Considerations for Test Selection: How Do Validity and Reliability Impact Diagnostic

Nine preschool and school-age language assessment tools found to have acceptable levels of identification accuracy were evaluated to determine their overall levels of psychometric validity for use in diagnosing the presence/absence of language impairment. Eleven specific criteria based on those initially devised by McCauley and Swisher (1984) were applied to each of the selected tests in order to determine each test’s overall level of psychometric validity. Results indicated that each of the selected assessment tools met at least eight of the 11 criteria used to evaluate each assessment tool. Five tests met 10 out of 11 criteria. Findings are discussed to assist clinicians in applying psychometric criteria to these selected tests, as well as those not reviewed as part of this current review of standardized assessment tools. A decision tree is included within the discussion of this study’s findings to aid clinicians in the selection of standardized assessment tools that are most appropriate for clinical use, based on their psychometric characteristics

The Effects of Supplemental Joint Storybook Reading on Preschool Students\u27 Use of Strident Sounds: A Preliminary Investigation

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of adding supplemental, joint storybook reading to existing cycles-based phonological remediation on the speech intelligibility of a group of preschool children with phonological disorders. Method: Sixteen preschool children, ages 3;8 (years; months) to 5;0, with moderate to severe phonological dis-orders served as the participant group for this study. The treatment group received treatment in the form of supple-mental joint storybook reading using books with a high frequency of strident sounds within the text of the story. Independent–samples t tests were used to study quantitative differences in the control and treatment groups following treatment. Results: Results indicated a significant difference in the presence of stridency observed in participants, with the treatment group showing greater positive change in the presence of stridency in their speech at completion of the study. Conclusion: Results from the study suggest that exposure to focused auditory input in the form of supplementary joint storybook reading, combined with traditional cycles-based phonological remediation, is an effective manner for improving speech intelligibility in children with moderate to severe expressive phonological disorders

Case-based Perspective-Taking as a Mechanism to Improve Metacognition and Higher-Level Thinking in Undergraduate Speech-Language Pathology Students

This case study addressed the authors’ efforts to design an 8-week small-group independent study (IS) experience that facilitated undergraduate speech-language pathology students’ (n=19) higher-level thinking and overall metacognitive awareness. We hoped to encourage both in order to improve students’ overall cognitive growth while enhancing their reflection about and knowledge of professional perspectives regarding the assessment and treatment of laryngeal cancer. To take on this challenge, we combined case-based learning (CBL) and perspective-taking (PT) pedagogies across the IS. Students completed the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI) pre- and post-IS, and written reflections after each of eight weekly discussion meetings. The MAI was quantitatively analyzed, while reflections were qualitatively coded using Bloom’s taxonomy. Findings indicated that metacognitive awareness significantly improved and that higher-level cognitive processing was increasingly evidenced across students’ IS experience. Results indicate the potential to maximize metacognition and cognitive processing by combining CBL and PT by the methods used here. Applications of combined CBL and PT to other disciplines and teaching and learning situations will be discussed along with the implications of our findings

Making Space for Failure in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A Blueprint

In this essay, we offer a typology of failure in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to serve as the foundation for a new line of inquiry to be featured in this new section of Teaching & Learning Inquiry — SoTL in Process. Through the typology, we advocate for making space to talk about failure and its many forms in SoTL. Read the corresponding ISSOTL blog post here

A Developmental Framework for Mentorship in SoTL Illustrated by Three Examples of Unseen Opportunities for Mentoring

Mentoring relationships that form between scholars of teaching and learning occur formally and informally, across varied pathways and programs. In order to better understand such relationships, this paper proposes an adapted version of a three-stage model of mentoring (McKinsey 2016), using three examples of unseen opportunities for mentoring in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to illustrate how this framework might be operationalized. We discuss how the adapted framework might be useful to SoTL scholars in the future to examine mentorship and how unseen opportunities for mentoring might shape how we consider this subset of mentorship going forward

Cross-National Differences in Victimization : Disentangling the Impact of Composition and Context

Varying rates of criminal victimization across countries are assumed to be the outcome of countrylevel structural constraints that determine the supply ofmotivated o¡enders, as well as the differential composition within countries of suitable targets and capable guardianship. However, previous empirical tests of these ‘compositional’ and ‘contextual’ explanations of cross-national di¡erences have been performed upon macro-level crime data due to the unavailability of comparable individual-level data across countries. This limitation has had two important consequences for cross-national crime research. First, micro-/meso-level mechanisms underlying cross-national differences cannot be truly inferred from macro-level data. Secondly, the e¡ects of contextual measures (e.g. income inequality) on crime are uncontrolled for compositional heterogeneity. In this paper, these limitations are overcome by analysing individual-level victimization data across 18 countries from the International CrimeVictims Survey. Results from multi-level analyses on theft and violent victimization indicate that the national level of income inequality is positively related to risk, independent of compositional (i.e. micro- and meso-level) di¡erences. Furthermore, crossnational variation in victimization rates is not only shaped by di¡erences in national context, but also by varying composition. More speci¢cally, countries had higher crime rates the more they consisted of urban residents and regions with lowaverage social cohesion.

The JCMT BISTRO Survey: The Magnetic Field Strength in the Orion A Filament

We determine the magnetic field strength in the OMC 1 region of the Orion A filament via a new implementation of the Chandrasekhar-Fermi method using observations performed as part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) B-Fields In Star-Forming Region Observations (BISTRO) survey with the POL-2 instrument. We combine BISTRO data with archival SCUBA-2 and HARP observations to find a plane-of-sky magnetic field strength in OMC 1 of B_pos=6.6±4.7 mG, where δB_pos=4.7 mG represents a predominantly systematic uncertainty. We develop a new method for measuring angular dispersion, analogous to unsharp masking. We find a magnetic energy density of ~1.7×10^-7 Jm^-3 in OMC 1, comparable both to the gravitational potential energy density of OMC 1 (~10^-7 Jm^-3), and to the energy density in the Orion BN/KL outflow (~10^-7 Jm^-3). We find that neither the Alfvén velocity in OMC 1 nor the velocity of the super-Alfvénic outflow ejecta is sufficiently large for the BN/KL outflow to have caused large-scale distortion of the local magnetic field in the ~500-year lifetime of the outflow. Hence, we propose that the hour-glass field morphology in OMC 1 is caused by the distortion of a primordial cylindrically-symmetric magnetic field by the gravitational fragmentation of the filament and/or the gravitational interaction of the BN/KL and S clumps. We find that OMC 1 is currently in or near magnetically-supported equilibrium, and that the current large-scale morphology of the BN/KL outflow is regulated by the geometry of the magnetic field in OMC 1, and not vice versa

Magnetic Fields toward Ophiuchus-B Derived from SCUBA-2 Polarization Measurements

We present the results of dust emission polarization measurements of Ophiuchus-B (Oph-B) carried out using the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array 2 (SCUBA-2) camera with its associated polarimeter (POL-2) on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. This work is part of the B-fields in Star-forming Region Observations survey initiated to understand the role of magnetic fields in star formation for nearby star-forming molecular clouds. We present a first look at the geometry and strength of magnetic fields in Oph-B. The field geometry is traced over ~0.2 pc, with clear detection of both of the sub-clumps of Oph-B. The field pattern appears significantly disordered in sub-clump Oph-B1. The field geometry in Oph-B2 is more ordered, with a tendency to be along the major axis of the clump, parallel to the filamentary structure within which it lies. The degree of polarization decreases systematically toward the dense core material in the two sub-clumps. The field lines in the lower density material along the periphery are smoothly joined to the large-scale magnetic fields probed by NIR polarization observations. We estimated a magnetic field strength of 630 ± 410 μG in the Oph-B2 sub-clump using a Davis–Chandrasekhar–Fermi analysis. With this magnetic field strength, we find a mass-to-flux ratio λ = 1.6 ± 1.1, which suggests that the Oph-B2 clump is slightly magnetically supercritical

JCMT BISTRO Survey: Magnetic Fields within the Hub-filament Structure in IC 5146

We present the 850 μm polarization observations toward the IC 5146 filamentary cloud taken using the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array 2 (SCUBA-2) and its associated polarimeter (POL-2), mounted on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, as part of the B-fields In STar forming Regions Observations. This work is aimed at revealing the magnetic field morphology within a core-scale (lesssim1.0 pc) hub-filament structure (HFS) located at the end of a parsec-scale filament. To investigate whether the observed polarization traces the magnetic field in the HFS, we analyze the dependence between the observed polarization fraction and total intensity using a Bayesian approach with the polarization fraction described by the Rice likelihood function, which can correctly describe the probability density function of the observed polarization fraction for low signal-to-noise ratio data. We find a power-law dependence between the polarization fraction and total intensity with an index of 0.56 in A V ~ 20–300 mag regions, suggesting that the dust grains in these dense regions can still be aligned with magnetic fields in the IC 5146 regions. Our polarization maps reveal a curved magnetic field, possibly dragged by the contraction along the parsec-scale filament. We further obtain a magnetic field strength of 0.5 ± 0.2 mG toward the central hub using the Davis–Chandrasekhar–Fermi method, corresponding to a mass-to-flux criticality of ~1.3 ± 0.4 and an Alfvénic Mach number of <0.6. These results suggest that gravity and magnetic field are currently of comparable importance in the HFS and that turbulence is less important