Year Of Tuition Research Articles

Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine.

Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine.

Persistent handwriting problems are hard to predict: A longitudinal study of the development of handwriting in primary school

BackgroundAfter one year of tuition, up to a third of primary school children show insufficient handwriting. It is unclear whether this early insufficient handwriting predicts persistent handwriting problems, because there is a dearth of studies that followed developmental trajectories longitudinally. AimsTo describe handwriting development in primary school children longitudinally and to determine predictive positive value and sensitivity of early handwriting assessment. To analyse whether underlying abilities helps early identification of persistent handwriting problems. Methods173 primary school children were yearly assessed for four years using the Concise Assessment Scale for Children’s Handwriting and the Beery Buktenica developmental test of visual-motor integration. ResultsBoth quality and speed of handwriting increased with years of tuition, with a pronounced increase in quality between two and three years of writing tuition. Sensitivity and positive predictive value were low. The only significant predictor of handwriting quality was handwriting quality in the previous year. For handwriting speed, no significant developmental model was revealed. ConclusionsQuality and speed of handwriting after one year of tuition is not sufficiently predictive for distinguishing between transient insufficient handwriting and persistent handwriting problems three years later. Practitioners should hold back when referring children for remedial teaching.

McKinney Fellowship in acoustics at ARL:UT

The McKinney Fellowship in Acoustics is a graduate research fellowship awarded to one student per year by Applied Research Laboratories at The University of Texas at Austin (ARL:UT). Created in 2006 and named after former lab director Chester M. McKinney, the fellowship is meant to foster quality research in acoustics while maintaining the strong connection between ARL:UT and the Graduate Program in Acoustics in the Cockrell School of Engineering. The fellowship provides up to three years of tuition and fees as well as a graduate research assistantship and travel expenses for the purpose of performing work toward a master’s or doctoral degree on a topic related to the acoustics research and development performed at ARL:UT. In this talk, the implementation of the McKinney Fellowship program will be given, as well as an overview of the research that has been done by the 10 McKinney Fellows of the past decade. The first author, a past McKinney Fellow, will also offer some personal perspective on the program.

Dialectical awareness in early literacy interventions

The present research investigated the potential link between low literacy acquisition levels and dialectal differences between the non-standard English spoken by many children from lower socio-economic schools in New Zealand in normal day-to-day conversation and the standard English used as the basis of literacy work. The work focused on assessing improvements in literacy of two students from a low decile school in New Zealand who showed evidence of common use of non-standard English. These two children were selected as they were relatively young learners (both approximately 7 years old with about 2 years of formal literacy learning) and because one showed literacy weaknesses in word-level tasks, and the other had more problems in writing. The two students each received two 30 minute sessions a week over an 8-week period of literacy intervention support that focused on linking letter sequences and language sounds: phonological awareness training linked to literacy. However, the tailored interventions also targeted those areas of language where the non-standard English of the children differed from a standard form more consistent with accurate writing. Despite both children having shown poor progress in literacy over the previous 2 years of tuition, the present intervention showed greater than expected improvements between pre- and post-intervention literacy measures of word and non-word reading, word spelling and writing, as well as phonemic awareness. This single-case intervention research suggests that programs aimed at linking letters and sounds may show increased success if attending to both cognitive and dialectical differences of the students.

Lucien E. Morris, MD, Aqualumnus, Inventor, Academic and Historian

Lucien E. Morris, MD, Aqualumnus, Inventor, Academic and Historian

Literacy i språkfagene: kunnskaper, ferdigheter og vurdering

This article discusses reading and writing in a foreign language (English, French, Spanish, German etc.) Foreign language learning carries an additional challenge compared to other school subjects. The foreign language is both the subject the students are learning and the language they are learning in. Therefore, the students must reach a certain language level before they can communicate in the foreign language. Likewise, their literacy skills in their mother language can only be transferred to their foreign language when they have reached a certain communicative level in the foreign language. Some students struggle to reach this level, referred to as the threshold level (B1), during the two to five years of tuition. Students also need help from the teacher in order to develop literacy strategies in the foreign language. In order to scaffold the students’ literacy development, the teachers need knowledge about the reading and writing processes. How can teachers develop an instructional design that promotes literacy in their classroom? How can they give feedback that moves the students forward? How can this be done in a digital context? This article tries to answer these questions.

Some Med Ed Traditions Showing Their Age

Some Med Ed Traditions Showing Their Age