2,803 research outputs found

    Responding to Reading Difficulties: An Exploration from Different Professional Perspectives

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    The study was designed to explore educators’ perspectives on reading difficulties and their choice of teaching strategies for students with reading difficulties. The study aimed to understand how educators form their professional perspectives on reading difficulties, how this relates to their understanding of the concept of ‘dyslexia’ and how this informs their teaching methods. Furthermore, the study has explored the extent to which these chosen teaching strategies are inclusive and meet the needs of all students. A qualitative case study was used to generate data to address the research questions and achieve the aims of this study. Data were generated from semi-structured interviews with thirteen educators from different contexts and career stages, classroom observations in two primary schools in England, and a dyslexia training session online. Thematic data analysis was used to interpret the data and identify themes related to the educators’ understanding of the reading difficulty and pedagogy for students with reading difficulty (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Braun and Clarke's six steps were followed for analysing the data. Furthermore, multi-layer analysis (Robbins, 2007) was used to incorporate findings from three aspects of my theoretical framework: Rogoff’s (1995) three planes of analysis, Tobin’s (1999) comparative classroom ethnography, and models of disability. My study suggests that teachers’ understanding of reading difficulties is influenced by different models of disability at different levels of their thinking, which then also influences their choice of teaching strategies to respond to reading difficulties. My study findings also suggest that students with reading difficulties are not given enough opportunities to voice their needs and feelings, and it is recommended that spaces be provided for individuals to reflect and for all stakeholders to talk and share their reflections. In addition, my study recommends that student teachers should be prepared for working with students who have reading difficulties in their future classrooms by developing an understanding and knowledge of inclusive pedagogy and how this relates to teaching children how to read. This can also be extended to teachers who are currently working in schools to develop a better understanding of how to support all children to learn to read.

    An examination of the verbal behaviour of intergroup discrimination

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    This thesis examined relationships between psychological flexibility, psychological inflexibility, prejudicial attitudes, and dehumanization across three cross-sectional studies with an additional proposed experimental study. Psychological flexibility refers to mindful attention to the present moment, willing acceptance of private experiences, and engaging in behaviours congruent with one’s freely chosen values. Inflexibility, on the other hand, indicates a tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts and emotions, entanglement with one’s thoughts, and rigid behavioural patterns. Study 1 found limited correlations between inflexibility and sexism, racism, homonegativity, and dehumanization. Study 2 demonstrated more consistent positive associations between inflexibility and prejudice. And Study 3 controlled for right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, finding inflexibility predicted hostile sexism and racism beyond these factors. While showing some relationships, particularly with sexism and racism, psychological inflexibility did not consistently correlate with varied prejudices across studies. The proposed randomized controlled trial aims to evaluate an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy intervention to reduce sexism through enhanced psychological flexibility. Overall, findings provide mixed support for the utility of flexibility-based skills in addressing complex societal prejudices. Research should continue examining flexibility integrated with socio-cultural approaches to promote equity

    UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024

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    The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp

    Is there a Relationship between Parents' Screen Usage and Young Children’s Development?

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    There has been growing concern over the links between children's screen time use and cognitive development (Halton, 2020). However, researchers have generally overlooked the possible impact of parental screen time, which might decrease the opportunities of learning and social interactions for young children. To address this gap, we investigated the relationship between parental screen use and toddlers’ development. However, the start of this thesis coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, and a few experimental tasks had to be adapted online. Thus, this thesis examined first whether online paradigms can provide valid data (word recognition, word learning and language assessment). Second, the main objective was to explore the relationship between parental screen use and young children’s language skills, and to revisit the link between parental screen time and children’s empathy. Findings from Chapter 2 provide support for the reliability of online testing with children. These experiments point to promising avenues of investigation in early language studies, and to possibilities for reaching out to families around the world. Findings from Chapter 3 revealed no impact of parental phone text on children’s learning in a lab situation. However, they suggest that parental responses to technoference and attitudes towards smartphones may moderate the relationship between parental screen use and children’s development. When examining effects in real life, a first exploratory study indicated an effect of parental screen time (in real life) on children’s language vocabulary when assessed via a parental questionnaire, at least for children aged 16 months and above. A second study was conducted with more objective measures of screen time and children’s vocabulary knowledge, and no association was found between parental screen time and children’s language when assessed via a standardised face-to-face language test. Findings from Chapter 4 showed a negative association between children’s alone screen time and their cognitive empathy abilities. However, parental screen time was not related to children’s cognitive empathy. The experiments and studies reported in this thesis fail to reveal a robust association between parental screen time and early language, at least in the population that we have studied here. Importantly, the findings suggest how parental screen use may be a moderator in children’s development and not a causal factor. They demonstrate the need to investigate more precisely why and how parents use electronic devices such as mobile phones during interactions with their children, might directly influence early language and emotional development

    The Dirt

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    With the mission to make words sweat, this MPHIL encompasses the writing of a metaphoric text for an hour-long solo performance in which physicality and movement are crucial elements, and an academic essay on the practice and challenges involved in the communication of text in embodied live performance. In this context, how does the material of words relate to the body in movement? How can the differences between the two be identified in order for performers and performance makers to use them to their expressive and communicative potential? These questions were explored through active research consisting of practical time spent in the studio (working alone or with colleagues), facilitating workshops in professional, vocational and participative contexts, the development of the solo The Dirt, creative writing and academic research and writing. The project has exposed areas of apparent contradiction in the artistic approaches expressed in words on the one hand and movement on the other. Rather than thinking of ‘dance’ or ‘movement’ therefore I prefer to research and then present states of physicality which run parallel to the text. This produces both resonances and dissonances and has the effect of making the text more expressive when it is experienced alongside the physicality of performing bodies. The Dirt, a one-woman-show, uses these explorations of form to ask ‘[In the context of the climate emergency] is it still OK to have children?’ Physicality is what carries the cumulative narrative structure and underpins its communication through language. The Dirt, encompassing the perspectives of multiple characters and voices, bounces between the literal and the surreal, observations from my everyday life in Berlin (drawing particularly on the experience of working as a babysitter and as a neighbour to the feminist-anarchist squat Liebig34), and abstract dreamlike material

    Posthuman Creative Styling can a creative writer’s style of writing be described as procedural?

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    This thesis is about creative styling — the styling a creative writer might use to make their writing unique. It addresses the question as to whether such styling can be described as procedural. Creative styling is part of the technique a creative writer uses when writing. It is how they make the text more ‘lively’ by use of tips and tricks they have either learned or discovered. In essence these are rules, ones the writer accrues over time by their practice. The thesis argues that the use and invention of these rules can be set as procedures. and so describe creative styling as procedural. The thesis follows from questioning why it is that machines or algorithms have, so far, been incapable of producing creative writing which has value. Machine-written novels do not abound on the bookshelves and writing styled by computers is, on the whole, dull in comparison to human-crafted literature. It came about by thinking how it would be possible to reach a point where writing by people and procedural writing are considered to have equal value. For this reason the thesis is set in a posthuman context, where the differences between machines and people are erased. The thesis uses practice to inform an original conceptual space model, based on quality dimensions and dynamic-inter operation of spaces. This model gives an example of the procedures which a posthuman creative writer uses when engaged in creative styling. It suggests an original formulation for the conceptual blending of conceptual spaces, based on the casting of qualities from one space to another. In support of and informing its arguments are ninety-nine examples of creative writing practice which show the procedures by which style has been applied, created and assessed. It provides a route forward for further joint research into both computational and human-coded creative writing

    Under construction: infrastructure and modern fiction

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    In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material forms—roads, rails, pipes, and wires—infrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading “infrastructurally”: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this project—James Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamid—take up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible
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