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.
The initial trigger of this research about learning from video was the availability of log files from users of video material. Video modality is seen as attractive as it is associated with the relaxed mood of watching TV. The experiments in this research have the goal to gain more insight in viewing patterns of students when viewing video. Students received an awareness instruction about the use of possible alternative viewing behaviors to see whether this would enhance their learning effects. We found that:- the learning effects of students with a narrow viewing repertoire were less than the learning effects of students with a broad viewing repertoire or strategic viewers.- students with some basic knowledge of the topics covered in the videos benefited most from the use of possible alternative viewing behaviors and students with low prior knowledge benefited the least.- the knowledge gain of students with low prior knowledge disappeared after a few weeks; knowledge construction seems worse when doing two things at the same time.- media players could offer more options to help students with their search for the content they want to view again.- there was no correlation between pervasive personality traits and viewing behavior of students.The right use of video in higher education will lead to students and teachers that are more aware of their learning and teaching behavior, to better videos, to enhanced media players, and, finally, to higher learning effects that let users improve their learning from video.
Out-of-home placed children or adolescents can be placed in family-style group care, a promising alternative youth care setting. It provides children and Professional Foster Parents (PFPs) with the opportunity to create a continuous relationship. This relationship, in turn, is an important factor in building and maintaining attachment. Scientific literature shows that sensitivity and responsivity are crucial interactional elements for building and maintaining an attachment relationship, but little knowledge is available on how those concepts are displayed in mundane interactions. Therefore this dissertation studies dinner conversations between experienced PFPs and adolescents in family-style group care to find out how sensitivity and responsivity unfold in these conversations. The data consist of 300 hours of videorecordings coming from six family-style group care settings. The method of Conversation Analysis was used to analyse the conversations in detail. On the basis of four studies a better understanding is gained into how the dyadic concepts sensitivity and responsivity are displayed in daily interactions between PFPs and adolescents in family-style group care. The analysis of these specific phenomena disclose the PFPadolescent interaction from different perspectives: the verbal and non-verbal actions of both PFPs and adolescents and how PFPs and adolescents align. In short, this dissertation provides a detailed analysis of interaction and improves the understanding of the dyadic concepts sensitivity and responsivity. It reveals that adolescents are active participants in interactions and shows that PFPs are inventive in their conversations with the adolescents.
