Sex work and students: an exploratory study

Available evidence suggests that changes in the funding of higher education have led to some students entering the sex industry in order to make ends meet. The current study comprises a sample of undergraduates (N = 130) in the south of England, who completed a cross‐sectional survey of their financial circumstances, health, psychological well‐being, substance use and lifestyle. A response rate of 74% was obtained. Data indicated that over 10% of all respondents knew of students engaged in sex work (defined as prostitution, escorting, lap dancing or stripping) in order to support themselves financially. Poor psychological well‐being, drinking problems and financial circumstances were associated with sex work, and although no direct evidence was found linking this to an earlier history of sexual abuse, there was an indirect relationship through the impact of abuse on mental health. A logistic regression model incorporating General Health Questionnaire scores, alcohol problems and hours worked outside of study strongly predicted whether respondents knew of students engaged in sex work. For lap dancing in particular the model was very strong. This study provides further evidence of students' participation in sex work and its association with economic circumstances. Further longitudinal work is required to clarify the nature of these relationships.     

Handwriting automaticity and writing instruction in Australian kindergarten: an exploratory study

Accumulating evidence indicates handwriting automaticity is related to the development of effective writing skills. The present study examined the levels of handwriting automaticity of Australian children at the end of kindergarten and the amount and type of writing instruction they experienced before entering first grade. The current study involved 177 kindergarten children enrolled in 23 classrooms from seven government-funded primary schools in Western Australia. Individual child level data (e.g., handwriting automaticity and word-reading skills) were collected and teachers were asked to complete a survey assessing the amount of time and types of writing activities developed in their classrooms (e.g., teaching basic skills and teaching writing processes). Hierarchical linear models were conducted to examine total variance attributable to child and classroom levels. Results showed a total variance of approximately 20% in children’s handwriting automaticity attributable to differences among classrooms when gender and word-reading skills were controlled for. Large variability was noted in the amount and type of writing instruction reported by a subset of participating teachers. Handwriting automaticity was associated with the teaching of revising strategies but not with the teaching of handwriting. Implications for writing development and writing instruction are discussed.     

探究性学习在中学物理教学中的应用

改变传统的教育观念和课堂教学模式,采取探究性学习教学模式,切实提高学生参与和体验学习的程度.落实课堂教学学生主体性这一现代教学基本原则.本文先是从理论的角度介绍探究性学习及其特点、探究性学习教学模式,再在实践的层面上结合实例,阐述探究性学习的教学应用.     

中学生早恋问题研究

青春期是一个特别的时期,早恋是现在中学生不容忽视的一个问题.本文拟对青春期的中学生早恋问题进行一番探讨.     

中介语理论的偏误观与高中英语写作教学

中介语是学习者在二语习得过程中形成的一种兼具母语和目的语特征的语言系统,中介语理论的偏误观对高中英语写作教学有着较强的解释力和指导意义。偏误是学生学习外语过程中不可避免的现象。教师在教学和科研中,应对学生的中介语偏误进行详尽的收集和系统分析,根据偏误的类型给出正确的评价,并实施灵活恰当的纠错策略,从而引导学生逐步修正其中介语系统,促进其写作能力的发展。     

Teaching self-instruction to high school students

In an attempt to demonstrate the effectiveness of instructional programming in counseling, an experimental evaluation of a ten-week program aimed at teaching skills and strategies of self-instruction to high school students was conducted. Thirty-two grade ten students were assigned randomly to an experimental self-instruction group and a control group. Dependent variables included Rotter's (1966) Control of Reinforcement Questionnaire, Rosenbaum's (1980) Self-control Schedule, a curriculum-specific test of self-instruction concepts, and a transfer test. Results revealed that students in the experimental, self-instruction program outperformed students in the control group on all dependent variables except for the Self-control Schedule. Content analysis of student responses to the transfer test showed a distinct pattern of skill development in the experimental group from pretest to posttest. Implications for the development and offering of instructional counseling programs are drawn.Many students of counseling have argued that counseling is essentially a kind of teaching (Carkhuff and Berenson, 1976; Ellis, 1977; Katz and Ivey, 1977; Krumboltz and Thoresen, 1976; Sorenson, 1967). More recently, Martin and his colleagues have developed an approach to counseling that employs models of instruction as a basis for the development and implementation of a broad range of counseling interventions and programs (Hiebert et al., 1981; Martin and Hiebert, 1982; Martin et al., 1981; Martin et al., 1980). Martin (1983) also has suggested that counselors in schools and elsewhere can make use of systematic teaching programs to help clients/students acquire functional skills in a variety of areas such as anxiety management, decision making, interpersonal skills, and so forth. In the development and offering of such programs, counselors act as curriculum developers and instructors. Initial evidence for the viability of this type of instructional counseling in schools was provided by Haynes et al. (1983), and Leal, Baxter, Martin, and Marx (1981) who developed programs based on cognitive and behavioral counseling methods that were successful in alleviating the test anxieties experienced by high school students. The experiment reported here extends the work of Martin and others in instructional counseling by evaluating an instructional program designed to teach a series of integrated skills of self-instruction to high school students. [Note that the term self-instruction is used here to refer to the activities of people engaged in systematic self-change, and is not intended to connote the system of self-instruction training developed by Donald Meichenbaum (1977).]Nearly all teachers and curriculum specialists share at least one goal: to help students acquire the capacity to engage in self-directed learning. Most often, it is assumed that school students will acquire skills in areas such as self-instruction and critical thinking (skills often seen as necessary requisites to self-directed learning) as a result of stimulating interactions with traditional school curricula. A frequently voiced alternative is to attempt to teach such skills directly (cf. Beyers, 1984a, 1984b), more or less as a curriculum in their own right. Many attempts have been made to do this, but few have received detailed empirical, experimental analysis. In a recent meta-analysis of primary prevention studies conducted in schools, Baker, Swisher, Nadenichek, and Popowicz (1984) found 40 such studies that had been conducted since 1970. Most of the experimental programs in the studies reviewed were targeted at improving students' communication skills, decision making and problem solving skills, and self-awareness. None of the studies reviewed by Baker et al. included instructional interventions that attempted to teach a broad range of skills and strategies that would permit students to plan, implement, and evaluate programs of personal change and development. Teaching school pupils to engage in systematic self-instruction for purposes of personal change simply has not been attempted, to date, in the context of an experimentally controlled investigation. Given an increasing number of pleas for exactly this kind of broad-based school programming (Martin, 1983; Sprinthall, 1984), the need for controlled experimental studies in this area is acute.Self-introduction or learning to learn has been the subject of considerable theorizing by both cognitive and instructional psychologists (Gagné, 1977; Bransford, 1979). Experimental work by Ann Brown and her colleagues (Brown, 1978; Brown et al., 1979) has highlighted the difficulty of teaching various metacognitive strategies that would seem basic to the capacity to self-instruct so as to ensure the transfer of such strategies to tasks other than those employed during strategy acquisition. At the same time, Brown's research also shows that the teaching of generalizable metacognitive strategies such as self-testing is possible, even with educable retarded children (Brown, et al., 1979). Other research concerned with differences between expert and novice knowledge has highlighted the importance of the ability to access declarative knowledge stores and the availability of relevant procedural knowledge in attempting to explain these differences (Chi et al., 1982; Leinhardt, 1983). [See Anderson, (1980) for formal definitions and discussions of declarative and procedural knowledge.] The greater ability of experts to function as independent learners or self-instructors in their areas of expertise likely is related to such differences. While it sometimes is unclear as to whether self-instructional competence resides in procedural knowledge stores or cognitive and/or metacognitive strategies, it seems clear that learning to learn involves more than simply acquiring necessary declarative knowledge in relevant substantive areas (Glaser, 1984). Thus, explicit, direct instruction in skills and strategies of self-instruction probably is necessary if students in schools are to learn to direct their own learning and development.The experiment reported here was conducted to supply initial experimental data about the possible effectiveness of a program designed to teach skills and strategies of self-instruction to high school students. It is a study of a ten-week instructional counseling program developed to teach self-instruction skills in areas such as decision making, gathering information, self-assessment, framing objectives, planning, and self-evaluation. As such, it is a more comprehensive program than other programs of primary prevention in schools that have been studied experimentally. While a variety of school and extracurricular situations were employed as illustrative contexts for presenting information about these skills to the students, the goal of the experimental program was to teach the self-instruction skills as detached skills that could be applied to a variety of situations and life circumstances. This approach was viewed as contrasting with traditional approaches in which such skills are thought to be acquired indirectly as a result of working through a series of tasks in defined substantive areas such as mathematics, history, or physics. In this latter method, it is likely that such skills, if they are acquired, become embedded in specific substantive contexts and are therefore less likely to generalize to situations or contexts other than those in which they were acquired (see Rigney, 1978 for the distinction between detached and embedded strategies). Dependent variables employed in the study were selected to test for the acquisition and transfer of targeted skills as well as for the acquisition of underlying beliefs about one's ability to control or influence external and internal events. The latter type of learning is thought by many counselors to be of great importance, particularly if attitudes and beliefs are learned that affect clients' attributional styles and/or tendencies (Strong and Claiborn, 1982).The overall purpose of the experiment was to determine whether instructional counseling curricula could be developed that would succeed in teaching detached strategies/skills of self-instruction to high school students. Should such instruction be possible, additional support would be provided for the notions of instructional counseling and counselors as curriculum developers and instructors. After all, a major part of counseling typically is associated with assisting clients to make decisions, gather information, frame goals and objectives, assess their situations and capabilities, plan actions, and evaluate the effects of their actions—all components of the self-instruction program taught to the experimental students in this study.The specific hypotheses investigated were that participation in the experimental instructional counseling program would increase: 1) students' knowledge of self-instruction skills (acquisition learning), 2) students' abilities to apply this knowledge to everyday events (transfer learning), and 3) students' attitudes consistent with higher levels of self-control and internal attributional processes (general attitudinal learning).The research reported here was supported by a grant from the Chairpersons' Research Fund, Simon Fraser University.The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Bruce Dallin, Louise Bourassa, Olwyn Irving, David Langton and the Abbotsford School District (British Columbia, Canada) in completing this work.     

大中学生英语听力元认知比较研究

采用Vandergrift等人的听力元认知意识调查问卷,对244名大学生和205名中学生进行调查,以探讨听力元认知和听力水平的关系.结果发现:1)大学生的总体英语听力元认知及其计划评价和个人知识维度均高于中学组,且存在显著差异;2)大学组与中学组在集中注意、问题解决和心译三维度不存在统计上的显著差异.研究结果对提高我国中学英语听力教学有启发意义.     

Settling In: Facilitating the transition to an inclusive middle school for students with mild disabilities

The present qualitative study examined the experiences of nine students with mild disabilities during their first year in an inclusive middle school in a Midwestern state of the United States (US). Data were gathered through interviews with students, teachers, and parents; classroom observations; and document analysis. Following the data analysis, three themes were identified: how the demands of navigating a new environment increased students’ anxiety; how students satisfied their need for belonging; and how students’ perceptions of school influenced their attitude towards help. Suggestions for facilitating school transitions for early adolescents with mild disabilities are provided.     

Determinants of participation and expenditure patterns of private tuition received by primary school students in Penang,Malaysia: an exploratory study

In this exploratory study, the censored Tobit model is applied on primary data collected amongst parents of primary school students in Penang, Malaysia to examine the determinants of participation and expenditures on private tuition (PT). Results of the marginal effects indicate that socio-demographic characteristics – ethnicity, household income, level of schooling, and marital status – affect the probability of participation and its corresponding conditional (amongst those whose spending is positive) and unconditional (overall) expenditures. Specifically, compared to ethnic Malays, households of Chinese and Indian descent are more likely to send their children to PT, whilst spending more on conditional and unconditional expenditures, ceteris paribus. Low-income households have a lower likelihood to enrol their children in PT classes and spend less on conditional and unconditional expenditures than higher income households. Upper primary students are more likely to attend PT and spend more on conditional and unconditional expenditures than lower primary students. Single-parent households spend more on conditional and unconditional expenditures than households where both parents are together, all else equal. Based on these findings, several observations in terms of comparisons to other studies and policy implications are noted vis-à-vis the demand for PT amongst primary school students.     

初中生学习困难原因的调查研究

从非智力因素和环境因素出发,探讨初中生学习困难的原因。通过对234名江西省上饶市初中生进行测查,结果表明:学习动机水平低、学习技能缺乏以及家庭环境因素是导致初中学习困难学生学习困难的重要因素。     

情商与中学生英语写作表现关系研究

将44名中学生随机分配为两组:实验组与对照组。为确保两组最初具有相似性,实验之初,44名中学生都接受写作测试,并完成特质情绪智力问卷青少年版简版(TEIQue-ASF)。实验组的学生接受了涉及情感活动教学,对照组学生则使用最普通的教学方式。     

医学院校非英语专业大学生英语写作策略探究

医学院校非英语专业学生英语写作一直是英语学习的一个难题。目前大学英语写作教学的现状也让人很不满意。针对这一现状,文章分析了英语写作中存在的问题及产生的原因,探讨了提高大学生英语写作水平的策略。     

初中英语学困生学习动机探究

如何提高学困生的学习动机水平对提高其学习成绩具有重要意义.然而近年来针对初中英语学困生的学习动机的研究还不多见.该文从提高初中英语学困生学习动机水平的角度入手,并借鉴各动机学派的研究成果对如何激发学困生学习动机进行了系统的探究.针对初中生的特点和英语学科的特性,改变学困生对英语学习价值的认识、原有爱好与学习嫁接、丰富学习内容和创造学习氛围等.     

高中学生数学思维障碍的成因及突破

在素质教育提出更高要求的当前,只要我们坚持以学生为主体,以培养学生的思维发展为已任,则势必会提高高中学生数学教学质量,真正减轻学生学习数学的负担,从而提高高中学生的整体素质.     

培养中学生物理学习兴趣的策略

根据物理学科特点和中学生的心理特点,提出了培养中学生物理学习兴趣的策略:巧妙设计实验,利用好奇心,培养学生直接兴趣;联系生活实际,培养学生的间接兴趣;利用多媒体辅助教学,培养学生的直觉兴趣;动手实验,动手制作,培养学生的操作兴趣;重视思维训练,培养学生有因果认识的兴趣。     

美国小学劝说文习作教学——以《探险家》主题习作教学为例

美国小学《探险家》劝说文习作教学,不仅为我们根据文体科学设计习作教学目标、实施分层习作教学提供了很好的例证,而且为我们带来诸多启示:以文体划分习作教学内容,并根据文体写作特点确定习作教学目标,能较好解决"习作教学什么"、‘习作教学到什么程度"的问题;要提高习作教学的效率,必须尊重儿童学得语言的规律,遵循感知、理解、内化、外化习作方法与策略的过程;关注习作策略的获得,能帮助儿童成为一个有意识的、真正的写作者、表达者。     

Transformation of students into active and participatory citizens: an exploratory study in Hong Kong

Based on the data collected from focus groups and individual interviews with secondary school students and civic education teachers, this article explores how young people are transformed to become active and participatory citizens. The findings show that the roles and personal beliefs of civic education teachers are of critical significance at the very first stage whereas their teaching methods help enable students to construct the notion of active and participatory citizenship at the second stage. Eventually students gradually develop a strong sense of civic responsibility and competence through social inquiry and political action in the transformation process.     

写作生态学在中学英语网络反馈教学中的应用

教师通过对受试者面对面反馈和在线反馈的不同态度、侧重层面、认真程度进行了调查和统计后发现:在线反馈应在精心准备和反复指导的基础上才能发挥其作用,以便帮助学生提高其写作水平。     

学校体育教学与中学生心理健康研究

在全面推进素质教育的进程中,加强中学生心理健康已成为中学体育教育的重要任务之一．用文献法、分析法阐述对学校体育教学与中学生心理健康的关联性进行了初步研究,就中学生心理健康现状、心理缝康教育在学校体育教学课程中的渗透表现以及二者的相互作用．