Educational practitioners’ beliefs and conceptualisation about the cause of ADHD: A qualitative study

Objectives: Educational practitioners play an important role in the referral and treatment of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This study aimed to explore how educational practitioners conceptualise their beliefs about the causes of symptoms of ADHD. Method: Forty-one educational practitioners from schools in the United Kingdom participated in focus groups or individual interviews. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Practitioners’ beliefs fell into two categories: biological and environmental. Practitioners conceptualised the causes of ADHD in lay-theoretical models: a ‘True’ ADHD model considered that symptoms of ADHD in many cases were due to adverse environments; and a model whereby a biological predisposition is the root of the cause of the child’s symptoms. Conclusion: Differential beliefs about the causes of ADHD may lead to practitioners blaming parents for a child’s behaviour and discounting ADHD as a valid condition. This has implications for the effective support of children with ADHD in schools.     

Lies and Truth: A Study of the Development of the Concept

This study examined the developmental questions of when children begin to use the terms lie and truth, how they understand them, and when their understanding approaches that of adults. 150 subjects in 5 groups (nursery schoolers, preschoolers, first graders, fifth graders, and adults) were presented a series of 8 short puppet plays that systematically varied the presence of absence of the 3 prototype elements: factuality of a statement, the speaker's belief in the factuality or falsity of the statement, and the speaker's intent to deceive the listeners. The interactions of age, factuality, and belief most fully accounted for the use of the terms lie and truth. Persons at different ages differentially weighed the prototypic elements. Responses of fifth graders were transitional between those of the younger children and adults. The results are interpreted as supporting the development of definitional prototypes for these moral concepts.     

The data life cycle applied to our own data

Increased demand for data-driven decision making is driving the need for librarians to be facile with the data life cycle. This case study follows the migration of reference desk statistics from handwritten to digital format. This shift presented two opportunities: first, the availability of a nonsensitive data set to improve the librarians'' understanding of data-management and statistical analysis skills, and second, the use of analytics to directly inform staffing decisions and departmental strategic goals. By working through each step of the data life cycle, library faculty explored data gathering, storage, sharing, and analysis questions.     

‘Partnership’ in Action: Contagious Abortion and the Governance of Livestock Disease in Britain, 1885–1921

Most histories of livestock disease in Britain treat the development of control policy as a government responsibility, to which farmers made little constructive contribution. Similarly, farmers rarely appear in accounts of disease research. This paper uses the example of contagious abortion (brucellosis) at the turn of the twentieth century to reveal that state-farming collaboration in research and policy did in fact occur, and that it operated in various ways, with often unexpected outcomes. The collaborative approach to contagious abortion is partly attributed to its clinical and epidemiological features, which made it an unsuitable candidate for the existing, state-led policy of stamping out disease. It is claimed that such collaboration has been overlooked by historians on account of their focus upon diseases that were amenable to stamping out. This focus needs to change if history is to inform present-day disease governance in Britain, which is founded on the concept of ‘partnership’ between farmers and the state.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Early Years Language Intervention

Research into the long‐term effects of language delay reflects an increasing concern that many children’s needs are not being met by current early years educational practice. This paper reports on a two‐part intervention designed to improve language skills within a nursery setting. In the first part of the intervention, a directly taught small group was found to be effective in improving language skills in children with language delay. However, in the second part of the intervention, creation of a “language rich” nursery environment was not fully implemented by nursery staff. A baseline assessment of all the nursery children revealed that alongside the high incidence of language delay in the nursery population there was also a high incidence of delay in non‐verbal reasoning skills as assessed by a single sub‐test from the British Ability Scales II Early Years. The findings raise the question: how can educational psychologists and speech and language therapists work together with teaching staff to create a “language rich” environment in the early years that will address the needs of all children?     

Coat of arms: Dovetailing the needs of outdoor sculpture and military assets to develop more durable and adaptable paint systems

The requirements for paints used on outdoor sculpture and military vehicles are similar: overall protection for the underlying substrate, and the ability to withstand prolonged outdoor exposure and recurring physical contact. Aesthetic requirements are different but stringent for both categories of coatings and include maintaining appearance over time. Building on prior work undertaken by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Army Research Laboratory (ARL) to modify military coating systems into a matte black paint suitable for outdoor sculpture, a long-term interdisciplinary collaboration is under way between the ARL, the Getty Conservation Institute, Mack Art Conservation, and NCP Coatings, that aims to develop and evaluate a wider range of robust paint systems with novel attributes for both the DoD and outdoor painted sculptures. For the latter, this includes coatings with a broader range of gloss, formulated with a much more varied palette. New low-gloss coatings used on military assets were used to paint sculptures by Alexander Calder, Tony Smith, and Louise Nevelson, designed to an aesthetic standard based on approved colour and gloss levels by the relevant artists’ foundations and estates, and formulated to enhance durability. These new coatings offer the ability to match or meet a range of artists’ aesthetic preferences, and to use a variety of polymeric flattening agents to control gloss levels, reduce marring, and eliminate volatile and hazardous pollutants. The use of low molecular weight (LMW) resins provides 4–8 hour pot life to assist in the application process. Compared to current resins, the LMW systems reduce organic solvent levels, are low viscosity, and permit far easier application. In addition, the replacement of typical pigments with low solar absorbing (LSA) pigmentation provides higher reflection which ‘shields’ the resin/binder system and reduces degradation. A particular advantage to conservators from this collaboration is that the coatings on DoD assets provide a convenient indicator of the paint's performance and durability. The outcome will be a unique coating system to provide enhanced durability and maintain the original coating properties for a period of 6–10 years.