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Metalinguistic awareness is the ability to identify, reflect upon, and manipulate linguistic units. It plays a critical role in reading development. The present study investigated Chinese- and English-speaking preschoolers' metalinguistic awareness development and the role of cognitive and linguistic abilities in its development. Forty-two Chinese-speaking and 36 English-speaking monolingual children completed a series of metalinguistic awareness, false belief, inhibitory control, and receptive vocabulary tasks. The results revealed distinct pathways for the two language groups. English speakers had a more advanced level of rhyme awareness. Chinese speakers developed homonym understanding faster during the preschool years. Inhibitory control was more important for Chinese speakers to develop synonym and homonym understanding, whereas receptive vocabulary was crucial for English speakers to develop rhyme awareness. These differences may be attributable to the characteristics of the Chinese and English languages, as well as the patterns of cognitive development in the two populations.

American-style summer programs in China, catering to Chinese-born students, have taken American universities by surprise. They are yet one more player in the complex and often opaque Chinese education industry, an industry in which American colleges are finding themselves increasingly entwined. These programs have become a booming enterprise, hiring professors from high-profile institutions, Harvard and Berkeley among them, to teach for a few weeks in the summer. They recruit Chinese students through friends and social media to check off a few college credits while visiting home, and they have persuaded American universities to accept their credits. At Indiana University at Bloomington alone, more than 175 students enrolled in 10 different programs this past summer. The private programs have allowed Chinese students to transfer credit back to the American colleges where they're enrolled, but American officials are taking a closer look.

Objective: Expectancy has been shown to affect the response to psychological and medical interventions; however, the lack of validated measure of expectancy in the setting of acupuncture limits the quantitative evaluation of the effects of expectancy on clinical response to acupuncture therapy. We seek to develop and validate an instrument that measures patients' expected response from acupuncture.Setting/design: We developed the acupuncture expectancy scale by eliciting items from patients and then conducted a survey study in two phases to test the reliability and validity of the instrument among 200 subjects at six outpatient acupuncture clinics in Beijing, China.Results: Our final scale consisted of four items measuring the expectation of improvement of illness, enhanced coping, increased vitality, and symptom alleviation as a result of acupuncture therapy. Scores of acupuncture expectancy scales ranged from four to 20, with a median of 17, and 21% at the maximum score. No item had over 5% missing data. Internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha coefficient) was .82. Principal components analysis revealed one general component accounting for 64% of the variance. Expectancy of response was positively correlated with selected questions of perceived efficacy (0.44), satisfaction (0.49), and confidence in prescribed acupuncture therapy (0.51), all with P < .001.Conclusion: We developed a simple four-item instrument with valid and reliable score that measures expectancy about acupuncture therapy and correlates to subject reported response. The reliability and validity of acupuncture expectancy scale score needs to be tested in other types of populations. Incorporating this instrument in clinical trials can evaluate the role of expectancy as part of the complex social-behavioral component of acupuncture therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]