This study aimed to describe 1-year changes in students' vocabulary in written narratives. Secondary aims included examination of accuracy and the relationship between lexical diversity and ...achievement. Participants included 749 students in first through eighth grades. Within-subjects 1-year change in diversity, productivity, and accuracy was examined across time points by grades. Findings indicated there was significant change in lexical diversity in early elementary grades with decreases in the proportion of spelling errors. There was significant change in the proportion of different words to total words in upper grades. Students' lexical diversity was moderately related to performance on standardized measures of achievement. Findings support the use of lexical measures as a tool to examine and describe written language growth.
In this study, we examined the relationship of growth trajectories of oral reading fluency, vocabulary, phonological awareness, letter-naming fluency, and nonsense word reading fluency from 1st grade ...to 3rd grade with reading comprehension in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades. Data from 12,536 children who were followed from kindergarten to 3rd grade longitudinally were used. These children were administered Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills subtests, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Third Edition, and reading comprehension (Stanford Achievement Test, 10th ed.) tasks multiple times in each year. Students' initial status and rate of growth in each predictor within each grade were estimated using individual growth modeling. These estimates were then used as predictors in dominance regression analyses to examine relative contributions that the predictors made to the outcome: reading comprehension. Among the 1st-grade predictors, individual differences in growth rate in oral reading fluency in 1st grade, followed by vocabulary skills and the autoregressive effect of reading comprehension, made the most contribution to reading comprehension in 3rd grade. Among the 2nd- and 3rd-grade predictors, children's initial status in oral reading fluency had the strongest relationships with their reading comprehension skills in 3rd grade.
Abstract
Environmental exposures produce heritable traits that can linger in the population for one or two generations. Millions of individuals consume substances such as artificial sweeteners daily ...that are declared safe by regulatory agencies without evaluation of their potential heritable effects. We show that consumption of aspartame, an FDA-approved artificial sweetener, daily for up to 16-weeks at doses equivalent to only 7–15% of the FDA recommended maximum daily intake value (equivalent to 2–4 small, 8 oz diet soda drinks per day) produces significant spatial learning and memory deficits in mice. Moreover, the cognitive deficits are transmitted to male and female descendants along the paternal lineage suggesting that aspartame’s adverse cognitive effects are heritable, and that they are more pervasive than current estimates, which consider effects in the directly exposed individuals only. Traditionally, deleterious environmental exposures of pregnant and nursing women are viewed as risk factors for the health of future generations. Environmental exposures of men are not considered to pose similar risks. Our findings suggest that environmental exposures of men can produce adverse impact on cognitive function in future generations and demonstrate the need for considering heritable effects via the paternal lineage as part of the regulatory evaluations of artificial sweeteners.
Using a longitudinal cluster-randomized controlled design, we examined whether students' reading outcomes differed when they received 1, 2, or 3 years of individualized reading instruction from first ...through third grade, compared with a treated control group. More than 45% of students came from families living in poverty. Following students, we randomly assigned their teachers each year to deliver individualized reading instruction or a treated control condition intervention focused on mathematics. Students who received individualized reading instruction in all three grades showed the strongest reading skills by the end of third grade compared with those who received fewer years of such instruction. There was inconsistent evidence supporting a sustained first-grade treatment effect: Individualized instruction in first grade was necessary but not sufficient for stronger third-grade reading outcomes. These effects were achieved by regular classroom teachers who received professional development, which indicates that policies that support the use of evidence-based reading instruction and teacher training can yield increased student achievement.
Among the consequences of systemic racism in health care are significant health disparities among Black/African American individuals with comorbid physical and mental health conditions. Despite ...decades of studies acknowledging health disparities based on race, significant change has not occurred. There are shockingly few evidence-based antiracism interventions. New paradigms are needed to intervene on, and not just document, racism in health care systems. We are developing a transformative paradigm for new antiracism interventions for primary care settings that integrate mental and physical health care. The paradigm is the first of its kind to integrate community-based participatory research and systems science, within an established model of early phase translation to rigorously define new antiracism interventions. This protocol will use a novel application of systems sciences by combining the qualitative systems sciences methods (group model building; GMB) with quantitative methods (simulation modeling) to develop a comprehensive and community-engaged view of both the drivers of racism and the potential impact of antiracism interventions. Community participants from two integrated primary health care systems will engage in group GMB workshops with researchers to 1) Describe and map the complex dynamic systems driving racism in health care practices, 2) Identify leverage points for disruptive antiracism interventions, policies and practices, and 3) Review and prioritize a list of possible intervention strategies. Advisory committees will provide feedback on the design of GMB procedures, screen potential intervention components for impact, feasibility, and acceptability, and identify gaps for further exploration. Simulation models will be generated based on contextual factors and provider/patient characteristics. Using Item Response Theory, we will initiate the process of developing core measures for assessing the effectiveness of interventions at the organizational-systems and provider levels to be tested under a variety of conditions. While we focus on Black/African Americans, we hope that the resulting transformative paradigm can be applied to improve health equity among other marginalized groups.
Introduction Fragile X syndrome is an inherited X-linked disorder associated with intellectual disabilities that begin in childhood and last a lifetime. The symptoms overlap with autism spectrum ...disorder, and the syndrome predominantly affects males. Consequently, FXS research tends to favor analysis of social behaviors in males, leaving a gap in our understanding of other behavioral traits, especially in females. Methods We used a mouse model of FXS to analyze developmental, behavioral, neurochemical, and transcriptomic profiles in males and females. Results Our behavioral assays demonstrated locomotor hyperactivity, motor impulsivity, increased “approach” behavior in an approach-avoidance assay, and deficits in nest building behavior. Analysis of brain neurotransmitter content revealed deficits in striatal GABA, glutamate, and serotonin content. RNA sequencing of the ventral striatum unveiled expression changes associated with neurotransmission as well as motivation and substance use pathways. Sex differences were identified in nest building behavior, striatal neurotransmitter content, and ventral striatal gene expression. Discussion In summary, our study identified sex differences in specific behavioral, neurotransmitter, and gene expression phenotypes and gene set enrichment analysis identified significant enrichment of pathways associated with motivation and drug reward.
The distinctive features of the Arabic language and orthography offer opportunities to investigate multiple word characteristics at the item level. The aim of this paper was to model differences in ...word reading at the item level among 3rd grade native Arabic-speaking children (
n
= 303) using cross-classified generalized random-effects (CCGRE) analysis. The participants read 80 vowelized words that varied in multiple elements that may contribute to their decodability: number of letters, number of syllables, number of morphemes, ligaturing (connectivity), semantics (concrete vs. abstract), orthographic frequency, root type frequency, and part of speech. Morphological awareness (MA) was included as a person-level predictor. Results of individual models showed that MA, number of letters, number of syllables, number of morphemes, number of ligatures, orthographic frequency, and part of speech were significantly related to the probability of a correct response. However, when all predictors were entered simultaneously, only MA and number of morphemes remained significant. These results underscore the important role of morphology in the lexical structure of Arabic words and in Arabic word reading. Discussion focuses on the role of morphology in Arabic reading and the implications for intervention to improve word recognition in children learning to read Arabic.
Recent achievement research suggests that executive function (EF), a set of regulatory processes that control both thought and action necessary for goal-directed behavior, is related to typical and ...atypical reading performance. This project examines the relation of EF, as measured by its components, Inhibition, Updating Working Memory, and Shifting, with a hybrid model of reading disability (RD). Our sample included 420 children who participated in a broader intervention project when they were in KG-third grade (age
= 6.63 years,
= 1.04 years, range = 4.79-10.40 years). At the time their EF was assessed, using a parent-report Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF), they had a mean age of 13.21 years (
= 1.54 years; range = 10.47-16.63 years). The hybrid model of RD was operationalized as a composite consisting of four symptoms, and set so that any child could have any one, any two, any three, any four, or none of the symptoms included in the hybrid model. The four symptoms include low word reading achievement, unexpected low word reading achievement, poorer reading comprehension compared to listening comprehension, and dual-discrepancy response-to-intervention, requiring both low achievement and low growth in word reading. The results of our multilevel ordinal logistic regression analyses showed a significant relation between all three components of EF (Inhibition, Updating Working Memory, and Shifting) and the hybrid model of RD, and that the strength of EF's predictive power for RD classification was the highest when RD was modeled as having at least one or more symptoms. Importantly, the chances of being classified as having RD increased as EF performance worsened and decreased as EF performance improved. The question of whether any one EF component would emerge as a superior predictor was also examined and results showed that Inhibition, Updating Working Memory, and Shifting were equally valuable as predictors of the hybrid model of RD. In total, all EF components were significant and equally effective predictors of RD when RD was operationalized using the hybrid model.
Surprisingly few studies have explored the intuitive connection between self-control and weight loss. We tracked participants’ diet, exercise and weight loss during a 12-week weight loss program. ...Participants higher in self-control weighed less and reported exercising more than their lower self-control counterparts at baseline. Independent of baseline differences, individuals high in dispositional self-control ate fewer calories overall and fewer calories from fat, burned marginally more calories through exercise, and lost more weight during the program than did those lower in self-control. These data suggest that trait self-control is, indeed, an important predictor of health behaviors.
We present an experiment that explores the degree to which cumulative structural priming effects of the sort reported in Kaschak (Memory and Cognition 35:925-937,
2007
) persist over the course of a ...week. In the first session of the experiment, participants completed written sentence stems that were designed to bias them toward producing the double object (
Meghan gave Michael a toy
) or prepositional object (
Meghan gave a toy to Michael
) construction. Participants returned for a second session of the experiment a week later. We observed that the biases established in the first phase of the experiment affected performance in the second phase. That is, the cumulative priming effect persisted for a week. The implications of this result for theories of language production are discussed.
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