação salarial gerou efeitos leves sobre a qualidade dos professores e sobre a atratividade dos cursos relacionados à carreira docente.

Neuroscience and education: prime time to build the bridge

As neuroscience gains social traction and entices media attention, the notion that education has much to benefit from brain research becomes increasingly popular. However, it has been argued that the fundamental bridge toward education is cognitive psychology, not neuroscience. We discuss four specific cases in which neuroscience synergizes with other disciplines to serve education, ranging from very general physiological aspects of human learning such as nutrition, exercise and sleep, to brain architectures that shape the way we acquire language and reading, and neuroscience tools that increasingly allow the early detection of cognitive deficits, especially in preverbal infants. Neuroscience methods, tools and theoretical frameworks have broadened our understanding of the mind in a way that is highly relevant to educational practice. Although the bridge’s cement is still fresh, we argue why it is prime time to march over it.

A literatura na sala de aula: uma alternativa de ensino transdisciplinar

The present thesis studies the appropriate education of the literary gender based in an approach of trans-disciplinary teaching. The main objectives will be to survey the degree of trans-disciplinarity of the literary reading in classrooms and to propose the literary reading as an alternative of trans-disciplinary teaching. The theoretical contributions, which sustain the lines of central argument of this thesis, are related to the critical theories on the epistemological and methodological crisis in the speech of the modernity; the emergency of an emerging paradigm under the optics of the speech of the post-modernity; the theories concerned to curriculums and their interrelations with the school teaching; the theories of the complexity and of the inter and trans-disciplinarity; theories of the reading and of the literature, more precisely the literary semiology and the aesthetics of the acceptance; theories about the pedagogic mediation starting from presupposed and trans-disciplinary principles. The methodological foundations, of the type inter and trans-disciplinary, which anchor the approach of the study is related to a line of qualitative analyses applied the teaching-learning situation accomplished during the data collection during the empiric stage of the research. The analyzed corpus is composed of episodes originated from the classes with literary texts accomplished in the months of June and December of 2005, under the orientation of a complex and trans-disciplinary didacticism. The involved subjects are students in the age group of 9 and 13 years of age from a public school in the county of Cabo de Santo Agostinho, in the State of Pernambuco. Starting from the discoveries found during the research, so much bibliographical, as that of the field, it is possible to conclude, among other things, that the literary reading, when mediated accordingly in the classroom, is a trans-disciplinary object of high degree, because the literary reading can allow and make it possible to the real reader, through a necessary process of speculation on life and its unfolding, solid reflection around the individual and collective occurrences so much in simpler instances as in more complex ones

Olhares sobre a formação do professor de matemática. Imagem da profissão e escrita de si

The main focus of this thesis is the formation of a mathematical teacher at a college institution. The general aim is to describe and to analyze the formation process of a mathematical teacher which is an undergraduate student in Mathematics at the Instituto de Educação Superior Presidente Kennedy IFESP, in Natal-RN. It is based on a qualitative ethnographic approach, and has its theoretical anchorage in the (auto)biographical narratives, the social representative theories, and the mathematical education. The number of participants in this investigation was 12 undergraduate students, which corresponds to 25% of the total number of students. The corpus utilized in our analysis included 48 (auto)biographical essays, 12 (auto)biographies (formation's memories), and 12 contextualization files, besides the research's diary. The sources were obtained from the whole program of studies, i.e. from November 2003 to December 2006. The analysis revealed that the reminiscences of the 12 students' academic trajectory influenced their professional formation, since their images of a mathematical teacher were intrinsically related to the one they had before. These representations were being either demolished or constructed in a network along the assertive image of their profession, changing afterwards the mathematical representation and the teaching way of this discipline. Our study also shows that the beginning of their teacher career was marked by mechanical practices influenced by their old teachers. The (trans)formation of themselves and their teaching practices happened in a smooth way as soon as they increased their knowledgements in Mathematics, and it reflected upon the way they learned mathematics. The writing of their (auto)biographies helped the set up of new knowledgements, leaving to a self-consciousness as well as a self-formation, and contributed for the construction of a new way to see and to live the profession. Therefore, a mathematical teacher, for the undergraduate students of the IFESP involved in this work, is made at the interface of the familiar, academic, and professional context, besides the reflexive writings about the formation path, the way of life and the relationships among them

Adelle de Oliveira: trajetória de vida e prática Pedagógica (1900-1940)

This work analyses pedagogical practices of Adelle Sobral de Oliveira, from 1900 to 1940, in order to notice how her performance as educator and administrator took place in Externato Angelo Varela in the Rio Grande do Norte city of Ceará-Mirim within a time in which the public teaching started to be considered modern in the State. Adelle was a self learner who developed an important role as a mentality mentor of a generation in the region. As the research corpus we have taken the five Reading Books written by Felisberto de Carvalho used by Adelle in her Externato, interviews with her ex-students and researches in the newspapers of her time, in the Public Archives and in the Historical and Geographic Institute of Rio Grande do Norte, and also in the governors messages, Education Department documents such as laws, and government decrees and acts. It was also taken as a research font the Publich Archives of Ceará-Mirim. The aim of this PhD thesis is understand the primary instruction spreading and modernization in the countryside of Rio Grande do Norte, which began with her teaching pedagogical practices. The research results show Adele Oliveira used practical and experimental modern methodological teaching methods in the subjects she taught. Due to this, in her scholar routine, she avoided physical punishment and mechanical teaching and learning strategies

Corpo e escrita: linhas e entrelinhas da produção de conhecimento em sala de aula

Body and writing: Lines and between-lines of production of knowledge in the classroom it is an ethnographic research, longitudinal character, based on experience while experienced educator of the Escola Municipal Professor Amadeu Araújo, located in the city of Natal-RN, from which are made reflections about texts written by students who have distorted age/education level, in the process of literacy. Here as initial goal: to discuss the production of students writing as a process body, considering the record of experiences and the impressions they have made during the teaching process. We initially by a conception of phenomenological body, by understanding it in its complexity, a phenomenon that is made from its relationship with the world and with the Other. The records examined were produced between the year 2000 and 2005 involving writings of 106 students, constituting a universe of 136 texts, from which, delimited a corpus of 27 texts. The relevance with respect to the theme and recurrence in which they were detected, were up to elements that allowed a systematization methodology, defining the following units of analysis: Body, written in everyday; body, written and sexuality; body, written and enjoyment poetics; body, writing and other stories. We used the techniques of search, participant observation, based on the actions and interactions body expressed during the experiment and the analysis of documents that consisted of students in the texts and secondary sources, among them, the records of daily class, reports and projects developed, as well as reports of my pedagogical practice, as a researcher inserted in the investigative process. The experience developed, showed a writing school able to express nuances of human complexity, showing that learning is made in the action body, crossed by various forms of language and pointing to the relevance of a pedagogical work able to articulate the dialogue between the written and registrations body of the students, as subjects of learning