Issues in the interpretation of the results of school effectiveness research

In this chapter three issues in the interpretation of the results of school effectiveness research are discussed: criterion choice, effect size and stability of effects. With respect to the first issue the overall conclusion is, that criterion choice and definition depend on the effectiveness perspective and the particular theory one wishes to corroborate. The issues of effect size and stability of school effects are treated both from the angle of a synthesis of available empirical results and from the angle of conceptual analysis. An overall evaluation of the available data on effect size and stability leads to the conclusion that school effectiveness models are not as shaky as certain critics would have it, but at the same time not established as firmly as enthusiastic school improvers treat them. Various suggestions as to the improvement of future school effectiveness research are offered, notably more refined research designs and more elaborate theory development

How visual cues to speech rate influence speech perception

Spoken words are highly variable and therefore listeners interpret speech sounds relative to the surrounding acoustic context, such as the speech rate of a preceding sentence. For instance, a vowel midway between short /ɑ/ and long /a:/ in Dutch is perceived as short /ɑ/ in the context of preceding slow speech, but as long /a:/ if preceded by a fast context. Despite the well-established influence of visual articulatory cues on speech comprehension, it remains unclear whether visual cues to speech rate also influence subsequent spoken word recognition. In two ‘Go Fish’-like experiments, participants were presented with audio-only (auditory speech + fixation cross), visual-only (mute videos of talking head), and audiovisual (speech + videos) context sentences, followed by ambiguous target words containing vowels midway between short /ɑ/ and long /a:/. In Experiment 1, target words were always presented auditorily, without visual articulatory cues. Although the audio-only and audiovisual contexts induced a rate effect (i.e., more long /a:/ responses after fast contexts), the visual-only condition did not. When, in Experiment 2, target words were presented audiovisually, rate effects were observed in all three conditions, including visual-only. This suggests that visual cues to speech rate in a context sentence influence the perception of following visual target cues (e.g., duration of lip aperture), which at an audiovisual integration stage bias participants’ target categorization responses. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how what we see influences what we hear

Openbare prestatiegegevens van scholen; nuttigheid en validiteit

The immediate motive for this article is the recently started practice in the Netherlands to publicly report performance indicators on secondary schools. Three contexts of application of performance reporting are discussed: supporting school choice, school improvement and external accountability. Given the uncertainty and relatively small size of output differences between schools, incomplete knowledge about education production functions, and limited discretion of higher administrative levels over secondary schools in the Netherlands, performance reporting is seen as being of only limited relevance in each of these contexts of application. In a discussion on the meaning and measurement of 'value added', it is argued that any measure should start with a definition based on the degree of overachievement or underachievement of individual students. Parents, quite obviously, have a different kind of value added in mind than other stakeholders: they want to know what a school can mean for their child, whereas others want to have a 'clean' as possible measure for the true impact of the school (i.e. by efforts of the teachers). Next to this parents are interested in differential value added: the specific meaning a school can have for t heir own child given its cognitive and other relevant abilities. The article closes with a discussion of possible unintended consequences of publishing school performance reports. The final conclusion is, nevertheless, that the increased consciousness about output performance is likely to act as an achievement incentive to schools thus leading to increased performance of secondary schools

A self-evaluation procedure for schools using multilevel modelling

Argues that self-evaluation should primarily be based on the outcomes of educational practice. When designing a self- evaluation system one has to cope with 2 problems: how to define a fair school effect measure and how to locate those practices that may lead to malfunctioning. It is shown how pupil monitoring systems can be used to construct a school monitoring system. The statistical aspects of such a system can be handled well by using multilevel statistical models. The proposed approach is illustrated using data on the development of pupils in mathematics achievement. The indicator proposed for self-evaluation purposes is compared with 7 other indicators. Striking differences between indicators are discussed. Moreover, it is discussed how such a monitoring system could be modified to detect educational practices that lead to malfunctioning of pupils. Finally, the practical aspects of implementing the proposed system are depicted

Acoustic correlates of Dutch lexical stress re-examined: Spectral tilt is not always more reliable than intensity

The present study examined two acoustic cues in the production of lexical stress in Dutch: spectral tilt and overall intensity. Sluijter and Van Heuven (1996) reported that spectral tilt is a more reliable cue to stress than intensity. However, that study included only a small number of talkers (10) and only syllables with the vowels /aː/ and /ɔ/. The present study re-examined this issue in a larger and more variable dataset. We recorded 38 native speakers of Dutch (20 females) producing 744 tokens of Dutch segmentally overlapping words (e.g., VOORnaam vs. voorNAAM, “first name” vs. “respectable”), targeting 10 different vowels, in variable sentence contexts. For each syllable, we measured overall intensity and spectral tilt following Sluijter and Van Heuven (1996). Results from Linear Discriminant Analyses showed that, for the vowel /aː/ alone, spectral tilt showed an advantage over intensity, as evidenced by higher stressed/unstressed syllable classification accuracy scores for spectral tilt. However, when all vowels were included in the analysis, the advantage disappeared. These findings confirm that spectral tilt plays a larger role in signaling stress in Dutch /aː/ but show that, for a larger sample of Dutch vowels, overall intensity and spectral tilt are equally important

Temporal contrast effects in human speech perception are immune to selective attention

Two fundamental properties of perception are selective attention and perceptual contrast, but how these two processes interact remains unknown. Does an attended stimulus history exert a larger contrastive influence on the perception of a following target than unattended stimuli? Dutch listeners categorized target sounds with a reduced prefix "ge-" marking tense (e.g., ambiguous between gegaan-gaan "gone-go"). In 'single talker' Experiments 1-2, participants perceived the reduced syllable (reporting gegaan) when the target was heard after a fast sentence, but not after a slow sentence (reporting gaan). In 'selective attention' Experiments 3-5, participants listened to two simultaneous sentences from two different talkers, followed by the same target sounds, with instructions to attend only one of the two talkers. Critically, the speech rates of attended and unattended talkers were found to equally influence target perception - even when participants could watch the attended talker speak. In fact, participants' target perception in 'selective attention' Experiments 3-5 did not differ from participants who were explicitly instructed to divide their attention equally across the two talkers (Experiment 6). This suggests that contrast effects of speech rate are immune to selective attention, largely operating prior to attentional stream segregation in the auditory processing hierarchy

Listeners track talker-specific prosody to deal with talker-variability

One of the challenges in speech perception is that listeners must deal with considerable segmental and suprasegmental variability in the acoustic signal due to differences between talkers. Most previous studies have focused on how listeners deal with segmental variability. In this EEG experiment, we investigated whether listeners track talker-specific usage of suprasegmental cues to lexical stress to recognize spoken words correctly. In a three-day training phase, Dutch participants learned to map non-word minimal stress pairs onto different object referents (e.g., USklot meant “lamp”; usKLOT meant “train”). These non-words were produced by two male talkers. Critically, each talker used only one suprasegmental cue to signal stress (e.g., Talker A used only F0 and Talker B only intensity). We expected participants to learn which talker used which cue to signal stress. In the test phase, participants indicated whether spoken sentences including these non-words were correct (“The word for lamp is…”). We found that participants were slower to indicate that a stimulus was correct if the non-word was produced with the unexpected cue (e.g., Talker A using intensity). That is, if in training Talker A used F0 to signal stress, participants experienced a mismatch between predicted and perceived phonological word-forms if, at test, Talker A unexpectedly used intensity to cue stress. In contrast, the N200 amplitude, an event-related potential related to phonological prediction, was not modulated by the cue mismatch. Theoretical implications of these contrasting results are discussed. The behavioral findings illustrate talker-specific prediction of prosodic cues, picked up through perceptual learning during training