Abstracts - Earli

Naming speed and the development of reading abilityJohn Kirby, Queen’s University, CanadaMany children struggle to learn to read, especially in English, and so it is important to understandthe factors that underlie success and failure. Naming speed (or Rapid Automatised Naming, RAN)has been proposed as one of the major predictors of reading development, in English and otherlanguages (Wolf & Bowers, 1999). Naming speed is the speed with which individuals name sets ofstimuli, such as colours, objects, letters, and digits. This paper will review the current evidenceconcerning the role of naming speed in learning to read, and present the results of a longitudinalstudy of reading development. 214 children began the study in kindergarten (age 5 years), andwere assessed annually (twice in grade 1) up to grade 3. Each year multiple measures of namingspeed, phonological awareness, and reading ability were administered. Over the four years of thestudy, the number of children decreased to 147. Results of repeated measures analyses of varianceand hierarchical regression analyses indicated that (a) naming speed increased with age, (b)naming speed of alphanumeric stimuli was a better predictor of reading than was naming speed ofobjects and colours, (c) concurrent measures of naming speed were better predictors of readingthan were earlier measures, (d) naming speed had a strong relationship with timed andorthographic measures of reading, and (e) the relationship between naming speed and reading wasstronger among less able than more able children. Implications for theories of reading, readingeducation, and special education are discussed.B 1128 August 2007 17:30 - 18:50Room: HarmóniaPaper SessionDifferent aspects of teachingChair:Sylvia Rojas, National Autonomous University of Mexico, MexicoE-teaching readiness of teachers - The effects of personality traits on ICT skills and teaching styleAndrea Kárpáti, Eötvös University, Budapest, HungaryBalázs Török, Institute for Research on Higher Education, HungaryAnna Linda Szirmai, Eötvös University, Budapest, HungarySurveys on the spread of computer culture in education unanimously position teachers as keyfactors for the success of ICT in schools but the percentage of teachers using ICT regularly in classas reported by national assessment projects has not increased considerably since the eighties. Ourassumption is that failure of in-service ICT teacher training courses to produce conceptual changeamong teachers towards ICT is due to their concentration on technology and not pedagogy andpersonality development. EPICT, the European Pedagogical ICT Licence (www.epict.org) is basedon collaboration of teacher teams mentored in a highly interactive e-learning environment byexperienced peers. In order to identify ICT-relevant individual characteristics reflected intechnology acquisition strategies, response to different types of mentoring and quality of coursetasks, we correlated the California Personality Inventory (CPI), measuring key factors of the selfand correlated it with our own ICT Competency Inventory (ICT-CI) to reveal correlations betweenICT based teaching – learning methods and personality characteristics. Our sample included 120– 91 –