The purpose of this study was to examine (a) how parents and their kindergarten-age children talk about disabilities when they read books that include characters with disabilities and (b) the relationship between the frequency of mother/child comments about disabilities and children’s attitudes toward peers with disabilities, as measured by the Acceptance Scale for Kindergarten–Revised (ASK…
The purpose of this manuscript was to describe a community-based program, Language and Play Everyday (LAPE), aimed at evaluating effective practices for enhancing parents’ capacity to increase their toddlers’ communication skills. LAPE was a parent education program focused on coaching parents to embed naturalistic language-enhancing strategies within daily routines. Participants included …
The purpose of this article is to summarize the current literature on the accuracy and reliability of interval systems using data from previously published experimental studies that used either human observations of behavior or computer simulations. Although multiple comparison studies provided mathematical adjustments or modifications to interval systems, recommendations were often noted as…
The assessment of young children in early childhood special education is a central area of educational practice. The results of child assessments often have significant implications for young children, their families, and the programs that serve them, including eligibility for special education services, instructional planning, and documentation of child outcomes. The array of early childhood a…
Quality literacy instruction in preschool can be critical to the future academic success for all children, but may be even more so for children with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to examine progress in emergent literacy skills of young children with disabilities, compared with their typical peers, in an inclusive preschool setting. Participants in this study included 77 prekinderg…
A significant number of young children exhibit challenging behaviors in preschool settings. A tiered framework of intervention has documented effectiveness in elementary and secondary schools, and recently has been extended to preschool settings.Although there is emerging research to support the effectiveness of Tier 1 (universal) and Tier 3 (intensive) interventions with young children, few st…
The authors describe a training program designed to improve the knowledge and skills of early childhood interventionists.Within the context of using the Routines-Based Early Intervention approach, this training focused on improving the quality of goals and objectives on individualized plans, through the Routines-Based Interview. We structured the training around five face-to-face sessions and a…
That teachers need to have deep knowledge has been an article of faith among philosophers, educators, and policymakers tracing back to Socrates. But the specifics of what teachers ought to know and how they can make use of knowledge during teaching continue to evolve (Biesta & Burbules, 2003) and are related to underlying conceptions of the role of teachers and the teaching profession that have…
On the surface, this chapter concerns the evolution of educational assessment from a paper-based technology to an electronic one. On a deeper level, that evolution is more substantive. As has been noted, that evolution can be viewed in terms of developmental stages (Bennett, 1998, 2010b; Bunderson, Inouye, & Olsen,1989). In the first section of this chapter, those stages are briefly described a…
The Welsh language, which is indigenous to Wales, is one of six Celtic languages.It is spoken by 562,000 speakers, 19% of the population of Wales, according to the 2011 U.K. Census, and it is estimated that it is spoken by a further 200,000 residents elsewhere in the United Kingdom. No exact figures exist for the undoubted thousands of other Welsh speakers beyond the United Kingdom who are able…
Review of Research in Education: Vol. 38, Language Policy, Politics, and Diversity in Education explores the role of educational language policies in promoting education as a human right. There are an estimated nearly 7,000 living languages in the world. Yet, despite the extent of language diversity, only a small number of the world’s languages are used as mediums of instruction. Even in Eng…
Each new demographic shift and economic or social change bring seemingly new issues into popular and political focus—questions, debates, and policies about the role of language in education and society and the recent claims that transnational migrations and globalization are resulting in unprecedented forms of ethnolinguisic “super-diversity.”This chapter addresses issues related to lang…
This article examines the role of language policies in mediating access and equity in education. By examining a range of research and case studies on language policies, we explore how educational language policies serve as a central gatekeeper to education itself, as well as to quality education that may fundamentally depend on language ability, not only for literacy and classroom interaction b…
Similar to most countries in the world today, English in Israel plays a major role, both as a global and a local language in multiple domains such as business, academia,media, and education, as well as in daily interactions. English is the language of texts that students are required to read in academia in most disciplines; it is a language frequently “peppered” in Hebrew oral interactions,…
This chapter1 offers a situated account of English and vernacular literacy practices from a postcolonial perspective. Postcolonial scholarship in disciplines such as cultural studies and English literature has alerted us to the extent to which colonial rule partially created and reproduced negative images regarding “natives” so as to be better able to govern. Within applied linguistics, thi…
In this chapter, I review the legal trajectory of language rights in public schooling in the United States and how language has been intertwined with other policy issues in court cases aimed at expanding access and equity for minority students:desegregation and school finance. Most of these cases originated in the Southwestern United States where there were and continue to be critical masses of…
In this chapter, we offer a critical examination of a growing field of educational inquiry and social practice: the reclamation of Indigenous mother tongues. We use the term reclamation purposefully to denote that these are languages that have been forcibly subordinated in contexts of colonization (Hinton, 2011; Leonard, 2007).Language reclamation includes revival of a language no longer spoken…
Not so long ago, we seemed to be making progress on the question of how to incorporate meaningfully the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of our increasingly diverse school student population. In the 1990s, multicultural and bilingual educational approaches were becoming commonplace in modern liberal democracies (Banks & Banks, 2004; May, 1999, 2009). Similarly, multiculturalism appeared to b…
The status of a language is very often described and measured by different factors,including the length of time it has been in use in a particular territory, the official recognition it has been given by governmental units, and the number and proportion of speakers. Spanish has a unique history and, so some argue status, in the contemporary United States based on these and other criteria. At l…
During the more vitriolic moments of the 1980s “culture wars” in the United States, the “culture warrior” E. D. Hirsch made a clarion call in defense of universal study of the masterworks of the English literay canon. In this work, he conceded space to the canonical literature of prestige foreign languages but drew a very firm line against linguistic pluralism, which he contrasted to a…
Language and cultural preservation efforts among different communities of language speakers in the United States have received increasing attention as interest in linguistic rights and globalization continues to deepen. In addition to mounting evidence of the cognitive, psychological, and academic benefits of heritage language/community language (HL/CL) maintenance for linguistic-minority child…
Spanish, as we know it today, made its debut as “a world language” at the very end of the 15th century in a highly heterogeneous languagescape—the newly constructed nation-state of Spain and the newly found Americas.1 Spanish grappled with bringing together the many forms of Romance spoken in Castile and Aragon at the same time when it was brought to new shores where people spoke in other…
On May 1, after more than a decade, the search for Osama bin Laden came to an end. It took patience and perseverance. And it took not only military prowess, but also intelligence that depended on a solid understanding of that region of the world and capabilities in a number of foreign languages that are not widely known in the United States. . . . Specifically, the United States’ ability t…
The arthropod-borne transmission route of Yersinia pestis, the bacterial agent of plague, is a recent evolutionary adaptation.Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, the closely related food-and waterborne enteric species from which Y. pestis diverged less than 6,400 y ago, exhibits significant oral toxicity to the flea vectors of plague,whereas Y. pestis does not. In this study, we identify the Yersinia …
Financial Risk Management started as one thing and has ended as another. I took up this project with the primary aim of making risk measurement and management techniques accessible, by working through simple examples, and explaining some of the real-life detail of financing positions. I had gotten fairly far along with it when the subprime crisis began and the world changed. I had alrea…
The Economic Impact of the Value Chain of a Marcellus Shale Well Site examines the direct economic impact of a Marcellus Shale well located in Southwestern Pennsylvania. This study seeks to fill a critical information gap on the impact of gas drilling and extraction from Marcellus Shale deposits deep underground: an assessment of the economic impacts – emphasizing the direct economic impact,…
English language proficiency assessments (ELPA) are used in the United States to measure annually the English language progress and proficiency of English-language learners (ELLs), a subgroup of language minority students who receive language acquisition support mandated and largely funded by Title III (NCLB, 2001). ELPA proficient and non-proficient classifications are determined by applying d…
It is currently unclear to what extent a spontaneous language sample of a given number of utterances is representative of a child’s ability in morphology and syntax. This lack of information about the regularity of children’s linguistic productions and the reliability of spontaneous language samples have serious implications for language testing based upon natural language. This study inves…
In this study, differential item functioning (DIF) trends were examined for English language learners (ELLs) versus non-ELL students in third and tenth grades on a large-scale reading assessment. To facilitate the analyses, a meta-analytic DIF technique was employed. The results revealed that items requiring knowledge of words and phrases in context favored non-ELLs in grade 3, whereas items re…
The Katzenberger Hebrew Language Assessment for Preschool Children (henceforth: the KHLA) is the first comprehensive, standardized language assessment tool developed in Hebrew specifically for older preschoolers (4;0–5;11 years). The KHLA is a norm-referenced, Hebrew specific assessment, based on well-established psycholinguistic principles, as well as on the established knowledge in the fiel…
This study investigated the relationship between latent components of academic English language ability and test takers’ study-abroad and classroom learning experiences through a structural equation modeling approach in the context of TOEFL iBT® testing. Data from the TOEFL iBT public dataset were used. The results showed that test takers’ performance on the test’s four skill sections, n…
Testlets are subsets of test items that are based on the same stimulus and are administered together. Tests that contain testlets are in widespread use in language testing, but they also share a fundamental problem: Items within a testlet are locally dependent with possibly adverse consequences for test score interpretation and use. Building on testlet response theory (Wainer,Bradlow, & Wang, 2…
Newer statistical procedures are typically introduced to help address the limitations of those already in practice or to deal with emerging research needs. Quantile regression (QR) is introduced in this paper as a relatively new methodology, which is intended to overcome some of the limitations of least squares mean regression (LMR). QR is more appropriate when assumptions of normality and homo…
Yersinia pestis forms a biofilm in the foregut of its flea vector that promotes transmission by flea bite. As in many bacteria,biofilm formation in Y. pestis is controlled by intracellular levels of the bacterial second messenger c-di-GMP. Two Y. pestis diguanylate cyclase (DGC) enzymes, encoded by hmsT and y3730, and one phosphodiesterase (PDE), encoded by hmsP,have been shown to control biofi…
Teacher preparation programs commonly use observational instruments to assess the progress and the exit performances of teacher candidates. However, while these instruments have been described and several have been studied for effectiveness,the field lacks a close examination of how they position participants: teacher candidates, K-12 pupils, and teacher educators. This article closely examine…
This article describes the development and initial validation of the Collaboration and Support for Inclusive Teaching, a measure of perceived support in special education teachers regarding the degree of collaboration with regular teachers for inclusive practice at school. The scale was validated on a sample of 276 special education teachers coming from lower and higher secondary schools by usi…
This study provided an independent examination of the Teacher Student Relationship Inventory (TSRI), a teacher report measure developed in Singapore. A total of 500 American high school students were rated by 84 teachers. Exploratory factor analysis supported the existence of three factors representing instrumental help, satisfaction, and conflict; 11 of 14 items emerged as relatively pure indi…
The aim of the present study was to investigate the reliability and validity of a brief standardized assessment of children’s working memory; Lucid Recall. Although there are many established assessments of working memory, Lucid Recall is fully automated and can therefore be administered in a group setting. It is therefore ideally suited to large-scale screening or research purposes.The findi…
The Polish Temperament Styles Questionnaire (PTSQ), derived from Student Style Questionnaire (SSQ) was developed to measure four bipolar temperament styles: extroverted versus introverted, practical versus imaginative, thinking versus feeling, and organized versus flexible.The study focuses on factorial validity and measurement invariance (configural, metric, and scalar) across gender and age g…
Research on secular trends in mean intelligence test scores shows smaller gains in vocabulary skills than in nonverbal reasoning. One possible explanation is that vocabulary test items become outdated faster compared to nonverbal tasks. The history of the usage frequency of the words on five popular vocabulary tests, the GSS Wordsum, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS),Wechsler Adult Intel…
This study employed a newly developed measure, the Social Skills Q-Sort (SSQ), to assess paraprofessionals’ and teachers’ reports of social skills for children with and without ASD.Paraprofessionals and teachers showed good rater-agreement on the SSQ. ROC curve analyses yielded an excellent profile of sensitivity and specificity for discriminating between children with ASD and typically dev…
Students who exhibit substantial behavior and emotional problems in school often have shown less severe problems earlier. Screening for such problems can suggest which students need extra support and help educators to direct support to students who are more likely to benefit. The present study explored predictive validity of a very brief behavior problem screening procedure as applied to 2,253 …
An important consideration in determining the validity of an observational assessment measure for young children is the variability attributed to the child versus that ascribed to the assessor or to some other factor such as classroom context. The Teaching Strategies GOLD® assessment system was used to elicit teacher ratings of a national sample of 21,592 children (age 12-51 months). Teacher r…
The influential Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) expect students to start statistics learning during middle grades. Thus teacher education and professional development programs are advised to help preservice and in-service teachers increase their knowledge and confidence to teach statistics. Although existing self-efficacy instruments used in statistics education focus on stu…
Students’ desire and intention to pursue a career in sales continue to lag behind industry demand for sales professionals.This article develops and validates a reliable and parsimonious scale for measuring and predicting student intention to pursue a selling career. The instrument advances previous scales in three ways. The instrument is generalizable across academic settings and is shown to …
Unlike the diversity issues in corporate governance, the diversity in top academic positions (e.g., editorial boards of academic journals in business) is rather underresearched. The editorial boards of academic marketing journals are important gatekeepers and trendsetters in the creation and dissemination of marketing knowledge. Membership on journal editorial boards usually signals scholarly …
Colleges of business must meet assurance of learning requirements to gain or maintain AACSB accreditation under the new standards adopted April 8, 2013. Team skills are among the most important skills desired by recruiters, yet employers and scholars perceive that team skills are frequently deficient in college graduates. This article describes how a set of free webbased tools available at www…
A meta-analytic review of self-directed learning (SDL) research over 30 years, five countries, and across multiple academic disciplines is used to explore its relationships with five key nomologically related constructs for effective workplace learning. The meta-analysis revealed positive relationships between SDL and internal locus of control, motivation, performance, selfefficacy,and support.…
Previous research has demonstrated that differential item functioning (DIF) methods that do not account for multilevel data structure could result in too frequent rejection of the null hypothesis (i.e., no DIF) when the intraclass correlation coefficient (r) of the studied item was the same as the r of the total score. The current study extended previous research by comparing the performance o…
With growing industry demand for sales professionals, recruitment at colleges and universities that have a sales education focus has increased remarkably over the past few years. However, results indicate that hiring organizations face an uphill task in filling sales positions. Recruiters and students struggle to build critical person–job fit during a relatively brief period of interaction. T…