“Retrograde amnesia: Loss of memory for events or experiences before a traumatic event or incident that causes the amnesia. The memories are generally recovered gradually over time, starting with early memories, and the traumatic event itself is often, though not always, recalled eventually.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“adaptive skills: Daily living skills that a person needs to be able to live, work, and play independently. There are 10 skills that are included in this area: communication, self-care, home living, social skills, leisure,, health and safety, self-direction, functional academics, community use, and work.
Adaptive skills are assessed in the person’s typical environment, in all aspects of an individual’s life. A person with limited intellectual functioning but who does not have have limits in adaptive skill areas may not be diagnosed as having mental retardation. By law, such a person is not retarded.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“context clues: Using information in a sentence or paragraph surrounding a new term to help the reader understand that term. There are several items to look for when searching for context clues, including
Learning to use context clues to gain meaning is an important reading skill. A student who is able to use the context to identify an unknown word, grasp the meaning of a word, or comprehend a passage read, will become a good reader.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
Here is an English usage worksheet on the nouns, singular and plural respectively, datum and data, along with a context clues worksheet on this noun pair. Why two? Well, as above, somewhere along the line, I started two and shepherded them far enough along to make it worth finishing them. In any case, the English usage worksheet is ten cloze exercises, and the context clues worksheet, also ten sentences, is a bit different than most I write in that it actually supplies the definitions up front and asks students to evaluate sentences to see whether or not datum or data are used properly.
As both worksheets explain, the usage rule on these words is shifting rapidly at the moment. My guess? There are still a few college professors out there that expect students to understand the difference between datum and data in grammar, style, and usage. Moreover, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that computer science courses require an understanding of proper application of these two words. If nothing else, these worksheets can be used to help students build and reinforce their understanding of subject/verb agreement. Most of the sentences setups use is and are as verbs, so students can use the number of the verb to determine whether or not datum or data is the right word to use.
Finally, understanding the difference between datum and data, two words of Latin origin, provides a basis for understanding usage of a similarly nettlesome Latin pair, medium and media, and a Greek pair used across the common branch curriculum, and indeed in all fields of knowledge, criterion and criteria.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Double bind: An inescapable dilemma involving conflicting demands that allow no right or satisfactory response. An influential theory of the etiology of schizophrenia was put forward by the English-born US anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) and several co-authors in an article in the journal Behavioral Science in 1956, according to which schizophrenia is caused by parenting styles that create double binds for children, as when a mother complains to her son for not giving her a kiss but recoils physically whenever the child does kiss her. This theory was enthusiastically adopted by the Scottish psychiatrist Ronald D(avid) Laing (1927-89) and others during the 1970s and 1980s, but empirical evidence has not been forthcoming in support of the theory, despite its attractiveness.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“analogy: A comparison between two different but related things. The ability to comprehend and create analogies is an important component of critical reasoning capabilities. For example, an analogy might compare the biological process of a tree growing from a small seed to a tall oak, to the human process of development from infancy to adulthood. This analogy would be written;
SEED : OAK AS INFANT : ADULT
Another type of analogy is the visual analogy. For example, in a 2 X 2 cell grid, the two cells on the left might contain blue strs, and the top cell on the right might contain a green square. The person taking the test must then select which of several presented figures (including the correct green square) mts go in the empty cell.
For some students with learning disabilities, understanding analogies may be very difficult. They may process information in fairly concrete ways, and miss more subtle connections between dissimilar things.
Often, however, the ability to reason analogically is a relative strength for students with learning disabilities.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“Subordination: In grammatical theory, a relationship between two units in which one is a constituent of the other or dependent on it. The subordinate unit is commonly a subordinate clause organized ‘under’ a superordinate clause. Such organization can be described in two ways: the subordinate unit as a constituent of the superordinate unit and the subordinate unit as dependent on but distinct from the superordinate unit. In the sentence, They did it when they got home, the subordinate when-clause may be either a constituent of its superordinate main clause, which begins with They and is coextensive with the entire sentence, or dependent on a more limited main clause They did it. There is in principle no limit (apart from comprehensibility and practicality) to the subordination of clauses one under another. In the sentence, They saw that I was wondering who won the competition, the subordinate who-clause is a constituent of or dependent on its superordinate that-clause (which ends with the competition), while the that-clause is also a subordinate clause, in turn a constituent of or dependent on its superordinate clause beginning with They. Subordinate clauses may also be constituents of or dependent on phrases: in What’s the name of the woman who’s winning the competition?, the who-clause modifies the noun woman.”
Form. Traditionally, part of a sentence can only be classed as a subordinate clause if it contains either an identifiable or an ‘understood’ finite verb. In contemporary grammatical analysis, however, subordinate clauses may be classed as: finite (‘I think that nobody is in’); nonfinite (‘He used to be shy, staying on the fringes at parties’); verbless (‘She will help you, if at all possible’), Traditionally, the second category would be classed as a participial phrase and the third as a clause with the verb ‘understood’ (it is). Finite subordinate clauses are usually marked as subordinate either by an initial subordinating conjunction (after in He got angry after I started to beat him at table-tennis) or by an initial wh-word that also functions within the clause (who in Most Iranians are Indo-Europeans who speak Persian, where who is the subject of the subordinate clause). These subordination markers sometimes introduce nonfinite clauses (while in I listened to the music while revising my report), and verbless clauses (if in If necessary, I’ll phone you).
Function. Subordinate clauses fall into four functional classes: nominal, relative, adverbial, comparative. Nominal or noun classes function to a large extent like noun phrases: they can be subject of the sentence (‘That he was losing his hearing did not worry him unduly’) or direct object (‘He knew that he was losing his hearing’). Relative or adjective/adjectival clauses modify nouns: the that-clause modifies star in ‘She saw a star that she had not seen before.’ Adverbial of adverb clauses function to a large extent like adverbs: the adverb there could replace the where-clause in ‘You should put it back where you found it.’ Comparative clauses are used in comparison and are commonly introduced by then or as: ‘The weather is better than it was yesterday’; ‘The weather is just as nice as it was yesterday.
All such clauses occur in complex sentences. Subordination contrasts with coordination, in which the units, commonly the clauses of a compound sentence, have equal status: the clauses joined by but in We wanted to see the cathedral first, but the children wanted to see the castle straight away. Sentences in which both subordinate and coordinate clauses occur are compound-complex sentences: with before and but in We wanted to visit the cathedral before we did anything else, but the children wanted to see the castle straight away.”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
“prior knowledge: The totality of an individual’s experience and knowledge at any given time—that is, what a student brings as background information to a new learning experience. The more prior knowledge a person has, the more prepared he or she will be to learn new ideas. Almost everything that a person learns or can learn depends on the extent of his or her prior knowledge. One of the major missions of school is to build students’ fund of background knowledge so they have a foundation for future learning.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Chapter 7: “Reading After the Digital Revolution” Summary, Implications and Discussion Questions
Summary
Implications
Discussion Questions
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
I prepared this reading on philosophical idealism and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet for one student. I used it once (so did he, then moved on to philosophical materialism), then never thought about it again until I found it just now in the back reaches of my warehouse. I doubt readers of this blog will find further use for it either, but who knows? Since I have metaphorical acres (gigabytes, to the literal-minded) of storage space on this website, I put it out on offer.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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