Cognitive Profile of Students Who Enter Higher Education with an Indication of Dyslexia

For languages other than English there is a lack of empirical evidence about the cognitive profile of students entering higher education with a diagnosis of dyslexia. To obtain such evidence, we compared a group of 100 Dutch-speaking students diagnosed with dyslexia with a control group of 100 students without learning disabilities. Our study showed selective deficits in reading and writing (effect sizes for accuracy between d = 1 and d = 2), arithmetic (d≈1), and phonological processing (d>0.7). Except for spelling, these deficits were larger for speed related measures than for accuracy related measures. Students with dyslexia also performed slightly inferior on the KAIT tests of crystallized intelligence, due to the retrieval of verbal information from long-term memory. No significant differences were observed in the KAIT tests of fluid intelligence. The profile we obtained agrees with a recent meta-analysis of English findings suggesting that it generalizes to all alphabetic languages. Implications for special arrangements for students with dyslexia in higher education are outlined

The Effect of Morphological Strategies Training for English Language Learners

Native speakers have a vocabulary size of about 50,000 when they enter college, but English as a second language learners (ELLs) have a size between 3500 and 4500 word families to take TOEFL exam (Chujo & Oghigian, 2009). It is not difficult to conclude that, when students enter college, the vocabulary size of native speakers is about 12 times of that for ELLs. Of the recently developed Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000), more than 82% of the entries are of Greek or Latin origin, indicating that the knowledge of morphemic structures, such as prefixes, suffixes, and word stems, positively affects vocabulary learning (Tong, Deacon, Kirby, Cain, & Parrila, 2011). This is especially true for college-level vocabulary as most college textbooks are filled with technical terms, jargons, and new disciplinary concepts (Francis & Simpson, 2009) . Morphological awareness refers to the conscious awareness of the morphemic structures of words and abilities to reflect on and manipulate the structures (Carlisle, McBride-Chang, Nagy, & Nunes, 2011). Morphological awareness influences lexical processing in the sense that students with better morphological awareness are more likely to retrieval their prior knowledge of the componential morphemes in their memory storage, and hence make connection between the morphological knowledge and the meaning of the new word to construct a schema for the new word, which enables the learners to achieve a deeper level of processing and store the new word in sematic memory (Goodwin & Ahn, 2010). There is evidence, however, that college students do not always apply morphological strategies. In fact, many students have little knowledge about morphological strategies, especially ELLs (Francis & Simpson, 2009; Nation, 2001). Up to date, it is not known how well ELL college students are equipped with morphological strategies and knowledge that enable them to learn vocabulary more effectively

Elementary preservice teachers' attitudes and pedagogical strategies toward hypothetical shy, exuberant, and average children

Children's learning and development are directly and indirectly influenced by teachers' beliefs and pedagogical strategies toward child behaviors. This cross-sectional study explored elementary preservice teachers' attitudes and pedagogical strategies for working with hypothetical children demonstrating temperament-based shy, exuberant, and average behaviors in the classroom. A secondary goal was to compare attitudes and pedagogical strategies at the beginning and end of teacher training program. A total of 354 participants responded to three vignettes describing children frequently displaying these behaviors. Results indicated preservice teachers were more likely to use social-learning strategies with shy children and high-powered strategies with exuberant children. Participants were more likely to show warmth to shy children, but believed they would be less academically successful. Participants at the end of the program reported higher self-efficacy and more warmth toward all children compared to those beginning the program. Results are discussed in terms of their educational implications