Standards of spelling among university students are now so bad that lecturers are being urged to turn a blind eye to mistakes.

Many undergraduates misspell basic words such as “their”, “speech” or even “Wednesday” in essays, it is claimed.

First year students are the worst offenders, despite already spending at least 13 years in the education system.

Standards have deteriorated to such an extent that one leading academic has been forced to ignore common errors altogether.

Dr Ken Smith, a senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University, said “atrocious” spelling was rife among new undergraduates, with many failing to apply basic rules, such as “i before e, except after c“. The words “weird”, “seize”, “leisure” and “neighbour” are regularly misspelt by students, he said.

The comments come amid growing fears that many sixth-formers are leaving school lacking basic skills.

Some universities have already extended courses by a year to give weak students extra tuition in core subjects that they failed to pick up in the classroom.

Last year, another academic claimed that British undergraduates had a poorer grasp of English than some foreign students.

Dr Bernard Lamb, a reader in genetics at Imperial College London, said those from Singapore and Brunei made fewer mistakes in their work, despite speaking English as a second language. Many British students appear to have been through school without mastering basic rules of grammar and punctuation, or having their errors corrected, he said.

Writing in Times Higher Education magazine, Dr Smith said mistakes were now so common that academics should simply accept them as “variants”.

“Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students’ atrocious spelling,” he said. “But why must we suffer? Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I’ve got a better idea. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell.”

He lists 10 words which are most regularly misspelt by students, including “February”, “ignore”, “truly” and “queue”.

“I could go on and add another 10 words that are commonly misspelt - the word ‘misspelt’ itself of course, and all those others that break the ‘i’ before ‘e’ rule - but I think I have made my point,” he said.

Jack Bovill, chairman of The Spelling Society, said: “All the data suggests that there are more and more students at university level whose spelling is not up to scratch. Universities are even finding they have masters-level students who cannot spell.”

Top ten misspellings

Argument Arguement

February Febuary

Wednesday Wensday

Ignore Ignor

Occurred Occured

Opportunity Opertunity

Queue Que

Speech Speach

Their Thier

Truly Truely

Twelfth Twelth

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2510704/University-students-cannot-spell.html

Growing numbers of people are concerned about the impact of working mothers on family life, a survey by Cambridge University suggests.

It compared results of social attitude polls from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

In 1998, 51% of women and 45.9% of men believed family life would not suffer if a woman went to work.

This had fallen to 46% of women and 42% of men in 2002, amid “growing sympathy” for the old-fashioned view women should be in the home and not the workplace.

‘Super mum’

The survey, which questioned between 1,000 and 5,000 people, was conducted by Professor Jacqueline Scott from the university’s department of sociology.

She used recent data from the International Social Survey Programme and older polls.

Professor Scott said the idea that support was steadily growing for women taking an equal role in the workplace, rather than their traditional role in the home was “clearly a myth”.

She added: “Instead, there is clear evidence that women’s changing role is viewed as having costs both for the woman and the family.

“It is conceivable that opinions are shifting as the shine of the ’super-mum’ syndrome wears off, and the idea of women juggling high-powered careers while also baking cookies and reading bedtime stories is increasingly seen to be unrealisable by ordinary mortals.”

Overseas figures

Yet, it also showed the numbers of people who believed it was the man’s role to work and the wife’s to look after the children had fallen.

In 1984, 59.2% of women and 65.5% of men believed that was the case, compared to 31.1% of women and 41.1% of men in 2002.

The survey focuses on results from Britain, the US and, because the earlier surveys pre-dated the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former Federal Republic of Germany.

In the US the percentage of people arguing that family life does not suffer if a woman works has plummeted, from 51% in 1994 to 38% in 2002.

About the same number of West Germans (37%) agree; but the number there has risen, having been just 24% in the mid-1990s.

‘Considerable strain’

The report adds there should now be further investigation to understand why the attitude shift is occurring.

It asks whether this is because caring for the family is seen as women’s work, or because people feel there is no practical alternative to a woman taking the role.

Prof Scott said a change in attitude was not the same thing as a change in behaviour, but it mattered.

She said: “Women, particularly mothers, can experience considerable strain when attitudes reinforce the notion that employment and family interests conflict.

“If we are to make progress in devising policies that encourage equal working opportunities for women, we need to know more about what gender roles people view as practical, as possible and as fair.”

‘Transformation needed’

Meanwhile, the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equality between women and men in the UK on pay and pensions, said attempts to force women into a male-created workplace were failing.

Its campaigns officer Kat Banyard said: “The long working hours culture and lack of flexible working means women are presented with impossible choices - forced to choose between caring for a family at home or maximising their career opportunities.

“The result is that motherhood carries a penalty and women and men are strait-jacketed by gender stereotypes.

“We need wholesale transformation.”

Source: BBC News, UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7543576.stm

To make up for a disappointing medal blank at the Athens Olympic Games four years ago, the US diving team is eyeing a comeback at the Beijing Olympics, with Chinese coach Chen Wenbo.

By doubling the training hours and adding a full-time training program, Chen has brought wholesale changes to the US diving team in the lead-up to the Beijing Games.

“We have worked very hard for the past three years. We got medals at the 2006 World Cup, 2007 World Cup and a medal this February at the Worlds. We believe we will break through this year,” said Chen, who joined the US diving team three-and-a-half years ago and is now the team’s assistant coach.

Unlike Chinese divers, who started diving at a young age, most of the American divers started their careers because of a personal interest. They lack basic skills training, which Chen considers a weak point.

Chen has turned part-time training into full-time training, doubling the hours from 20 to 40 a week.

“We were looking for some new ideas, and Mr Chen has certainly brought those,” said US diving coach John Wingfield. “He has taken us from a developmental level to the top level.”

The divers have accepted Chen’s training methods.

“He has a different style to some of the US coaches, but I think that’s only made Ariel (Rittenhouse) and I a stronger sychro team,” said Kelci Bryant, a US synchronized 3m-springboard diver. “I think my coach is a great coach. He helped me to achieve my dream of being in the 2008 Olympic Games.”

Born in Zhanjiang, a city in China’s southern Guangdong province, Chen was one of the best divers in the Chinese national team from 1973 to 1982, winning two national titles in 1977 and 1980.

He began his coaching career in the Chinese national diving team in 1983, until 1991. He left to coach in Canada in 1992 and moved to the US two years later.

Compared with the Chinese divers, who are more experienced and whose performances are stable, Chen said he believed the US team was physically stronger and under less pressure.

“My divers are open-minded and have little mental burden in competitions, which will help them create a miracle,” he said. “If they are well trained they will have a bright future.”

At the Beijing Games, the US diving team is led by veteran divers Laura Wilkinson, the 2000 Olympic gold medalist on the women’s 10m platform, and Troy Dumais, who is competing in his third Olympics and has three sixth-place finishes, and a fourth in two Olympics.

“The US team has a mix of veterans and young divers, the whole team is improving,” Chen said. “Wilkinson is still the best in the women’s platform. I hope those veterans will steady the team’s nerves and help it strive for a good result.”

Source: People’s Daily Online, China
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90779/94837/6466479.html

Manufacturing companies in Wales are in danger of going to the wall because they cannot recruit suitable employees from a potential workforce being sent out into the world of work by schools and colleges without the range of basic skills they need.

As another academic year draws to an end, the Engineering Employers’ Federation says a radical overhaul is needed of schools’ and colleges’ approach to basic skills if they are to provide the employees with the skills that companies need to survive.

The EEF is an employers’ membership organisation which works with thousands of manufacturing and non-manufacturing companies providing advice on business issues, offering tailored training programmes and representing their views at all levels of government.

It says some of the companies it works with are warning that, by the end of this year, they will not have sufficient skilled people to deliver their trading objectives – which often include a desire to expand – and are not confident about being able to find people.

The EEF says the solution lies partly in increasing the number of apprenticeship places available. But it also contests that the problem is rooted much earlier in young people’s academic careers, and that the whole way in which schools are structured needs to be changed.

It believes young people should attend the same school up to the age of at least 14, and preferably 16, with no need to change schools, lose friends or change teachers at a vulnerable age until GCSE choices or the GCSEs themselves have been undertaken. Between the ages of 16 and 19, they would then move to an establishment that caters for those choices.

The Federation’s position reflects UK Government plans announced recently by Schools Minister Lord Adonis for children to stay at the same school from age five to 18 to stop their performance dropping when they move on to secondary school.

EEF Wales spokesperson Martin Bibey said contact with, and formal surveys of, the employers they dealt with showed that companies were seriously struggling to recruit the right people because of their lack of basic skills and because schools and colleges were turning out the wrong type of people.

He added: “Recent surveys carried out by the EEF show that 80% of companies said technical staff needed to improve skills, as did 50% of management and supervisors.

“Our research shows that 76% of companies say current skills will not meet future strategic priorities – and what’s worrying is that a high percentage of firms say they find it very hard to recruit skilled manual people, citing lack of knowledge, experience, qualifications and poor attitude to employment. Graduates are also singled out as being poor, showing the most marked gap between existing and required skills, with only 50% perceived to have the basic skill required.

“A frightening 96% of companies in one of our surveys said private training was better than that provided by colleges of further education, which they criticised for poor standards of teaching, inappropriate course content, and turning out students who lacked the basic skills for the workplace and commercial environment.”

Mr Bibey said the EEF in Wales was now calling for something radical to be done with the format of the school structure and curriculum in order to improve basic skills.

“We need to get education right from pre-school up to age 16 – trying to get basic skills drummed in after 16 is too late,” he said.

“We would expect public funding to have already equipped everyone with the basic skills necessary for employment and participation in community life.

“The fact that this approach has patently failed to deliver for many individuals and employers, and continues to fail, gives some cause for concern.

“It is our contention that a radical overhaul of the structure pre-16 is required.”

Source: WalesOnline, United Kingdom
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/business-in-wales/business-news/2008/08/06/companies-want-radical-overhaul-of-school-system-91466-21472140/

Participation in a childcare program appears to increase the likelihood that a child will be obese when he or she shows up for the first day of kindergarten, researchers report in the journal Pediatrics.

Moreover, the report indicates that the type of childcare makes a difference. For instance, children who receive care from a relative, friend, or neighbor, held at least occasionally in the child’s own home, were more prone to obesity than those who received care at a daycare center or nursery school.

Latino children, however, seemed to be the exception. While they were found to be at greater risk for obesity than kids of other races, they were less likely to become obese when enrolled in a childcare program rather than spending the week with a parent.

The study, conducted by Dr. Erin J. Maher, from Casey Family Programs in Seattle, and colleagues, involved nearly 16,000 first-time kindergartners who had or had not been enrolled in childcare, defined as spending at least 10 hours per week in care not provided by a parent.

Childcare was subdivided into four types: 1) paid or unpaid care by a relative, friend, or neighbor, held at least occasionally at the child’s home; 2) paid care by a non-relative family outside the child’s home; 3) Head Start; and 4) care at daycare center, nursery school, preschool, or pre-kindergarten. Children were considered to be obese if their weight was in the 95th or higher percentile for height.

Overall, kids in childcare were more likely to obese than children not in childcare. Of the various childcare types, care by a relative, friend, or neighbor was most strongly linked to obesity. Compared with other racial groups, white children were less likely and Latino children more likely to be obese.

“Our research points to the need to better understand how the specific features of childcare environments may promote or protect against the development of obesity,” Dr. Maher’s team concludes. “This understanding can then lead to the development of targeted interventions to reach children and families in childcare settings.”

Source: Canada.com, Canada
http://www.canada.com/topics/bodyandhealth/story.html?id=3e896b07-81ae-4289-a60a-c40f9dee0896

Growing interest in publicly funded programs for young children has drawn attention to whether and how Head Start and other early childhood programs should be asked to prove their worth.

Congress asked the National Research Council for guidance on how to identify important outcomes for children from birth to age 5 and how best to assess them in preschools, child care, and other early childhood programs.

The Research Council’s new report concludes that well-planned assessments can inform teaching and efforts to improve programs and can contribute to better outcomes for children, but poor assessments or misuse of the results can harm both children and programs. The report offers principles to guide the design, implementation, and use of assessments in early childhood settings.

Federal agencies, states, school systems, and other organizations that evaluate early childhood programs or the children they serve should make the purpose of any assessment explicit and public in advance, the report says. For example, a state should specify whether an assessment will be used to help teachers gauge the progress of individual children or to help public agencies decide whether to continue a program’s funding.

“The goal of the assessment should guide the choice of the assessment tools used, and assessments that will have widespread effects should meet high standards of rigor and validity,” said Catherine Snow, a professor at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University and chair of the committee that wrote the report. “For example, using a standardized test with a sample of children in a program would be suitable if the goal was to determine whether the program is bringing children closer to national norms, but if the purpose is to guide instruction within a specific classroom, a nonstandardized assessment linked to the curriculum would be appropriate.”

Effective assessment must be part of a larger system with a strong infrastructure to support children’s care and education, the report says. Facets of this system should include clearly articulated standards for what children should learn and what constitutes a quality program. Other aspects include professional development opportunities, training to familiarize policymakers, teachers, and administrators with standards and assessments, and continuous monitoring to ensure that all elements of the system are working together to serve the interests of the children.

The report urges extreme caution in basing high-stakes decisions — such as determining whether a program will receive continued funding or whether a child is eligible for services because of an identified disability — on assessments of young children. Models such as those set forth in the No Child Left Behind Act strive to link yearly progress assessments to explicitly defined academic content areas for children in grades three through 12. It would be inappropriate to borrow this model unchanged and apply it to early childhood settings, the committee said, because well-defined academic content areas are not characteristic of excellent care and education for younger children.

Cutting a program’s funding or imposing other negative consequences based on assessments of the participating children should happen only under certain conditions — if the program has been given enough resources to meet expectations, for example, and if the level of children’s development when they entered the program has been taken into account. Child assessment results should never be the only information considered. And a program should not be closed or restructured if doing so would have worse consequences for children than leaving it open, the report adds.

Likewise, decisions to penalize a teacher should never rest solely on findings from assessments of students in his or her classroom, without considering children’s starting points, how the test is related to the curriculum, and whether the teacher has adequate support, professional development, and other resources.

Programs’ quality should be evaluated based not only on how they affect children’s academic skills such as language and mathematics, but also on whether they improve other important aspects of child development, such as social and emotional skills, the report says. While good measures of certain outcomes — such as literacy and language development — currently exist, tools to assess other abilities such as problem-solving and creativity remain underdeveloped, and more effort will be required to improve their quality.

In addition, the report notes, some assessment measures have only been tested with populations that do not represent the diversity of children enrolled in today’s early childhood programs. Care should be used in assessing the status or progress of young children with special needs and those for whom English is a second language, because many existing instruments have not demonstrated their validity for these groups.

The report was sponsored by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council make up the National Academies. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter. The Research Council is the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

Source: Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080804111640.htm

We soon will experience the most important time in the entire school year for children: the first two weeks. What happens during this critical period pretty much determines how the rest of the year will go.

When children return to school after the summer break, their perceptions about school and themselves as learners are mostly uncertain. It’s a new year with new teachers, new books, new classes, new schedules and new friends. All of these new things come with the hope that this year could be different and better than all previous years.

That uncertainty in students’ perceptions continues only until teachers administer the first quizzes and tests near the end of the second week of school. When teachers assign grades to those first quizzes, the grades put students into categories. And getting out of a category is really difficult.

Students who receive a C on that first math quiz, for example, begin to see themselves as C students. Their uncertainty suddenly becomes fixed, and they accept the idea that they are likely to earn Cs in math for the rest of the school year.

When the second quiz or test occurs, they expect to receive another C. When they do, it reinforces their perception. Similarly, if they receive a failing grade on that first quiz, they think all following grades will be the same.

But if they succeed on that first quiz and receive a high grade, that, too, is their perception of all that might follow.

This means that teachers must do everything they can to ensure students’ success in the first two weeks. And not fake success, but success in something challenging. The key to motivating students rests with that success. Students persist in activities at which they experience success, and they avoid activities at which they are not successful or believe they cannot be successful.

This is the reason that truancy and attendance problems rarely occur during the first two weeks of the school year. They begin to occur after the first graded quizzes and tests. In students’ minds, the grades they receive on these first quizzes establish their likelihood of future success. And why come to school if there is so little chance of doing well?

Parents, too, must be genuinely involved in their children’s education during the first two weeks. Routines established at home in this critical period profoundly affect the likelihood of success.

Daily conversations about school activities help children recognize that their parents value success in school. Providing a quiet place for children to work on school assignments and limiting the time they spend watching TV or playing on computers further increase chances for success. Checking with teachers to make sure children are well prepared and ready to succeed also can help.

Successful experiences during the first two weeks of school do not guarantee success for the entire year. But they are a powerful and perhaps essential step in that direction.

Teachers and parents need to take advantage of this critical time and use it well. It can make all the difference.

Source: Kentucky.com, KY
http://www.kentucky.com/589/story/478728.html

When parents read aloud to their children, everyone wins, according to LSU AgCenter family development professor Rebecca White.

“Reading is fun for the adult and great for the children,” White said. “It’s easy for you and good for them.”

Parents don’t even have to ration it because, unlike TV or ice cream, there’s no such thing as too much.

“There’s no such thing as too early, either,” White said, noting that if you wait until preschool age to start reading to your children, you’ll have missed out on years of opportunities to help your child with pre-literacy skills.

Reading to young babies is a way of talking to them. Talking not only speeds brain development but also cements relationships.

Reading to older babies is a way of expanding their experiences. You can’t always find a real cat or truck or fried egg to tell them about, but you can always find pictures of those things in books. And linking the sight of things with the sounds of names boosts language learning.

“Reading to toddlers is educational and loving and fun,” White said, adding that it’s about language itself and discovering the joys of jokes and rhymes and funny, long words. It’s about learning to “read” pictures to find the meanings of words or the answers to questions hiding behind those thrilling pull-tabs: “Where’s the kitten gone? There he is!”

“Reading to young children is about the sheer, entrancing magic of stories unfolding between the pictures and the voice, playing to an emerging imagination and learning to put oneself in someone else’s place,” White said.

For related youth development topics, visit the family and home link at the LSU AgCenter Web site at www.lsuagcenter.com . For local information and educational programs, contact an extension agent in your parish LSU AgCenter office.

Source: The Times-Picayune - NOLA.com, LA
http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base//library-152/1217742068244430.xml&coll=1

The secret to the academic success of many Asian students starts in the home, with a study of schoolchildren suggesting a regular homework routine carries benefits into the classroom.

The research examined the study habits of three groups of Year 3 students and found that Chinese children spent more time on their homework, completed more work and did it on a more regular basis than Anglo or Pacific Island students.

The study by University of Western Sydney researchers and the NSW Education Department challenges the myth that Chinese students perform better at school because of a cultural disposition to study.

“There has been inadequate attention given to the ways educational attainment is founded on embodied capacities, such as productive stillness and quiet, which are crucial to sustained attention and application in intellectual endeavour,” the report says.

Cathy Garde, a Year 3 teacher at Berala Public School in Sydney’s west, agreed that less attention was paid in recent years to the practicalities of learning, and training young bodies to sit still.

“I often have to start the year teaching the kids work habits, the capability to sit down and focus,” she said. “Some children struggle to control themselves. They don’t have any self-discipline. You get children who come into the classroom and start walking around the room in the middle of a task.”

The report, Cultural Practices and Learning, involved interviews with parents, teachers and 36 students in six Sydney schools, as well as classroom observation.

The study found that 56per cent of the Chinese students spent more than one hour a night on their homework, compared with 24per cent of Anglo children and 35per cent of Pacific Islander students.

But the study says the time spent on homework was not as important as the study routine.

A greater proportion of Chinese students, 40per cent, did homework in their bedroom or study at a desk compared with 13per cent of Anglo students and 25per cent of Islander children, who tended to do their homework sitting on their bed.

Source: The Australian, Australia
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24115399-2702,00.html

The United States is not making the grade.

The 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) shows the United States ranks 12th of 25 countries among eighth graders in math and science skills. In the No. 1 and No. 2 spots: Singapore and the Republic of Korea.

“There is a critical need right now in this country to do research on math. We need to identify the skills that children need to improve upon, and hone in on factors that can predict development. We really want to answer the question, ‘Why do some children succeed at math and others do not?’ There is an epidemic when it comes to children who just don’t have basic math skills,” said Steven A. Hecht, Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics in the Children’s Learning Institute (CLI) at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

“CLI is expanding its math intervention program through satellite clinics that can offer extra small group tutorials. We also want to address needs at the elementary and middle schools levels. Right now, CLI’s math initiative only involves students in pre-kindergarten,” said Susan Landry, Ph.D., director of the Children’s Learning Institute and Michael Matthew Knight Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

According to Landry, if children can be reached when they first begin struggling with math, a better educational foundation can be built. “We don’t want them just thinking ‘math is not my subject.’ We want to give them ways to succeed, so they can be anything they want to be. CLI uses only research-proven interventions that can help them pursue their dreams,” she said.

Hecht said the CLI group wants to find the most sensitive ways to measure math difficulties to identify early on what areas of math might require additional instruction.

To better understand how the brain processes mathematics, experts are using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). “We are studying the entire brain to obtain more information on how it responds to mathematics,” said Andrew C. Papanicolaou, Ph.D., professor of pediatrics and director of the Center for Clinical Neurosciences in CLI at the UT Medical School at Houston. “We are seeking more funding from the National Institutes of Health to further this study.”

In the future, those scans may be able to be used to correctly diagnosis individuals who are having trouble processing math, Papanicolaou said. Imaging could also be used to see if interventions are working.

CLI, which is in the Department of Pediatrics at the medical school, currently uses one-on-one testing to determine a child’s math ability. Once a learning disability is detected, interventions can be implemented to help the child succeed.

“I believe that most people do not realize how important it is to foster a love of science and math in our young people today. With special activities and interventions in these areas, we can grab their interest and entice these future leaders into careers in medicine and other areas of science, where there is so much need,” said Judianne Kellaway, M.D., the Stephen A. Lasher Professor in Ophthalmology and assistant dean for admissions at the medical school.

CLI is developing math satellite clinics, which would bring extra assistance into Houston Independent School District schools. The clinics are scheduled to open by next year. “If we could provide that extra help and encouragement, it could go a long way to improving our children’s math skills not only at the state level, but also nationally and internationally,” Hecht said.

According to Kellaway, the medical school is also responding through its students. “In the last two years, our medical students have designed and implemented several elementary science programs. We have tripled our outreach to high school students and are initiating elementary and middle school programs,” she said.

Hecht said math and science skills are vital for national security and American businesses. “The National Science Foundation has reported that most graduate students who are obtaining advanced training in engineering departments are not U.S. citizens,” he said. “How are we going to remain a world leader in designing and building new space exploration technology? Right now, we are also relying on other countries to fill positions in American businesses that thrive in the math and science industry. If we want to stay competitive, we need action now.”

Source: Newswise
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/543136/