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Vietnam's 1986 doi moi reforms are transforming Vietnam from a socialist economy to a socialist market economy. In addition to liberalized laws allowing

Objectives: To engage a community to critically examine local health disparities. Design: Concept mapping is a tool used to rapidly assess the variations in thinking of large stakeholder groups' about a particular topic. Setting: Jackson, Mississippi. Participants: Community members. Methods: Dialog groups and community meetings were held, and participants were asked to respond to the statement, "A specific thing that causes African Americans to get sicker and die sooner is⋯" Aggregate responses were rated for importance and feasibility and then sorted into related groups. Aggregate sorts and ratings were then processed by using multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis. Results: There were 132 (unduplicated) reported contributors to health disparities. These responses fell into eight general clusters: economic issues, government, contextual factors, cultural factors, HIV, stress, environment, and motivation. Factors respondents felt were the most important contributors to disparities (economic factors, contextual factors, stress) did not correlate with those that they thought were most likely to be changed in society (contextual factors, government, motivation). Conclusions: Concept mapping provided a mechanism for rapidly documenting community thinking about health disparities. This mechanism stimulated community dialog and was used as a first step toward the long-term goal of creating equal community, academic, and medical partnerships for addressing disparities. The concept mapping process stimulated critical thinking about contributors to health inequities and uncovered contextual factors previously unknown to researchers and public health planners. The process allowed for active engagement and exchange of knowledge between the community and researchers and allowed a mechanism for identifying and rectifying disconnects in knowledge within and between stakeholder groups.

The Center for Adaptive Technology at Southern Connecticut State University was established in 1988 to provide access to computers for students with disabilities. The challenge of keeping current with both standard and adaptive technology has caused our service to evolve from a focused, centralized model to an integrated model providing technology access to students regardless of their location on campus. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.

After rating their own literacy-related knowledge in three areas (knowledge about reading/reading development, phonemic awareness/phonics, and morpheme awareness/structural analysis), graduate teacher-education students completed five tasks intended to measure their actual disciplinary knowledge in these areas. Teachers with high levels of prior background (i.e., course preparation and experience) rated themselves as significantly more knowledgeable than did low-background teachers in all areas; high-background participants also significantly outperformed low-background participants on all tasks. However, even high-background teachers scored well below ceiling on the tasks. Regression analyses indicated that teachers' self-perceptions and knowledge were positively influenced by both level of preparation and teaching experience, although the influences on teachers' knowledge differed by task. Teachers had some accurate perceptions of their own knowledge, especially in the area of phonics. Results suggest that differentiating levels of preparation may be useful in studying teacher knowledge, and also support the notion of a substantial gap between research on reading and teacher preparation in reading.

This study examined fourth graders' performance on two reading comprehension measures, involving a question-answering format and a cloze format, which were part of a state-mandated assessment. Word-level reading skills and oral language comprehension were important to success on both formats, but word accuracy had a stronger relationship to the cloze than to the question-answering measure. Language comprehension related strongly to both formats. The cognitive profiles associated with poor reading comprehension varied, but most often involved a specific difficulty in accuracy of pseudoword decoding. The results suggest that test format should be considered in interpreting reading comprehension performance and underscore the need to assess specific component abilities in reading.

This study examined the word-structure knowledge of novice teachers and the progress of children tutored by a subgroup of the teachers. Teachers' word-structure knowledge was assessed using three tasks: graphophonemic segmentation, classification of pseudowords by syllable type, and classification of real words as phonetically regular or irregular. Tutored children were assessed on several measures of basic reading and spelling skills. Novice teachers who received word-structure instruction outperformed a comparison group of teachers in word-structure knowledge at post-test. Tutored children improved significantly from pre-test to post-test on all assessments. Teachers' post-test knowledge on the graphophonemic segmentation and irregular words tasks correlated significantly with tutored children's progress in decoding phonetically regular words; error analyses indicated links between teachers' patterns of word-structure knowledge and children's patterns of decoding progress. The study suggests that word-structure knowledge is important to effective teaching of word decoding and underscores the need to include this information in teacher preparation.

Previous research suggests that teachers' knowledge about English word structure (e.g., the phonological structure of words and common orthographic patterns in English) may be limited, although this knowledge is important for effective teaching of word decoding. This study examined teacher education students' knowledge about word structure, and improvements in their knowledge as a result of instruction, using three tasks: graphophonemic segmentation, classification of pseudowords by syllable type, and classification of real words as phonetically regular or irregular. Participants came from a special education certification program and included both preservice and inservice teachers. Results indicated that prior preparation to teach reading influenced participants' initial performance on two of the three word-structure tasks (all but graphophonemic segmentation); however, prior experience in teaching reading did not influence word-structure knowledge. A subset of participants who received specific instruction about word structure improved their knowledge relative to a comparison group of teacher education students who did not receive word-structure instruction. Prior preparation did not influence participants' responsiveness to instruction. Conclusions support the viewpoint that teacher education must include information about English word structure for educators who will teach reading and suggest that sufficiently intensive instruction may be important in developing word-structure knowledge.