Development of a Brief Screening Tool for Early Literacy Skills in Preschool Children.

BACKGROUND: Preschool children develop early literacy skills (ELS) needed for reading acquisition. Screening for delayed ELS could trigger interventions to prevent reading problems. OBJECTIVE: To develop a brief screening test for ELS delays, the Early Literacy Skills Assessment Tool (ELSAT). METHODS: This study included 4-year-old, typically developing, English language-predominant children attending preschool. The ELSAT comprised 63 items relating to 3 main ELS domains and was piloted with 21 children. After we excluded items that were nondiscriminatory, 57 items remained and were administered to 96 children. Items were compared with reference measures of ELS (Get Ready to Read-Revised), and language (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4 and Phonological Awareness from the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing-2). Within-domain reliability was calculated for each of the 3 ELS domains and item correlations between all ELSAT items and the reference measures were calculated. RESULTS: A final set of 10 items was retained that represented all 3 ELS domains and that maximized correlations with reference measures. Cronbach alpha for the refined 10-item ELSAT was 0.868; correlations between individual items and a composite of the reference measures ranged from 0.409 to 0.617 (all Ps < .01). In a receiver operating characteristic curve analysis, a cut-off score of ≤5 predicted a below-average score for any of the reference measures with sensitivity of 90%, specificity of 71.4%, and area under the curve of 0.872. CONCLUSIONS: The 10-item ELSAT shows strong psychometric properties and with further validation may prove valuable in screening preschool children for ELS delays.

The effects of corporate social responsibility on employees' affective commitment: a cross-cultural investigation.

This study investigated the moderating effects of several Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) cultural value dimensions on the relationship between employees' perceptions of their organization's social responsibility and their affective organizational commitment. Based on data from a sample of 1,084 employees from 17 countries, results showed that perceived corporate social responsibility (CSR) was positively related to employees' affective commitment (AC), after controlling for individual job satisfaction and gender as well as for nation-level differences in unemployment rates. In addition, several GLOBE value dimensions moderated the effects of CSR on AC. In particular, perceptions of CSR were more positively related to AC in cultures higher in humane orientation, institutional collectivism, ingroup collectivism, and future orientation and in cultures lower in power distance. Implications for future CSR research and cross-cultural human resources management are discussed.

Relative contribution of perception/cognition and language on spatial categorization.

This study investigated the relative contribution of perception/cognition and language-specific semantics in nonverbal categorization of spatial relations. English and Korean speakers completed a video-based similarity judgment task involving containment, support, tight fit, and loose fit. Both perception/cognition and language served as resources for categorization, and allocation between the two depended on the target relation and the features contrasted in the choices. Whereas perceptual/cognitive salience for containment and tight-fit features guided categorization in many contexts, language-specific semantics influenced categorization where the two features competed for similarity judgment and when the target relation was tight support, a domain where spatial relations are perceptually diverse. In the latter contexts, each group categorized more in line with semantics of their language, that is, containment/support for English and tight/loose fit for Korean. We conclude that language guides spatial categorization when perception/cognition alone is not sufficient. In this way, language is an integral part of our cognitive domain of space.