Voices from South and North in dialogue: on diversity and education for the future

In this article texts by scholars from South Africa, Sweden and Great Britain are analysed. They contributed as invited speakers to a conference in Sweden in 2009 on changing societies, values, religions and education. Here a South–North dialogue on diversity and the future of education is constructed through the way their conference contributions are presented and analysed. Democracy and gender also appear as crucial themes. Out of the original 12 keynote contributions to the conference a selection is made, meaning that seven of them are focused on. What can be observed is (a) that the contributors from South Africa connect diversity and social justice; (b) that the gender researchers critically discuss the risks of the North imposing its theoretical framework on the South and search for ways out of that and (c) a preoccupation with a renewal of education recognising diversity but also looking for what could come beyond such an emphasis and form a common ground. The article constitutes an example of shared knowledge production where South and North meet. Conditions for that are critically reflected upon methodologically.     

Language in science performance: do good readers perform better?

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Science performance is highly affected by students’ reading comprehension. Recently, there has been a growing attention to the role of linguistic...     

Naming speed in dyslexia and dyscalculia

In four carefully selected samples of 8- to 10-year old children with dyslexia (but age adequate arithmetic skills), dyscalculia (but age adequate reading skills), dyslexia/dyscalculia and controls a domain-general deficit in rapid automatized naming (RAN) was found for both dyslexia groups. Dyscalculic children exhibited a domain-specific deficit in rapid naming of quantities. This finding is in line with recent assumptions that dyscalculia is associated with a neurobiological deficit in the processing of numerosities. In the dyslexia/dyscalculia group, RAN deficits were additive, that is, the dyslexia/dyscalculia group exhibited the sum of the deficits found in the dyslexia only and dyscalculia only groups. This finding suggests that the cognitive bases of dyslexia and dyscalculia are independent from each other. Within the naming speed paradigm no differential impact of special demands on the executive functions inhibition and shifting was found for any of the four groups.     

Images of industrial life and vocational training: Scouting as a liminal space for educating a workers’ elite in 1920s Luxembourg

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at a specific set of corporate images, namely photographs of apprentices of the Luxembourg steel conglomerate ARBED, and analyses how young workers are depicted in these images. The paper draws on a collection of 2251 glass-plate negatives (re)presenting ARBED’s industrial cosmos, including its vocational school the Institut Emile Metz. The roughly 160 images of apprentices contained in the collection put on display the apprentices’ bodies and a variety of activities in different contexts. The images’ contents testify to the institute’s programmatic hybridity and the constant (re-)mix of formal and semi-formal learning activities intended to educate natural, urban, mobile and communal men and future workers. Our focus is on Boy Scouts’ activities in a variety of different environments, which have functioned as a liminal space for educating a workers’ elite, mitigating the risks of industrialisation and fostering social harmony and cultural belonging.     

Training reading fluency among poor readers of German: many ways to the goal

Outcomes of two training programs aimed at improving reading speed for 39 German-speaking poor readers in grades 2 and 4 were evaluated. During a 6-week training period, a specific target for children in a computer group was to improve reading of word-initial consonant clusters by practice in associating an orthographic unit with a corresponding phonological unit. Children in a paired reading group read books with an adult tutor. The results showed that, in reading words in which the computer-trained sublexical items were included, both groups exhibited similar improvement. A post hoc analysis suggested that computer training was associated with better reading skills with respect to the trained sublexical items; however, this improvement did not show large generalization effects to the words with the sublexical items. The paired reading group showed a more rapid gain in global word reading fluency than the computer group. Neither of the groups improved their pseudoword reading.

Development of morphological priming effects in reading aloud in the biscriptal Bosnian orthography

Reading and Writing - A substantial body of research has noted morphological priming effects in visual word recognition in deep orthographies, but it is still unclear whether similar effects exist...     

Infants of Depressed Mothers Exhibit Atypical Frontal Electrical Brain Activity during Interactions with Mother and with a Familiar, Nondepressed Adult

Previous studies have shown that infants of depressed mothers exhibit atypical frontal brain electrical activity when they are interacting with their mothers. Whereas typically developing infants exhibit greater left versus right frontal brain activity, infants of depressed mothers have been found to exhibit reduced relative left frontal activity. The left frontal brain region has been associated with the expression of positive emotions. In the present study, the question of whether the atypical pattern of brain activity found in infants of depressed mothers generalizes to situations not involving mother was addressed. Brain electrical activity was recorded from 13- to 15-month-old infants of depressed (N = 59) versus nondepressed (N = 40) mothers during a baseline condition, and during several social conditions that included a playful social interaction with a familiar experiments. Infants of depressed mothers exhibited reduced left relative to right frontal activity during the baseline condition, and during interactions with their mothers and with the familiar experimenter. The present results suggest that the atypical pattern of electrical brain activity found in infants of depressed mothers generalizes to a variety of situations, including positive interactions with nondepressed adults.     

A two-level study of predictors of private tutoring attendance at the beginning of secondary schooling in Germany: The role of individual learning support in the classroom

More and more students attend private supplementary tutoring to improve their academic achievement. Private tutoring might be understood as a reaction to insufficient instructional quality in school, especially regarding individual support. However, it might also be possible that parents generally see insufficient grades as an indicator of lacking support and engage a tutor in hopes of improvement or to enhance a competitive edge for their children. So far, the relationship between tutoring attendance and perceived individual learning support during classroom lessons has not been tested. We used multilevel analyses based on N = 2,842 students in 102 Grade 5 classrooms at German academic track schools to test for a relationship between private tutoring in several subjects and students’ shared perception of the instructional quality in these subjects. On the individual level, we controlled for typical predictors of private tutoring such as academic achievement and family income, as well as for additional variables such as working behaviour and parental homework assistance. In classrooms with more individual support, students were less likely to start private tutoring in English. However, we did not find comparable relationships for tutoring in mathematics and German. Therefore, school principals and educational policy-makers should monitor the incidence of private tutoring and consider within-school structured tutoring programmes as an effective measure to improve academic achievement and to meet parents’ desire for individualised instruction.     

Reading and Spelling Development Across Languages Varying in Orthographic Consistency: Do Their Paths Cross?

We examined the cross-lagged relations between reading and spelling in five alphabetic orthographies varying in consistency (English, French, Dutch, German, and Greek). Nine hundred and forty-one children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2 and were tested on word and pseudoword reading fluency and on spelling to dictation. Results indicated that the relations across languages were unidirectional: Earlier reading predicted subsequent spelling. However, we also found significant differences between languages in the strength of the effects of earlier reading on subsequent spelling. These findings suggest that, once children master decoding, the observed differences between languages are not related to the direction of the effects but to the strength of the effects from reading to spelling. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.