The implementation of naturalistic evaluation of reading comprehension: A descriptive study of first graders in a Chapter 1 reading program

The purpose of this study was to document the implementation of naturalistic evaluations of reading comprehension, specifically, the comprehension abilities of first-grade students in a Chapter 1 reading program. There were five major questions which guided the study: (a) How will naturalistic evaluations assess students\u27 reading comprehension abilities in a Chapter 1 classroom? (b) What problems does a Chapter 1 teacher encounter when implementing naturalistic forms of evaluation? (c) Given special consideration to time and management, how can naturalistic devices be used in a Chapter 1 reading program? ( d) How will a Chapter 1 teacher be able to use the information provided by these types of evaluations for improving instruction? (e) Will portfolios provide an evaluation form which is understandable for students, parents, and classroom teachers? Naturalistic evaluations were found to be effective tools for measuring student comprehension abilities. While running records, retellings, and self-evaluations were useful in yielding sufficient information to be used when planning instruction, observation sheets and journal entries were less effective. Preparing and implementing the evaluations was time consuming as it involved determining appropriate assessments, recording observations, and scoring retellings and running records. However, during the semester, these evaluations became more routine and a natural part of the Chapter 1 program. Parents, students, and teachers responded positively to the evaluations used in this study. Their comments indicated that they found the information beneficial for understanding student abilities. Further research documenting the use of naturalistic forms of evaluation is recommended. Practical studies are needed to aid educators in other teaching situations in constructing, implementing, and evaluating student growth through naturalistic evaluations

To be or not to be: Examining the Role of Language in a Concept of Negation

Negation is a complex, abstract concept, despite the ubiquity of words like “no” and “not” in even young children’s speech. One challenging aspect to words like “no” and “not” is that these words can serve many functions in speech, giving us tools to express an array of concepts such as denial, refusal, and nonexistence. Is there a single concept of “negation” that unites these separate negative functions – and if so, does understanding this concept require the structure of human language? In this paper we present a study demonstrating that adults spontaneously identify a concept of negation in the absence of explicit verbal instructions, even when the exemplars of negation are perceptually varied and represent many different functions of negation. Furthermore, tying up participants’ language ability using verbal shadowing impairs participants’ ability to identify a concept of negation, but does not impair participants’ ability to identify an equally complex control concept (natural kinds). We discuss our findings in light of theories regarding the representation of negation and the relationship between language and thought

How Do Children Deal with Shifted Indexicals?

The topic of indexical shift has, like so many other domains in linguistics, blossomed into a domain showing extensive and unusual variation across languages. One initial goal in this project was to bring an acquisition perspective to the evolving theories early in the process. Initially we began with views derived from Hollebrandse (2000) where the idea was advanced that there is an PoV operator that jointly controls several types of indexicals such as personal pronouns, demonstratives, time and space adverbials

Distinguishing processing difficulties in inhibition, implicature, and negation

Despite their considerable communicative abilities, youngchildren often have difficulty interpreting complex linguisticstructures in context. Two examples of this phenomenon arenegation and pragmatic implicature, both of which pose some-times surprising difficulties for preschoolers. Both of thesestructures require children to resist a more salient alternativeinterpretation; since executive function abilities develop ex-tensively during childhood, perhaps failures are due to prob-lems in inhibition. To test this hypothesis, we designed tasksto measure inhibitory control, negation, and implicature com-prehension in children and adults. Using standard analyses aswell as drift diffusion models, we found different patterns ofprocessing on all three tasks, and no support for the hypothesisthat inhibitory control per se is playing a role in either adults’or children’s negation or implicature processing. Instead, ouranalyses reveal qualitatively different developmental trajecto-ries, suggesting task-specific factors driving these changes

Radiomics-based aortic flow profile characterization with 4D phase-contrast MRI

4D PC MRI of the aorta has become a routinely available examination, and a multitude of single parameters have been suggested for the quantitative assessment of relevant flow features for clinical studies and diagnosis. However, clinically applicable assessment of complex flow patterns is still challenging. We present a concept for applying radiomics for the quantitative characterization of flow patterns in the aorta. To this end, we derive cross-sectional scalar parameter maps related to parameters suggested in literature such as throughflow, flow direction, vorticity, and normalized helicity. Derived radiomics features are selected with regard to their inter-scanner and inter-observer reproducibility, as well as their performance in the differentiation of sex-, age- and disease-related flow properties. The reproducible features were tested on user-selected examples with respect to their suitability for characterizing flow profile types. In future work, such signatures could be applied for quantitative flow assessment in clinical studies or disease phenotyping

Testing a global standard for quantifying species recovery and assessing conservation impact.

Recognizing the imperative to evaluate species recovery and conservation impact, in 2012 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) called for development of a "Green List of Species" (now the IUCN Green Status of Species). A draft Green Status framework for assessing species' progress toward recovery, published in 2018, proposed 2 separate but interlinked components: a standardized method (i.e., measurement against benchmarks of species' viability, functionality, and preimpact distribution) to determine current species recovery status (herein species recovery score) and application of that method to estimate past and potential future impacts of conservation based on 4 metrics (conservation legacy, conservation dependence, conservation gain, and recovery potential). We tested the framework with 181 species representing diverse taxa, life histories, biomes, and IUCN Red List categories (extinction risk). Based on the observed distribution of species' recovery scores, we propose the following species recovery categories: fully recovered, slightly depleted, moderately depleted, largely depleted, critically depleted, extinct in the wild, and indeterminate. Fifty-nine percent of tested species were considered largely or critically depleted. Although there was a negative relationship between extinction risk and species recovery score, variation was considerable. Some species in lower risk categories were assessed as farther from recovery than those at higher risk. This emphasizes that species recovery is conceptually different from extinction risk and reinforces the utility of the IUCN Green Status of Species to more fully understand species conservation status. Although extinction risk did not predict conservation legacy, conservation dependence, or conservation gain, it was positively correlated with recovery potential. Only 1.7% of tested species were categorized as zero across all 4 of these conservation impact metrics, indicating that conservation has, or will, play a role in improving or maintaining species status for the vast majority of these species. Based on our results, we devised an updated assessment framework that introduces the option of using a dynamic baseline to assess future impacts of conservation over the short term to avoid misleading results which were generated in a small number of cases, and redefines short term as 10 years to better align with conservation planning. These changes are reflected in the IUCN Green Status of Species Standard

Pragmatic felicity facilitates the production and comprehension of negation

Negation is a fundamental element of language and logical systems, but processing negative sentences can be challenging. Early investigations suggested that this difficulty was due to the representational challenge of adding an additional logical element to a proposition. In more recent work, however, supportive contexts mitigate the processing costs of negation, suggesting that pragmatics can modulate this difficulty. We test the pragmatic hypothesis that listeners’ processing of negation is influenced by expectations about speakers’ production of negation by directly comparing speakers and listeners in two pairs of experiments. In both experiments, speakers produce negative sentences more often when they are both relevant and informative. And in both experiments, listeners in turn are fastest to respond to sentences that they expect speakers to produce. We argue that general pragmatic principles that apply to all sentences can help explain the challenges of processing negation