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Martin Burrett

When do speech difficulties in children matter for literacy? - 7 views

ukedchat.com/...n-children-matter-for-literacy

speech SEN speech difficulties

shared by Martin Burrett on 08 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Martin Burrett on 08 Nov 16
     
    A new study found that speech difficulties are linked with difficulties in learning to read when children first start school, but these effects are no longer apparent at 8 years of age. Researchers confirmed that early language impairment that co-occurs with speech difficulties predicts poor literacy skills at both 5½ and 8 years of age. Having a family history of dyslexia had a small but significant effect on literacy at both ages, above and beyond the effects of speech and language...
Don Doehla

The Importance of Fluency and Automaticity for Efficient Reading - 43 views

www.resourceroom.net/...2002_automaticity.asp

Reading fluency research article resources

shared by Don Doehla on 21 Aug 13 - Cached
  • Don Doehla on 21 Aug 13
     
    The reading process involves two separate but highly interrelated areas - word identification and comprehension. It is well established that difficulties in automatic word recognition significantly affect a reader's ability to effectively comprehend what they are reading (Lyon, 1995; Torgeson, Rashotte, and Alexander, 2001). Even mild difficulties in word identification can pull attention away from the underlying meaning, reduce the speed of reading, and create the need to reread selections to grasp the meaning. Many students who struggle to learn to read are able, with appropriate instruction, to compensate for initial reading problems by becoming accurate decoders but fail to reach a level of sufficient fluency to become fast and efficient readers. Thus, the development of techniques for improving automaticity and fluency is critical. Although the research is clear that a systematic alphabetic approach to teaching beginning readers is more effective than a whole word approach (Adams, 1990; Chall, 1996; Snow, Burns and Griffin, 1009), the most effect ways to develop fluency are less well understood.
Mr. Eason

Educational Leadership:Reading: The Core Skill:The Challenge of Challenging Text - 131 views

www.ascd.org/...lenge-of-Challenging-Text.aspx

teaching text complexity literacy

shared by Mr. Eason on 24 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The new standards instead propose that teachers move students purposefully through increasingly complex text to build skill and stamina.
  • higher-order thinking in reading depends heavily on knowledge of word meanings.
  • Students' ability to comprehend a piece of text depends on the number of unfamiliar domain-specific words and new general academic terms they encounter.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • If students are to interpret the meanings such complex sentence structures convey, they need to learn how to make sense of the conventions of text—phrasing, word order, punctuation, and language.
  • Students who are aware of the patterns authors use to communicate complex information have an advantage in making sense of text.
  • maintaining understanding across a text.
  • Students' background knowledge, including developmental, experiential, and cognitive factors, influences their ability to understand the explicit and inferential qualities of a text.
  • building skills, establishing purpose, and fostering motivation.
  • even students who have basic decoding skills sometimes struggle to deploy these skills easily and accurately enough to get a purchase on challenging text. To help these students develop reading fluency, teachers should give them lots of practice with reading the same text, as well as instruction to help them develop a stronger sense of where to pause in sentences, how to group words, and how their voices should rise or fall at various junctures when reading aloud.
  • A final determinant of text difficulty, however, depends on the reader's prior knowledge.
  • pair repeated readings of the same text with questions that require the student to read closely for detail and key ideas.
  • Ongoing, solid vocabulary instruction
  • also on general academic words.
  • also explore the connections among words,
  • In contrast, in reading history and literature, readers need to be concerned with not just the causes of events, but also the human intentions behind these causes.
  • teachers should not convey so much information that it spoils the reading or enables students to participate in class without completing the reading; rather, they should let students know what learning to expect from the reading.
  • Teachers may be tempted to try to make it easier for students by avoiding difficult texts. The problem is, easier work is less likely to make readers stronger.
  • You need to create successive successes.
  • Students experience success in the company of their teacher, who combines complex texts with effective instruction.
  • Christine Dailey on 24 Mar 12
     
    What makes text difficult and how to teach skills for successful comprehension.
Martin Burrett

Early intervention is better for children overcoming reading difficulties - 5 views

ukedchat.com/...reading-intervention

reading research

shared by Martin Burrett on 18 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • Martin Burrett on 18 Oct 18
     
    "A University of Alberta education researcher who achieved dramatic results with early assessment and intervention to help Grade 1 and 2 students with reading difficulties says there's still a chance to help these students in Grade 3. George Georgiou, a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, along with his collaborators Rauno Parrila at Macquarie University and Robert Savage from the University College of London, started working with 290 Grade 1 students from 11 Edmonton public schools in 2015-16."
Matt Renwick

Extensive Reading Interventions for Students With Reading Difficulties After Grade 3 - 74 views

rer.sagepub.com/...0034654313477212.abstract

reading interventions intermediate research students

shared by Matt Renwick on 28 May 13 - No Cached
    • Matt Renwick
      Matt Renwick on 28 May 13
       
      This is another reason why we need to focus much of our intervention resources in reading at the K-3 level.
  • This synthesis extends a report of research on extensive interventions in kindergarten through third grade (Wanzek & Vaughn, 2007) to students in Grades 4 through 12, recognizing that many of the same questions about the effectiveness of reading interventions with younger students are important to address with older students,
  • Mean effect sizes ranged from 0.10 to 0.16 for comprehension, word reading, word reading fluency, reading fluency, and spelling outcomes.
Martin Burrett

Dyslexia: When spelling problems impair writing acquisition - 11 views

ukedchat.com/...dyslexia-spelling-writing

dyslexia reading

shared by Martin Burrett on 28 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Martin Burrett on 28 Nov 17
     
    "Dyslexia is a learning difficulty which affects the ability to adopt the automatic reflexes needed to read and write. Several studies have sought to identify the source of the problems encountered by individuals with dyslexia when they read. Little attention, however, has been paid to the mechanisms involved in writing. Sonia Kandel, Professor at the GIPSA-Lab of the Université Grenoble Alpes (CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes/Grenoble INP) and her team [1] decided to look at the purely motor aspects of writing in children diagnosed with dyslexia. Their results show that orthographic processing in children with dyslexia is so laborious that it can modify or impair writing skills, despite the absence of dysgraphia in these children. The findings of this study are published in the November 2017 edition of Cognitive Neuropsychology."
anonymous

Rethinking the Way College Students Are Taught - 52 views

americanradioworks.publicradio.org/...rethinking-teaching.html

teaching learning Education pedagogy discussion effective_use_of_multiple_choice

shared by anonymous on 19 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • But here's the irony. "Mary is more likely to convince John than professor Mazur in front of the class," Mazur says. "She's only recently learned it and still has some feeling for the conceptual difficulties that she has whereas professor Mazur learned [the idea] such a long time ago that he can no longer understand why somebody has difficulty grasping it." That's the irony of becoming an expert in your field, Mazur says. "It becomes not easier to teach, it becomes harder to teach because you're unaware of the conceptual difficulties of a beginning learner."
  • To make sure his students are prepared, Mazur has set up a web-based monitoring system where everyone has to submit answers to questions about the reading prior to coming to class. The last question asks students to tell Mazur what confused them. He uses their answers to prepare a set of multiple-choice questions he uses during class.
  • Mazur begins class by giving a brief explanation of a concept he wants students to understand. Then he asks one of the multiple-choice questions. Students get a minute to think about the question on their own and then answer it using a mobile device that sends their answers to Mazur's laptop. Next, he asks the students to turn to the person sitting next to them and talk about the question. The class typically erupts in a cacophony of voices, as it did that first time he told students to talk to each other because he couldn't figure out what else to do. Once the students have discussed the question for a few minutes, Mazur instructs them to answer the question again.
  • ...7 more annotations...
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Feb 13
       
      Why do we continue to do things the same way we always have and expect different results from what we have always gotten?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Feb 13
       
      How true this statement is!  If students want to learn, they are going to learn in spite of who the teacher is or what the teacher does - no teacher is really needed!
  • So Mazur gave what he thought was a thorough and thoughtful explanation of the concept. He went slowly, putting all kinds of helpful diagrams up on the board. "I thought I'd nailed it," he says. "I thought it was the best explanation one could possibly give of this question." Mazur triumphantly turned around. "Any questions?" he asked. The students just stared at him. "Nobody raised their hand and said, well but what if this and what if that, simply because they were so confused they couldn't," he says. "I didn't know what to do. But I knew one thing. I knew that 50 percent of the students had given the right answer."
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Feb 13
       
      How many times have we done this when we are providing direct instructions to students and then felt frustration when we assess what they know?  ARGH!
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Feb 13
       
      Watch this video!
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Feb 13
       
      The same probably goes for info that is simply read and not annotated or discussed.  It is probably also true for info gained from a video or movie...
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Feb 13
       
      This would be an effective use of Socrative or WallWisher!
ekpeterson

Educational Leadership:Teaching Screenagers:Too Dumb for Complex Texts? - 72 views

www.ascd.org/...b-for-Complex-Texts%C2%A2.aspx

reading technology education texts complex learning resources

shared by ekpeterson on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Willingness to Probe
  • readers may need to sit down with them for several hours of concentration.
  • hey insert a hesitant question before moving on.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • That willingness to pause and probe is essential, but the dispositions of digital reading run otherwise. Fast skimming is the way of the screen. B
  • they have grooved for many years a reading habit that races through texts, as is the case with texting, e-mail, Twitter, and other exchanges, 18-year-olds will have difficulty suddenly downshifting when faced with a long modernist poem.
  • They are deep and semiconscious behaviors that are difficult to change except through the diligent exercise of other reading behaviors.
  • Texts like this one are too complex to allow for rapid exit and reentry. They often originate in faraway times and places and discuss ideas and realities entirely unfamiliar to the modern teenager. To comprehend what they say requires a suspension of present concerns.
  • Finally, the comprehension of complex texts depends on a receptive posture in readers. They have to finish the labor of understanding before they talk back, and complex texts delay the reaction for hours and days.
  • Digital communications, on the other hand, especially those in the Web 2.0 grain, encourage quick response.
  • Complex texts aren't so easily judged. Often they force adolescents to confront the inferiority of their learning, the narrowness of their experience, and they recoil when they should succumb.
  • reserve a crucial place for unwired, unplugged, and unconnected learning. One hour a day of slow reading with print matter, an occasional research assignment completed without Google—any such practices that slow down and intensify the reading of complex texts will help.
victoria waddle

University students are struggling to read entire books | Education | News | The Indepe... - 47 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ead-entire-books-a6986361.html

books reading college-students sustained-reading reading-difficulty stress academic-stress

shared by victoria waddle on 18 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Chantelle Francis, Academic and Inclusions Officer for the Sheffield University English Society, said: “I would argue that it is the time constraints that students struggle with as opposed to the actual material in most cases. I’m sure that if students had longer to read a text, they’d likely understand it better, because they’ve had more time to engage with it and appreciate it. But to suggest that students’ attention spans are low or that we are of insufficient ability is unfair.”
anonymous

Taylor & Francis Online :: Supervision and scholarly writing: writing to learn-learning... - 0 views

www.tandfonline.com/...14623940500300491

shared by anonymous on 12 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • students’ difficulties with the academic genre should be considered to be the norm, rather than the exception.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 12 Nov 12
       
      Step away from problematising writing and toward it being normal to seek help
  • mechanical errors r
  • errors in the microstructure of writing
  • ...77 more annotations...
  • inconsistencies in writin
  • macrostructure of writing
  • quality and clarity of purpose
  • substantive general writing errors
  • publication, authorship, training and fairness
  • plagiarism
  • formal writing courses and reading lists, writing activities, and peer writing groups
  • Ideally, the supervisor provides a writing role mode
  • fallacious to assume that supervisors are necessarily scholarly writers
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 12 Nov 12
       
      relying on spvrs to be writing mentors does not always work, may have own issues with writing/lack of confidence
  • apprenticeship model can be ineffective
  • a passive role in improving their writing
  • tudents and supervisors need to master a range of writing task
  • benefit of naming what will be attended to and framing its context accrues through the process of planning, action and reflection
  • implicit contractual relationship between my students and me
  • supervisor
  • provide feedback
  • conceptu
  • methodological
  • I conceived postgraduate students’ writing as similar to that of an academic co‐author.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 12 Nov 12
       
      assumed they were more developed as writers than they actually were
  • initially corrected all errors
  • ttle emphasis to these errors in subsequent interactions
  • explored whether these were careless errors or whether the students had difficulty with particular aspects of writin
  • students assumed some responsibility for proofreading
  • cholarly writing in a thesis involves much more than a set of discrete writing tasks
  • heightened awareness of individual differences in students as writers
  • dependent writer
  • ‘writer’s block’ that could be overcome by breaking writing down into subtasks
  • copious notes
  • detailed note‐taking limited her interaction
  • brief summary of the key points on my written response to her drafts
  • action plan
  • writing block initially posed a major ethical dilemma for me because the ethical guidelines of authorship restrict the writing that should be undertaken by a superviso
  • not writing per se that underpinned Denise’s writing block but a lack of knowledge about the content and organization of a particular writing task.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 12 Nov 12
       
      Writers block can come from lack of knowledge/confidence in the writing process, rather than lack of subject knowledge
  • confident writer
  • published during his doctoral studies
  • nadvertently engaged in unethical writing behaviour by including me as a co‐author without my permission
  • difficulties with all aspects of the macrostructur
  • epeat sections of writing from earlier chapters
  • replace repeated text with concise summaries or use cross‐referencing
  • tendency to rush through corrections, which often resulted in many issues identified on a previous draft remaining unresolved
  • writing was often submitted and returned electronically using the ‘comments’ and ‘track changes’ tools in Microsoft Word.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 12 Nov 12
       
      use of technology to produce tracked drafts/version control
  • resistant writer
  • acknowledged herself to be a poor write
  • writing supp
  • oral and written feedback
  • email guidance, sessions where writing was modeled and her writing scaffolded, and handouts on writing style.
  • specialist assistance
  • r lack of commitment to improving the quality of subsequent drafts
  • argumentative stance towards writing feedback
  • my colleague and I decided that we were no longer prepared to supervise Rita.
  • imited writing progress
  • , Rita had failed to adequately demonstrate her writing capability as a doctoral candidat
  • sporadic writer
  • repeatedly failed to meet negotiated deadlines
  • supervisor, it was difficult to maintain interest in and respond to Sherry’s work because of the time lag between each piece of writing
  • enlisted an experienced supervisor to act as my mentor
  • forewarned
  • Sherry’s approach to writing was likely to result in a lengthy completion time and she needed to accept the responsibility for managing her writing tasks.
  • emotional excitement of writing up a thesis and the ensuing motivation
  • lacked
  • This trail of documentation
  • importance of
  • highlighted student‐centred writing issues
  • dentified broader issues that also needed to be accommodated in supervision
  • confidence in writing does not necessarily equate with capability.
  • uture directions
  • upport students
  • ncouraging them to participate in activities designed to support scholarly writing,
  • community of support for each othe
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 12 Nov 12
       
      rationale for peer support groups
  • Technology
  • virtual community of student writers
  • Ethical writing
  • cant attention in postgraduate training to ethical practices in writing
  • explore the ethical standards that are in operation in our local academic community.
  • underpinned by a performance‐orientation
  • ssues of concern related to students’ scholarly writing were identified.
  • eper understanding of the breadth of issues related to the supervision of postgraduate writing
D. S. Koelling

5 Myths About the 'Information Age' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...127105

education myths information age books

shared by D. S. Koelling on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • 1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published.
  • 2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time.
  • 3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 4. "Libraries are obsolete." Everywhere in the country librarians report that they have never had so many patrons. At Harvard, our reading rooms are full. The 85 branch libraries of the New York Public Library system are crammed with people.
  • 5. "The future is digital." True enough, but misleading. In 10, 20, or 50 years, the information environment will be overwhelmingly digital, but the prevalence of electronic communication does not mean that printed material will cease to be important. Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run.
  • I mention these misconceptions because I think they stand in the way of understanding shifts in the information environment. They make the changes appear too dramatic. They present things ahistorically and in sharp contrasts—before and after, either/or, black and white. A more nuanced view would reject the common notion that old books and e-books occupy opposite and antagonistic extremes on a technological spectrum. Old books and e-books should be thought of as allies, not enemies.
  • Last year the sale of e-books (digitized texts designed for hand-held readers) doubled, accounting for 10 percent of sales in the trade-book market. This year they are expected to reach 15 or even 20 percent. But there are indications that the sale of printed books has increased at the same time.
  • Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed?
  • Writing looks as bad as reading to those who see nothing but decline in the advent of the Internet. As one lament puts it: Books used to be written for the general reader; now they are written by the general reader. The Internet certainly has stimulated self-publishing, but why should that be deplored? Many writers with important things to say had not been able to break into print, and anyone who finds little value in their work can ignore it.
  • One could cite other examples of how the new technology is reinforcing old modes of communication rather than undermining them. I don't mean to minimize the difficulties faced by authors, publishers, and readers, but I believe that some historically informed reflection could dispel the misconceptions that prevent us from making the most of "the information age"—if we must call it that.
Catherine Hainstock

All Educational Productions - 44 views

www.nobelprize.org/...all_productions.html

NobelPrize nobel physics chemistry literature learning peace interactive

shared by Catherine Hainstock on 15 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Catherine Hainstock on 15 Mar 13
     
    "Nobelprize.org's educational section consists of 46 productions. Of these, 29 are interactive learning games of various sorts and degrees of difficulties. Most of them also includes a "Read more" about the subject. Enjoy learning!"
onepulledthread

Testing education: Pisa envy | The Economist - 22 views

www.economist.com/...ween-countries-growing-drawing

testing education pisa

shared by onepulledthread on 28 Jan 13 - No Cached
mollyfanning liked it
  • onepulledthread on 28 Jan 13
     
    short article on the international rankings of students in reading and math pointing out the difficulty in drawing strong conclusions.
anonymous

What are the Disadvantages of Online Schooling for Higher Education? - 18 views

study.com/...ling_for_Higher_Education.html

online disadvantages

shared by anonymous on 23 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 23 Oct 16
     
    "hat Are the Disadvantages of Online Schooling for Higher Education? Today, online schooling for higher education is prevalent across many fields. While there are several benefits to online schooling, such as flexibility and convenience, there are also real and perceived disadvantages. Explore some of the potential drawbacks of online learning. View 10 Popular Schools » Online Schooling In 2012, about a quarter of undergraduate college students were enrolled in distance education courses as part -- if not all -- of their studies, according to a 2014 report from the National Center for Education Statistics. That same data found that 29.8% of graduate students in this country are enrolled in some or all distance learning classes as well. A 2013 report from Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, LLC, pointed out that approximately 86.5% of higher education institutions offer distance learning classes. Clearly, online schooling is commonplace. Disadvantages: Student Perspective Despite advantages, online schooling is not the right fit for every student. Taking online courses is generally believed to require more self-discipline than completing a degree on campus, a belief that is supported by SCHEV -- the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. Because online schooling options often allow students to complete much of the coursework at their own pace, students must be motivated to stay on schedule and manage their time accordingly. Other potential disadvantages from a student's viewpoint may include the following: Less Instructional Support Although instructors are available to students via e-mail, telephone, Web discussion boards and other online means, some students may see the lack of face-to-face interaction and one-on-one instruction as a challenge. A lack of communication or miscommunication between instructors and students may frustrate students who are struggling with course materials. That could be exacerbated by the casual nature
Martin Burrett

Pupils with autism twice as likely to be bullied - what can teachers do? - 6 views

ukedchat.com/...autism-bullied-teachers

autism bullied bullying

shared by Martin Burrett on 04 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Martin Burrett on 04 Jan 19
     
    "In the UK, there are about 100,000 children with autism - about one in 100 - according to the NHS and 70% are educated in mainstream schools. Learning and socialising with neurotypical children can pose a challenge for pupils with autism who find it hard to read facial expressions and body language and have difficulties understanding the intentions of their peers. They may also prefer to play alone which sets them up as targets in the playground, with other children finding it easier to pick on them as they do not have a support structure around them."
khirnhup yeo

Idea: Use Tags to create a differentiated learning experience - 92 views

Some of my students are very proficient readers whereas others are very far from that. In our group page, bookmarks to readings are tagged with a number from 1 (very easy) to 5 (very challenging). ...

tags numbered differentiated reading

started by khirnhup yeo on 08 May 10 no follow-up yet
D. S. Koelling

Font Size May Not Aid Learning, but Its Style Can, Researchers Find - NYTimes.com - 110 views

www.nytimes.com/...19mind.html

education undergraduate Learning font

shared by D. S. Koelling on 19 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Is it easier to remember a new fact if it appears in normal type, like this, or in big, bold letters, like this?
  • Font size has no effect on memory, even though most people assume that bigger is better. But font style does.
  • New research finds that people retain significantly more material — whether science, history or language — when they study it in a font that is not only unfamiliar but also hard to read.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “So much of the learning that we do now is unsupervised, on our own,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, “that it’s crucial to be able to monitor that learning accurately; that is, to know how well we know what we know, so that we avoid fooling ourselves.”
  • “Studying something in the presence of an answer, whether it’s conscious or not, influences how you interpret the question,” Dr. Bjork said. “You don’t appreciate all of the other things that would have come to mind if the answer weren’t there. “Let’s say you’re studying capitals and you see that Australia’s is Canberra. O.K., that seems easy enough. But when the exam question appears, you think: ‘Uh oh, was it Sydney? Melbourne? Adelaide?’ ” That’s why some experts are leery of students’ increasing use of online sites like Cramster, Course Hero, Koofers and others that offer summaries, step-by-step problem solving and copies of previous exams. The extra help may provide a valuable supplement to a difficult or crowded course, but it could also leave students with a false sense of mastery. Even course outlines provided by a teacher, a textbook or other outside source can create a false sense of security, some research suggests. In one experiment, researchers found that participants studying a difficult chapter on the industrial uses of microbes remembered more when they were given a poor outline — which they had to rework to match the material — than a more accurate one.
  • a cognitive quality known as fluency, a measure of how easy a piece of information is to process.
  • On real tests, font size made no difference and practice paid off, the study found.
  • And so it goes, researchers say, with most study sessions: difficulty builds mental muscle, while ease often builds only confidence.
  • To test the approach in the classroom, the researchers conducted a large experiment involving 222 students at a public school in Chesterland, Ohio. One group had all its supplementary study materials, in English, history and science courses, reset in an unusual font, like Monotype Corsiva. The others studied as before. After the lessons were completed, the researchers evaluated the classes’ relevant tests and found that those students who’d been squinting at the stranger typefaces did significantly better than the others in all the classes — particularly in physics. “The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material,” a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. “But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.” Then again, so will raw effort, he and other researchers said. Concentrating harder. Making outlines from scratch. Working through problem sets without glancing at the answers. And studying with classmates who test one another.
  • D. S. Koelling on 19 Apr 11
     
    Students' raw effort improves learning [No surprise there, huh?]
SHARON DRESSEL

Coh-Metrix - 30 views

edr.sagepub.com/...223.abstract

readability textselection individualized matrix formula reading Coh-Metrix textanalysis

shared by SHARON DRESSEL on 01 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • five major factors that account for most of the variance in texts across grade levels and text categories: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, causal cohesion, and narrativity
  • Florence Dujardin on 01 Jul 11
     
    Computer analyses of text characteristics are often used by reading teachers, researchers, and policy makers when selecting texts for students. The authors of this article identify components of language, discourse, and cognition that underlie traditional automated metrics of text difficulty and their new Coh-Metrix system. Coh-Metrix analyzes texts on multiple measures of language and discourse that are aligned with multilevel theoretical frameworks of comprehension. The authors discuss five major factors that account for most of the variance in texts across grade levels and text categories: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, causal cohesion, and narrativity. They consider the importance of both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of texts for assigning the right text to the right student at the right time.
  • SHARON DRESSEL on 02 Jul 11
     
    How do we go about selecting texts for individualized reading assistance? This sounds like a new way.
Martin Burrett

Webinar: Supporting Special Needs Students with eBooks & Audiobooks - 2 views

ukedchat.com/...webinar-sen-ebooks-audiobooks

ebooks ebook audiobooks audio reading engagement

shared by Martin Burrett on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Martin Burrett on 04 Jun 21
     
    In this webinar, expert in eBooks Meredith Wemhoff discusses ways to engage and support learners with special needs using eBooks and audio. Using the case-study of an independent all-boys school located in Surrey, the school provides special needs students an opportunity to succeed and thrive. Many arrive to the 80-year-old institution with low self-confidence, often due to struggles they faced in traditional educational institutions caused by learning and language difficulties. This means providing a collection that meets the individual learning needs of the school's 470 students, who range in age from 8-18. ​​​​​​​ During this eye-opening webinar, Meredith will share the story of selecting, launching and promoting a digital library service that helps address learning challenges. Attendees will come away with best practices for bringing ebooks and audiobooks to their school and real-life examples of these practices in action. Don't miss out, register today!
Steve Ransom

The fantasies driving school reform: A primer for education graduates - The Answer Shee... - 5 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQA5vwzLU_blog.html

education reform poverty teachers gr8 speech research black minority poor

shared by Steve Ransom on 14 May 12 - No Cached
  • Richard Rothstein
  • In truth, this conventional view relies upon imaginary facts.
  • Let me repeat: black elementary school students today have better math skills than white students did only twenty years ago.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • As a result, we’ve wasted 15 years avoiding incremental improvement, and instead trying to upend a reasonably successful school system.
  • But the reason it hasn’t narrowed is that your profession has done too good a job — you’ve improved white children’s performance as well, so the score gap persists, but at a higher level for all.
  • Policymakers, pundits, and politicians ignore these gains; they conclude that you, educators, have been incompetent because the test score gap hasn’t much narrowed.
  • If you believe public education deserves greater support, as I do, you will have to boast about your accomplishments, because voters are more likely to aid a successful institution than a collapsing one.
  • In short, underemployment of parents is not only an economic crisis — it is an educational crisis. You cannot ignore it and be good educators.
  • equally important educational goals — citizenship, character, appreciation of the arts and music, physical fitness and health, and knowledge of history, the sciences, and literature.
  • If you have high expectations, your students can succeed regardless of parents’ economic circumstances. That is nonsense.
  • health insurance; children are less likely to get routine and preventive care that middle class children take for granted
  • If they can’t see because they don’t get glasses to correct vision difficulties, high expectations can’t teach them to read.
  • Because education has become so politicized, with policy made by those with preconceptions of failure and little understanding of the educational process, you are entering a field that has become obsessed with evaluating only results that are easy to measure, rather than those that are most important. But as Albert Einstein once said, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.
  • To be good educators, you must step up your activity not only in the classroom, but as citizens. You must speak up in the public arena, challenging those policymakers who will accuse you only of making excuses when you speak the truth that children who are hungry, mobile, and stressed, cannot learn as easily as those who are comfortable.
  • Steve Ransom on 14 May 12
     
    An important read for anyone who truly wants to understand what's really important in education and the false reform strategies of our current (and past) administration.
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