Exploring alternative assessments for signing deaf candidates     

Rachel O'Neill  Audrey Cameron  Eileen Burns  Gary Quinn 《Psychology in the schools》2020,57(3):344-361

Attitudes to sign languages or language policies are often not overtly discussed or recorded but they influence deaf young people's educational opportunities and outcomes. Two qualitative studies from Scotland investigate the provision of British Sign Language as accommodation in public examinations. The first explores the views of deaf pupils and staff about the official system for face-to-face interpretation of exam papers. The second investigates a centrally translated digital paper with embedded video questions. Discussion focuses on contrasts between the USA and UK approaches to accommodations, raising issues of standardized technical terms in signed languages, the right to respond in sign, and candidate choice.  相似文献   

The effects of expressions of fear induced by background music on reading comprehension     

Agnes S.K. Wong  Matthew Moreno  Samantha Burns  Earl Woodruff 《Journal of Research in Reading》2023,46(2):143-162

Background

Research has suggested that background music can have a positive or negative effect that can influence the affective state of individuals. Although research has demonstrated that fear negatively influences our cognitive performance, there is a research gap in understanding the combined effects of different background music tempo and fear in influencing reading comprehension performance.

Methods

Data were collected from 70 participants enrolled at a public university in Canada. Participants were required to listen to background music of varying speeds with three conditions (no music, slow music and fast music). We adopted a cross-sectional multi-level modelling approach for the main analyses, and further analyses using t-test and ANOVA.

Results

Results indicated that expression of fear was not a significant predictor of participants' reading comprehension performance (Model 1). However, when music condition was added (Model 2) in addition to expression of fear, a significant relationship between reading comprehension performance and music condition was found, showing better reading comprehension performance in the slow music condition than in the no music condition. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction effect between music condition and expression of fear on reading comprehension performance (Model 3). Importantly, not all individuals were affected by the music to the same extent, with the possibility that baseline level of fear being the key issue in influencing comprehension performance.

Conclusions

Considering both expression of fear and music condition is required to understand the combined effects on cognitive performance. Expression of fear during cognitive tasks such as reading could be an essential signal that interventions should be applied. Such strategies may be especially beneficial for task performers with higher baseline levels of fear and possibly provide us with insights for best practice and research implications in the field of reading comprehension among individuals with special needs.

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