Purpose: Utilizing datasets of Ecuador, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico and Peru from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies survey from 2017 to 2018, this study aimed to develop and validate a profile indicating core workplace skills in developing countries. Design/methodology/approach: DeVellis' guide of scale…

The Humanities Institute of Universidad Panamericana, Guadalajara (Mexico), has carefully crafted its own reading canon by incorporating in to its course design a learning outcomes framework that mirrors its Christian institutional mission. The paper presents an overview of this framework and of its implementation within the University's Gen Ed…

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a study of 15-year-old students' performance in reading, mathematics, and science literacy conducted every 3 years. The PISA 2018 results provide a global view of U.S. students' performance compared to their peers in nearly 80 countries and education systems. By design, PISA aims to…

This study provides a broad, macro-analysis of how the home literacy environment (HLE) manifests among Mayan families with preschool-aged children in Yucatan, Mexico. Despite a substantial body of work showing the significant contribution of the HLE to children's reading achievement in the U.S., little work examines the HLE and children's learning…

Globally, there is great interest in enhancing young children's literacy development as a route to improving worldwide literacy. To contribute to this area of interest, this paper reports findings from a multi-pronged early-literacy program designed to improve the print-knowledge of young children in Yucatec Mayan villages. The school-based…

Achieving inclusive and quality education for all is a global priority, and policymakers are still grappling with the best ways to ensure the poorest and most marginalized children are in school and learning. About 120 million children, many from rural areas, are still out of school, despite a recent global push for universal access to education.…

This dissertation portfolio is comprised of three first-authored pieces of writing that investigate the oral language and emergent literacy development of Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). Each piece features a unique but complementary aim. The first study investigates group differences on a battery of emergent…

Although there is a growing consensus that, in reading acquisition, it is essential to provide children with learning activities that promote the development of reading cognitive schemes, particularly intra-syllabic related patterns, there is no agreement on which kind of syllabic schemes should be worked out in the first place. The main aim of…

This report supplements Jerrim (2012) where John Jerrim investigated the link between family background and children's reading tests across a series of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Previous studies for the Sutton Trust (Smithers 2012) have suggested that policy and provision for the highly able in…

This comparative study examines relationships between phonemic awareness and Spanish reading skill acquisition among three groups of Spanish-speaking first and second graders: children in Mexico receiving reading instruction in Spanish and children in the United States receiving reading instruction in either Spanish or English. Children were…

Although the Common Core state standards' goal of ensuring that every student leaves high school prepared to meet the demands of college and career is laudable, it's daunting for teachers who serve English language learners. The authors, educators at a private bilingual school in Mexico, describe how they used short excerpts of longer works giving…

While it is known that the process of becoming literate begins in early childhood and usually involves several years of schooling, research related to cognitive characteristics has been done mostly on illiterate adults, and information concerning illiterate children is therefore limited. The aim of the present study, involving 21 illiterate and 22…

When two or more languages are part of a child's world, we are presented with a rich opportunity to learn something about language in general and about how the mind works. In this book, Norbert Francis examines the development of bilingual proficiency and the different kinds of competence that come together in making up its component parts. In…

This study examined the effectiveness of a bilingual/bicultural technology intervention on beginning learners of Spanish at a public university in the United States and intermediate learners of English at a public university in Mexico. This study used a quasi-experimental mixed method design and compared gains in grammar, listening, and reading…

The Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) will establish technical standards and guidelines to ensure that the survey design and implementation processes of PIAAC yield high-quality and internationally comparable data. This document provides a revised version of the technical standards and guidelines originally…