Depth of reading vocabulary in hearing and hearing-impaired children

The main point of our study was to examine the vocabulary knowledge of pupils in grades 3–6, and in particular the relative reading vocabulary disadvantage of hearing-impaired pupils. The achievements of 394 pupils with normal hearing and 106 pupils with a hearing impairment were examined on two vocabulary assessment tasks: a lexical decision task and a use decision task. The target words in both tasks represent the vocabulary children should have at the end of primary school. The results showed that most hearing pupils reached this norm, whereas most hearing-impaired pupils did not. In addition, results showed that hearing-impaired pupils not only knew fewer words, but that they also knew them less well. This lack of deeper knowledge remained even when matching hearing and hearing-impaired children on minimal word knowledge. Additionally, comparison of the two tasks demonstrated the efficacy of the lexical decision task as a measure of lexical semantic knowledge

Measurement of Executive Functioning Using a Playful Robot in Kindergarten

We explored the potential of a robotics application in education as a measurement tool of child executive functioning skills. Sixty-five kindergarteners received assignments to go through a maze with a programmable robot, the Bee-Bot. Via observation we quantified how they solved these tasks. Their performance was successfully aggregated into a latent variable, which was used to predict the outcomes on standardized tasks that measure executive functioning. The latent variable significantly predicted performance on several tasks that measure problem-solving abilities, memory, visuospatial abilities and attention. It did not significantly predict pencil-and-paper tasks that measured visuospatial ability and nonverbal or design fluency. This study showed that it is possible to use a playful robotics task to obtain information on children''s ability. We recommend more research on using diverse robots in larger samples with different age groups to further explore the possibilities of robots as a test instrument

Developing a Structural Model of Reading: The Role of Hearing Status in Reading Development Over Time

The purpose of the present study was to develop a structural model of reading based on the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). Data from a 4-year longitudinal study of Dutch primary school children with and without hearing loss were used to conduct an exploratory analysis of how lexical components (i.e., decoding skills, lexical decision, and lexical use) relate to one another and to reading comprehension. Our structural model supports a positive role of the quality of the mental lexicon for reading comprehension. Furthermore, it was possible to apply the same conceptual model of reading development to both groups of children when incorporating hearing status as a grouping variable. However, a multigroup comparison model showed that the predictive values of the relations between the different tasks differed for the two groups