Primary Education Pupils Research Articles

Oral language acquisition by deaf pupils in primary education: impact of musical education

When a child has some hearing loss, a great number of interdependent factors of human development, and more particularly linguistic development that come into play, is apparent. From a school perspective, some requirements can be met in order to make school the best place to enhance this linguistic development, while at the same time the deaf child is educated in a normalized environment. The aim of this paper is to carry out a longitudinal follow‐up of a group of five deaf pupils educated in mainstream schools, considered as optimal for school integration, and to analyse their linguistic development considering both the excellence of the school and the use of a programme of musical education with deaf pupils throughout the period of study. These data are compared with those obtained from another sample of deaf pupils, educated in similar settings, who did not follow the aforementioned hearing training programme. The main results show that musical education has some positive effects on supra‐segmental aspects of language, on voice quality and on the structuring of simple sentences.

European and Intercultural Dimension in Greek Education

Negotiations concerning Greece’s accession into the European Union began as early as 1961, when a cooperation agreement was signed between Greece and the European Economic Community (EEC). These negotiations were concluded 20 years later, on 1 January 1981, when Greece became the tenth full member of the EU.[1] The next major step in Greece’s progress within Europe was integration into the Economic and Monetary Union in 2002. Greece has a 23-year history as a full member of the EU, and thus can be expected to have adopted many EU structures and regulations. One of the major parameters in the paper will be the transformation of Greece, over the last decade, from a migrant sender country into a host country. Indeed, migrant arrivals have come about largely against the backdrop of recent uncontrolled population movement following the collapse of the communist system in 1989, as well as that of the new world order and economic globalisation. The presence of approximately one million foreigners accounts for 10% of the population and has brought about a significant change in the country’s demographic makeup. Furthermore, the fact that almost 11% of the pupils in primary education come from 46 countries (IPODE, 2003) has forced Greek governments to take specific steps in education policy, which, as we shall see below, fall within the general term of ‘intercultural education’. These steps were taken, for the most part, in the 1990s, thus adding a third intercultural dimension to national and European counterparts. With the above data in hand, there will be an attempt to analyse and discuss the European and intercultural dimension comparatively, working on two levels: the political-institutional (educational policy) and the theoretical (pedagogical discourse). In particular, the major steps taken thus far by Greek governments regarding the European and intercultural dimension in education will be presented and commented on by comparison. Thereafter an outline will be offered of the theoretical discourse on the above two dimensions, as it has unfolded over the last two decades in Greece. Finally, an attempt will be made to arrive at some interim conclusions as to developments thus far and prospects for the two dimensions.

La televisión como agente socializador ante el 11-M: percepciones y reacciones de la infancia frente a los atentados terroristas

On March 11 2004 Spain suffered the bloodiest terrorist attack in its history. During this tragic day adult Spanish spectators received intensive information about the events over the television, but no attention was paid to the fact that a large sector of the audience lacked elements of judgment to decode the antecedents and consequences of what was shown on TV. The aim of our research was to explore the subjective experience of children in Madrid six months after the 11-M attacks. Based on a probabilistic sample of 606 pre-school and primary education pupils, the segmentation analysis shows, among other results, how in the majority of cases infant audiences lacked support from socialization agencies; how the selective memory of children reduces the events to the bloody images of the TV news coverage; and how exposure to pro-social contents promoted antiviolence attitudes in children.

CLUSTERING AND BAYESIAN NETWORK APPROACHES FOR DISCOVERING HANDWRITING STRATEGIES OF PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN

The aim of this paper is to assess the evolution in writing performance amongst typical pupils in primary education. More precisely, we propose ways of discovering groups of pupils sharing the same writing strategies during their primary education and methods for the temporal modeling of these pupils' writing strategies. For this purpose, online acquisition of writing and drawing tests have been performed three times during a period of one year for the same pupils under the same experimental conditions. A first approach, based on clustering, is applied to highlight clusters on a set of dynamic primitives chosen by an expert in the field of child development psychology. Results are presented by means of a comparative study between features of each group and writing tests. An analysis of within and between-strategies migration of pupils over time is also conducted to highlight pupils who change (or fail to change) their writing strategies during this period of one year. A second approach is used to model the problem by means of a probabilistic graphical model, i.e. a bayesian network. Expert knowledge partially determines the bayesian network structure, in which the writing strategy is represented by a hidden variable whose cardinality is estimated by the results of the clustering approach. By considering that each writing test is represented by its own (local) strategy and that there exists a global strategy which deals with each local strategy, we propose a Global Hierarchical Model. The results of our hierarchical model structured using real data highlight, among others, two global strategies that correspond to normo-writer pupils and more advanced normo-writers. A longitudinal and temporal study of the evolution of the pupils in these strategies shows that these two strategies are consistent.

Construction and Validation of a Test for Inductive Reasoning1

Summary We present in this paper a test for inductive reasoning (TIR), which consists of two versions that can be used to assess the inductive reasoning development of third-grade pupils in primary education. The test versions can also be used in combination with a training program for inductive reasoning. Two experiments using samples of 954 and 145 pupils were carried out to investigate the psychometric properties of the tests, including validity. Item response theory (IRT) analyses revealed that the scores on the two TIR tests gave meaningful inductive reasoning summaries. This was supported by analyses of the convergent and divergent validity of the TIR tests. IRT analyses were used to equate the two TIR test versions such that the scores can be compared on a common scale. Possible explanations for the misfit of items that were deleted from the TIR tests are discussed.

Lezen Volgen In Het Basisonderwijs Met Liskal

The use of the Kalman filter in the Dutch pupil monitoring system LISKAL makes it possible to reduce with 30 to 50% the estimation error variance resulting from Bartlett's well-known cross-sectional factor score estimator. The PC-program LISKAL is based on a longitudinal LISREL model of reading achievements of pupils in primary education. It combines past and present information from educational test scores to estimate optimally individual pupil's achievements in reading skills: decoding speed, reading comprehension and spelling. It is explained how LISKAL works and how it can be used by the teacher in the class room. Most LISKAL results are given in graphical form. Different kinds of information are provided by LISKAL: 1) the individual pupil's achievements are compared at successive time points with those of a normative group, 2) the pupil is compared with itself at previous points in time, 3) on the basis of the model predictions can be made of future achievements to enable the teacher to take timely intervention measures, 4) by comparing predicted development with actual development the effect of intervention measures can be evaluated, 5) in addition to individual developmental curves the program also generates mean curves for groups of pupils as, for example, classes or schools. In the present version of LISKAL achievement variables are present as standardized variables in the form of z-scores, having mean 0 and standard deviation 1 at each point in time. This implies relative assessment in relation to a normative group. However, teachers are often interested in absolute developmental curves, especially for low achieving pupils. The problem of estimating absolute developmental curves can also be solved by means of the Kalman filter. The LISREL model on which it has to be based is more complicated, however. Absolute assessment will be added as an option in a new version of the LISKAL program based on a new research project with a nationwide sample of 3430 pupils.