An assessment of the discriminant validity of the checklist of behavior alteration techniques: A test of the item desirability bias in prospective and experienced teachers’ likelihood‐of‐use ratings

This study assessed the discriminant validity of the checklist of Behavior Alteration Techniques. Specifically, the ability of the BATs checklist procedure to discriminate between the likelihood that individual BATs would be selected and the social desirability of those same BATs was examined. The BATs checklist should discriminate between the likelihood that individual BATs would be selected and the social desirability of those same BATs because 50 years of observational studies of teacher discipline behavior suggest that teachers typically and routinely employ negative and antisocial strategies to correct student misbehavior (Burleson & Waltman, 1993). In a within‐subject, repeated measures designs, prospective teachers and experienced teachers provided likelihood‐of‐use and social appropriateness ratings to the BATs checklist in the four hypothetical situations typically employed with the BATs checklist. As predicted, likelihood‐of‐use and social appropriateness ratings were significantly correlated. Thus, the BATs checklist is not able to discriminate between the likelihood that BATs would be used and the social appropriateness of those BATs. As Campbell and Fiske (1959) have argued, an instrument's discriminant validity is a minimum standard that social scientific instruments must meet.     

Kindergarten risk factors, cognitive factors, and teacher judgments as predictors of early reading in Dutch

This study focused on the predictive value of risk factors, cognitive factors, and teachers' judgments in a sample of 462 kindergartners for their early reading skills and reading failure at the beginning of Grade 1. With respect to risk factors, enrollment in speech-language therapy, history of dyslexia or speech-language problems in the family, and the role of gender were considered. None of these risk factors were significantly related to reading performance. Cognitive factors in this study included letter knowledge, rapid naming ability, and nonword repetition skills. Of these skills, letter knowledge seemed to have the highest correlation with reading. Kindergarten teachers' judgments, including a task assignment scale and teachers' predictions, demonstrated a significant relationship with reading. Finally, to judge whether these predictors could identify reading disabilities, the discriminatory power of all predictors was assessed and appeared to be insufficient. Implications for screening purposes are discussed.     

Individual variation in children's reading comprehension across digital text types

The present study examined children's digital text comprehension of digital text types linear digital text vs hypertext, with or without graphical navigable overviews. We investigated to what extent individual variation in children's comprehension could be explained by lexical quality (word reading efficiency and vocabulary knowledge), cognitive load factors (prior knowledge and working memory), text type and graphical overview. Participants were 93 sixth graders in a within‐subject design. Word reading efficiency, vocabulary knowledge and prior knowledge predicted children's digital comprehension scores, while working memory did not. Reading comprehension was equal for linear text or hypertext. However, the presence of an overview facilitated reading comprehension for readers with lower prior knowledge. It can be concluded that hypertexts with basic digital text features and accompanying comprehension questions are not more difficult for children than linear digital texts, that similar individual factors predict reading comprehension of linear text and hypertext, and that a graphical overview helps when prior knowledge is low.     

Phonemic awareness in Dutch kindergartners: Effects of task, phoneme position, and phoneme class

The aim of the present study was to provide more insight in the relative difficulty of four tasks testing phonemic awareness: (a) blending, (b) isolation, (c) segmentation, and (d) deletion. At the same time the roles of phoneme position and phoneme class were taken into account in a fully balanced way. To this purpose, 141 kindergartners were presented with four phonemic-manipulation tasks consisting of the same 32 CVC items. Children performed better on phoneme blending and phoneme isolation compared to phoneme segmentation and phoneme deletion. However, performance between and within phoneme tasks appeared also to be dependent on phoneme position. Phoneme class exerted effects within the initial and final position of the four different tasks. The effect of plosives and fricatives compared to that of nasals and liquids on performance was particularly striking. Our findings were explained in terms of sonority and degree of co-articulation in pre-vocalic and post-vocalic plosives.     

Language development in deaf children's interactions with deaf and hearing adults: a Dutch longitudinal study

The language development of two deaf girls and four deaf boys in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) and spoken Dutch was investigated longitudinally. At the start, the mean age of the children was 3;5. All data were collected in video-recorded semistructured conversations between individual children and deaf and hearing adults. We investigated the lexical richness and syntactic complexity of the children's utterances in SLN and spoken Dutch, as well as language dominance and interactional participation. Richness and complexity increase over time, as well as children's participation. An important outcome is that syntactic complexity is higher in utterances with both sign and speech. SLN does not have higher outcomes on richness or complexity, but is dominant in terms of frequency of use.     

Relations between the shape of a size-frequency distribution and the shape of a rank-frequency distribution

We study the dependence of the shape of the rank-frequency distribution g on the shape of the size-frequency distribution f and vice versa. We show mathematically that g is convexly decreasing if and only if f is monotonically decreasing and that g has an S-shape (i.e., g is first convexly decreasing and then concavely decreasing) if and only if f is first increasing and then decreasing.     

Predictors of reading literacy for first and second language learners

In this study an attempt was made to construct a multi-factor model predicting the development of reading literacy in the upper grades of primary school in the Netherlands for subgroups of 729 first language (L1) learners and 93 second language (L2) learners. Following a longitudinal design, it was explored to what extent the variation in reading literacy development in L1 and L2 from grade 4 to grade 6 can be explained from children’s word decoding, language, mathematics and nonverbal reasoning skills, reading motivation and self confidence as well as their home reading resources. The results showed that L1 and L2 learners differed in reading literacy skills, language, mathematics, and reasoning skills. Structural equation modelling showed that the reading literacy development in both L1 and L2 learners could be explained from decoding, language, mathematics and reasoning skills, as well as their motivation and self-confidence. A striking difference was the fact that home reading resources had an impact on reading literacy in L1 learners but not in L2 learners.     

Learning Phonologically Specific New Words Fosters Rhyme Awareness in Dutch Preliterate Children

How do children use phonological knowledge about spoken language in acquiring literacy? Phonological precursors of literacy include phonological awareness, speech decoding skill, and lexical specificity (i.e., the richness of phonological representations in the mental lexicon). An intervention study investigated whether early literacy skills can be enhanced by training lexical specificity. Forty-two prereading 4-year-olds were randomly assigned to either an experimental group that was taught pairs of new words that differed minimally or a control group that received numeracy training. The experimental group gained on a rhyme awareness task, suggesting that learning phonologically specific new words fosters phonological awareness.     

Word decoding development in incremental phonics instruction in a transparent orthography

The present longitudinal study aimed to investigate the development of word decoding skills during incremental phonics instruction in Dutch as a transparent orthography. A representative sample of 973 Dutch children in the first grade (M _age  = 6;1, SD = 0;5) was exposed to incremental subsets of Dutch grapheme–phoneme correspondences during 6 consecutive blocks of 3 weeks of phonics instruction. Children’s accuracy and efficiency of curriculum embedded word decoding were assessed after each incremental block, followed by a standardized word decoding measurement. Precursor measures of rapid naming, short-term memory, vocabulary, phonological awareness, and letter knowledge were assessed by the end of kindergarten and subsequently related to the word decoding efficiency in the first grade. The results showed that from the very beginning, children attained ceiling levels of decoding accuracy, whereas their efficiency scores increased despite the incremental character of the consecutive decoding assessments embedded in the curriculum. Structural equation modelling demonstrated high stability of the individual differences assessed by word decoding efficiency during phonics instruction during the first 5 months of the first grade. Curriculum embedded word decoding was highly related to standardized word decoding after phonics instruction was completed. Finally, early literacy and lexical retrieval, and to a lesser extent verbal and visual short term memory, predicted the first fundamental processes of mastering word decoding skills.