Using Social Stories to Enhance Behaviour in Children with Autistic Spectrum Difficulties

This paper describes teachers, parents and educational psychologists working together to meet the needs of children and young people with autistic spectrum difficulties in mainstream and special schools. It examines the impact on children's social behaviour of a two-session workshop for groups of parents/carers, teachers and learning support assistants about 'Social Stories' (Gray, 1994). It highlights the contribution that Social Stories can make to the management of a wide range of social behaviours, including inappropriate sexual behaviour, unsafe behaviour and obsessional behaviour. Issues raised by the use of Social Stories and their benefits for children with autistic spectrum difficulties are considered. The paper concludes by describing the developing diversity in the use of Social Stories and invites those working in the field to contribute to the body of information about their strengths and limitations.     

Using Peers and Technology to Strengthen Leadership

This article presents information on a new, successful, leadership development program designed to target and strengthen key performance skills. The technology outlined in the article couples pedagogy with video and computer technology. The resulting Professional Enhancement Program (PEP) has demonstrated its effectiveness for improving the performance of prospective and practicing school leaders and is currently used in twenty sites across seven states in the United States.     

要重视社会教育中的幼儿主体关系

儿童社会化是儿童在一定的社会条件(包括社会环境和社会关系)下逐渐独立掌握社会规范、正确处理人际关系、妥善自治,从而客观适应社会生活的心理发展过程.社会性则是指儿童心理和行为中表现出来的本质特性.在开展幼儿社会教育时有两点特别重要,一是幼儿社会教育必须紧密联系现实社会生活,二是幼儿社会教育必须重视幼儿的主体关系.     

Social Competencies and Difficulties of Gifted Children Compared to Nongifted Peers

This study, conducted in Israel, examined the social and emotional difficulties of gifted children, in comparison with nongifted children. The gifted children were further compared in two educational settings: segregated classes and pull-out programs. The 974 participants were from the fifth to twelfth grades. The dependent variables included loneliness, social competence, empathy, and self-concept. The results indicated that gifted children score higher on need fulfillment, empathy, academic self-concept, and lack of emotional anxiety and lower on self-disclosure and physical self-concept. Few differences were found between the two settings for gifted children. The conclusion is that gifted children differ from nongifted children only on some of the social–emotional variables examined, mainly for the better.     

Family Needs,and Self-Efficacy During a Child's Social Support Transition to School

The needs of families of young children with handicaps were examined in relationship to the transition from an early intervention/preschool program to school placements. The results showed that needs became less pronounced during and after a transition compared to the time period during which transition planning occurred, and that the self-efficacy of the parents during and following transitions was positively influenced by social support and the interaction between transition time and social support. The implications of the findings for promoting effective transitions are discussed, especially the importance of identifying and responding to both child- and family-level needs if broad-based social influences are to be assured as a result of transition activities.     

Family Needs, and Self-Efficacy During a Child's Social Support Transition to School

The needs of families of young children with handicaps were examined in relationship to the transition from an early intervention/preschool program to school placements. The results showed that needs became less pronounced during and after a transition compared to the time period during which transition planning occurred, and that the self-efficacy of the parents during and following transitions was positively influenced by social support and the interaction between transition time and social support. The implications of the findings for promoting effective transitions are discussed, especially the importance of identifying and responding to both child- and family-level needs if broad-based social influences are to be assured as a result of transition activities.     

Using Photovoice as a Tool to Engage Social Work Students in Social Justice

In order to ensure that social workers graduating from social work programs embrace social justice's central role in their professional careers, educators must find creative, theoretically grounded, practice-relevant ways of conveying this value and socializing social work students. This article describes the use of Photovoice as one tool for helping convey that value and describes its theoretical underpinning and use in a social work course. Originally developed as a participatory action research approach largely in public health, Photovoice can also serve as a powerful social work tool that facilitates the development of critical consciousness among community members who photograph and discuss elements of their lives and community. The author describes using this strategy with social work students, asking them as community members themselves to engage in the process of documenting, discussing, and transforming their analysis into an advocacy plan using the photographs. Through this process, the students learn about the power of collaborative creativity and strategic messaging. In the process of demonstrating the importance of relationship and the power of “problem-posing” the professor, as facilitator, role-models while teaching and engendering increasing critical consciousness among class participants.     

Using Film to Increase Counselor Empathic Experiences

The early stages of empathy in counseling—emotional reaction, role-taking, and cognitive suspension—have all been largely ignored in the counselor education/psychological literature. This article describes these stages from the perspective of the aesthetic/film literatures. Emotional reaction is an internal, unobservable state of being. Role-taking involves cognitive understanding and entering the perceptual world of another. Cognitive suspension means letting go of personal beliefs and values. The film literature describes how audience emotional states are created by directors, writers, actors, and editors. This article explains how counselor educators and supervisors can use this information to help counselors increase their empathic experiences.     

结构化教学在单元主题教学中的合理使用 --孤独症学生的教学实例

结构化教学是一项对孤独症儿童治疗和教育非常有效的综合性教育措施。本文主要以具体的教学实践为例,说明“结构化教学”在孤独症儿童“单元主题教学”中的具体操作和应用。     

Using Technology to Increase Parent Involvement in Schools

The importance of parent involvement in Parents who monitor their student’s schoolwork and daily activities, communicate frequently with teachers and help develop schools and its relationship to student achievement have been widely studied. Nevertheless, many principals and teachers report that lack of parent involvement continues to be an obstacle to increasing student achievement at school. The purpose of this study was to determine whether emerging technologies facilitate better parent-teacher communication and parent involvement. Data were collected through surveys and semi-structured focus group interviews to analyze the relationship between parents’ and teachers’ perceptions of student achievement when electronic communications are used between parents and school. The study revealed that parents and teachers both place a high value on proactive parent involvement. Because proactive involvement does not require parents to be physically at their children’s school, the question of how technology can be used to keep parents involved in their children’s academic lives becomes important. As access to technology continues to expand, the capabilities for connecting parents to schools will continue to grow. As schools invest in websites, phone calling systems, parent portals, online curriculum, and other types of technologies that connect schools to home, research needs to continue to focus on the effectiveness of these technologies to increase parent involvement.     

利用信息技术手段,培养大学生的认知能力

随着信息技术的广泛应用,对大学生的认知能力提出了更高的要求.要重视大学生的认知能力培养,采用理论学习,知识学习,方法学习,各种训练,反思日记等策略.     

Promoting Parents' Social Capital to Increase Children's Attendance in Head Start: Evidence From an Experimental Intervention

Improving children's attendance is a high priority for Head Start and other early childhood education programs serving low-income children. We conducted a randomized control trial in a major northern city to evaluate the impact of a low-cost intervention designed to promote parents' social capital as a potential influence on children's attendance in Head Start centers. The intervention assigned children to treatment group classrooms based on (a) neighborhood of residence (geography condition) or (b) the geography condition plus the opportunity for parents to form partnerships in support of their children's attendance, or to control group classrooms according to Head Start guidelines only. We did not find impacts on average attendance throughout the year. However, the intervention did lead to increased attendance during the winter when average center attendance was lowest. There were no impacts on fall or spring attendance. Follow-up exploratory analyses of focus groups with parents and staff suggested that parents' level of connection and trust, self-generated partnership strategies, and commitment to their children's education may be factors by which parents' social capital expands and children's attendance improves.     

Note-taking During Discussion: Using a Weekly Reflection Assignment to Motivate Students to Learn from Their Peers

The benefits of in-class discussion, a form of active learning, are well-documented; in particular, discussions allow students the opportunity to learn from their peers. Yet students often treat discussions as ‘down’ or ‘free’ time. If students are not taking notes during discussion and reviewing those notes later on, they may not be learning much from this activity, despite their professed understanding of its value. This article reviews the benefits of discussion and the important functions of note-taking before introducing an online weekly reflection assignment that was designed to motivate students to take notes during discussion, particularly on their peers' contributions. An analysis of past weekly reflection text and survey data from students confirms the utility of the assignment. Intended and unintended benefits of the weekly reflection assignment are shared, as well as its limitations. The conclusion offers suggestions for future areas of research to complement this study.     

Social Reinforcement Counseling as an Adjunct to a Course in Education

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine what effects social reinforcement counseling has on attitudes toward teaching and accuracy of teacher attitude self-estimation held by beginning education students. Teacher attitudes were assessed by the MTAI. Seventy-eight education students at the Ohio State University were randomly divided into three groups that received individual counseling, group counseling, and no counseling for four sessions with social reinforcement as the major technique. The results of the study lend support to conclusions which follow. First, social reinforcement counseling in individual or group setting is more effective for changing attitudes toward teaching, but not effective for increasing students' accuracy of self-estimated teacher attitudes. Second, social reinforcement counseling in groups is as effective as individual counseling for changing MTAI scores of beginning education students.     

Using environmental impact statements as an introduction to technical writing

Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) provide college students with hands‐on experience working with genuine technical documents from the working world, an overview of the writing process, and the strategies and tasks encountered in technical writing. Using EISs can help students understand decision‐making processes, heighten their environmental awareness, and generate class camaraderie. This essay details one method of introducing students to EISs and reports the benefits and problems encountered in doing so.     

Using Television as an Educational Medium

Abstract

The fact that each medium has its own profile of cognitive advantages calls on the media educationist to master the medium's formal features so as to use them to convey an educational message that is desirable and suitable for the medium. TV is known to be a pervasive audiovisual electronic mass medium. This paper pursues its features in order to expose its particular qualities that have the potential to enhance education. Only if TV has more to offer educationally than other educational tools have, or if it makes a specific contribution to education, can its expensive use be justified.     

社会建构论从科学研究到技术研究的延伸——以科学知识社会学（SSK）和技术的社会形成论（SST）为例

伴随着科学知识社会学(SSK)的产生而逐步形成体系的社会建构论，主张站在社会学的角度分析科学知识的产生。强调社会因素对科学的建构。这种建构主义的分析问题方式逐渐由科学观延伸到了技术观，并在此基础上形成了技术的社会形成论(SST)。社会建构论作为一种方法论从SSK研究到SST研究的延伸，表明科学的人研究对技术的人研究有着十分密切的联系。     

社会性软件促进非正式学习

非正式学习是指学习者利用一切适合的条件进行的具有明确目的指向,自我发起、自我调控、自我负责的学习活动.基于Web2.0的社会性软件,具有个性化、主体性、社会性、多样性等特征,它的推出及在教育、工作、生活中的普遍应用,为非正式学习提供了有力的技术支持,是人们获取知识的一种最普遍方式.根据社会性软件的主要功能及对学习的影响,可将非正式学习的组织形式划分为在线交谈、个人信息检索、个人知识管理、协作学习和生成学习等类型.应用社会性软件,学习者不仅可以快速从网络获取信息,而且可以对信息进行分类存储和处理,实现个人知识管理,同时能够实现与其它学习者的交流和信息分享,促进信息向知识的转化,促进虚拟"实践共同体"的形成.