Orthography is considered to be a major problem in Dutch education, since many pupils don’t seem to be able to master orthographic rules, even after years of education. In educational literature it is argued that the problems related to spelling are caused by approaches that focus more on rules of thumb than on linguistic insights. This is somewhat remarkable, since a good understanding of the Dutch orthographic system requires a fair amount of morphological knowledge. In order to effectively implement this knowledge, the development of a morphological awareness (MA) seems to be required. Therefore, a short intervention was designed for the upper levels of secondary schools (4 havo) which aimed to foster MA and, subsequently, improve orthographic skills. Results of this quasi-experimental study indicate that a short intervention can significantly boost MA, but that students don’t seem to be able to use MA effectively to enhance spelling performance.
Societal one-way directed approaches of sustainable primary school building design cause persistent physical building problems. It affects the performances of the societal challenge of designing real sustainable school buildings, as well as the educational and social processes, and its end-user performances. Conventional building construction approaches build traditionally their designs on a syntheses of dialogues and consensus during decision-making processes, due to a variety of different interests. Principals define their ambitions and requirements into a team of mainly technical domain related disciplines. There are no design methods available that connect human systems and ecosystems integrated and balance the dynamic multi-level scaled mechanisms of human needs and sustainability development factors. The presented analytic framework recognizes similarity patterns between these multi-level scaled social systems, ecosystems and sustainable development entities, qualitatively as well as quantitatively. It delivers a new polarity based dynamic system that contributes to the client briefs and physical building morphological factors from a more sustainable development base. This theoretical approach establishes Sustainability-Centered Guidelines for primary schools (SCGs) design and building.
