The educational psychologist: Facing a new era

The once firm divisions between regular and special education are now fading. In many regions, the integration into regular classrooms of formerly extruded atypical students has an accepted and sometimes legally determined future. Much greater responsibility has thus fallen upon the shoulders of the classroom teacher, and when the failure of students to learn is attributed to a failure to teach them effectively, the question of professional accountability becomes poignant indeed. So, too, for the educational psychologist. Assessment, tied to placement, is no longer acceptable as a raison d'etre. His/her primary contribution in an era of integration for special education is towards improving the quality of instruction in regular classrooms and the quality of learning. Activities of educational psychologists, including assessment, research dissemination, programs of evaluation, systems analysis, and work with parents are reconstrued in this paper as contributing to better instruction in better classrooms.     

Multimodal behavior therapy with elementary school children; rationale and case study

During the 1979-80 school year, a seven-year-old boy was treated with a Multimodal Behavior Therapy (MMBT) approach to counseling. The primary presenting problem evidenced by this youngster involved a low frequency of on-task behavior. While treatment strategies focused on specific modalities of the BASIC ID, the intervention package was built around three major parameters: (a) an emphasis on intervention in the classroom setting, (b) the use of treatment contracting, and (c) comprehensive assessment of client needs. Despite evidence suggesting that the client's teacher was not reinforcing him for on-task behavior, the youngster's on-task behavior increased from 10.5 minutes out of 30 minutes to the goal level of 20 minutes out of 30 by the end of the four weeks of treatment. At follow-up four months later, the client was engaged in on-task behavior for 17 minutes out of 30, and for 20.7 minutes out of 30 one and one-half years later, Implications for counseling with elementary school children are discussed, based on the three parameters listed above.     

Online student evaluation improves Course Experience Questionnaire results in a physiotherapy program

This paper reports the use of an online student evaluation system, Course Experience on the Web (CEW), in a physiotherapy program to improve their Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) results. CEW comprises a course survey instrument modelled on the CEQ and a tailored unit survey instrument. Closure of the feedback loop is integral in the CEW system. Analysis of the data shows that the students’ evaluation in their final year of the program is closely correlated with their CEQ results. Increases in the CEQ scores from 2001–04 included an increase in the Good Teaching Scale (27.5), Generic Skills Scale (10.3) and Overall Satisfaction Index (29.3). By using CEW, academics at the School of Physiotherapy were able to determine students’ perceptions during the course, make changes to teaching and learning, where appropriate, in a timely manner and, as a result, the CEQ scores were improved markedly.     

Spontaneous Self‐Distancing and Adaptive Self‐Reflection Across Adolescence

Experiments performed primarily with adults show that self‐distancing facilitates adaptive self‐reflection. However, no research has investigated whether adolescents spontaneously engage in this process or whether doing so is linked to adaptive outcomes. In this study, 226 African American adolescents, aged 11–20, reflected on an anger‐related interpersonal experience. As expected, spontaneous self‐distancing during reflection predicted lower levels of emotional reactivity by leading adolescents to reconstrue (rather than recount) their experience and blame their partner less. Moreover, the inverse relation between self‐distancing and emotional reactivity strengthened with age. These findings highlight the role that self‐distancing plays in fostering adaptive self‐reflection in adolescence, and begin to elucidate the role that development plays in enhancing the benefits of engaging in this process.