Paving the Pathway: Exploring Student Perceptions of Professional Development Preparation in Doctoral Education

The breadth of doctoral education has expanded to include professional development activities in order to prepare students for academic and nonacademic careers. This mixed methods study focused on students’ perceptions of professional development opportunities at a Research One university. The findings suggest that most students feel prepared in scholarly-related activities; but they identify gaps in areas such as preparation for grant writing, teaching, and leading research teams. Statistically significant differences in perceived preparation were noted among disciplines. We offer suggestions for future research in doctoral professional development and recognize the need to expand and diversify centralized, institution-based resources so as to pave the pathway to successful careers for graduate students.     

A constructivist approach to numeration in primary school: Results of a three year intervention with the same group of children

This article is a follow-up to an earlier article (Bednarz and Janvier, 1982) which presented the results of a research study on the understanding of numeration by primary school children. That study pointed out the main difficulties children meet in learning numeration, presented a theoretical framework that made explicit a conception of numeration different from the one considered in current mathematics teaching, and also proposed a reference framework utilizable for learning and evaluating this notion. The experimentation in a classroom announced at the end of the article, was undertaken from 1980 to 1983 with the same group of children from the time they were in first grade (6–7 years old) to the third grade (8–9 years). The theoretical and reference frameworks developed in the former research study proved to be effective for developing a constructivist approach leading children to build a meaningful and efficient symbolism of number.This article is mainly devoted to presenting the results of this three year longitudinal study (part C). At first, we shall characterize briefly our intervention based on a constructivist approach of numeration (part A). Also we shall describe the conditions under which the experimentation was carried out, and the means used to evaluate the impact on the pupils (part B).     

Causal Connections Between Mathematical Language and Mathematical Knowledge: A Dialogic Reading Intervention

The acquisition of early mathematical knowledge is critical for successful long-term academic development. Mathematical language is one of the strongest predictors of children's early mathematical success. Findings from previous studies have provided correlational evidence supporting the importance of mathematical language to the development of children's mathematics skills, but there is limited causal evidence supporting this link. To address this research gap, 47 Head Start children were randomly assigned to a mathematical language intervention group or a business-as-usual group. Over the course of eight weeks, interventionists implemented a dialogic reading intervention focused on quantitative and spatial mathematical language. At posttest, students in the intervention group significantly outperformed the students in the comparison group not only on a mathematical language assessment, but on a mathematical knowledge assessment as well. These findings indicate that increasing children's exposure to mathematical language can positively affect their general mathematics skills. This study is an important first step in providing causal evidence of the importance of early mathematical language for children's general mathematical knowledge and the potential for mathematical language interventions to increase children's overall mathematics abilities.     

Differential supervision and cognitive structure effects on empathy and counseling effectiveness

The present study investigated the effects of didactic and experiential supervision procedures on the judged counseling effectiveness of high and low cognitive complexity counselor trainees. Subjects in the two supervision groups (N=16) were trained in attending, questioning, and reflection of feeling over three sessions. Training consisted of exposure to videotaped counseling models, discussion of the model's behavior with the supervisor, videotaped role playing of therapy, and discussion of the therapy with the supervisor. Training was exactly the same for both groups except for supervision. A control group (N=8) did not receive any training. All subjects, including controls, were pre- and post-tested for counseling effectiveness as measured by judged tape ratings on the 25-item Counselor Effectiveness Scale and four scales designed to assess affective, exploratory, listening, and honest labeling responses.High complex subjects responsed more favorably to the didactic supervision significantly outperforming both the high complex controls and the low complex didactic subjects on four of the five dependent measures, whereas high and low complex subjects did not respond differentially to the experiential supervision. The results were discussed in terms of fitting the complexity of the students to the supervision approach in selecting students for counseling programs.This paper was presented at the International Round Table for the Advancement of Counselling, Thessaloniki, Greece, April 1980, and was based partly on the senior author's doctoral disser tation (University of Maine, 1978).     

Systematic comparison of solved problems as a cooperative learning task

Problem-solving skills and understanding of domain, knowledge (e.g., fighting misconceptions) are important goals in both secondary and tertiary science education. A prototype of an instructional task is presented which aims at improved problem-solving skills based on understanding of domain knowledge. In this task, comparing carefully selected solved problems by groups of students is utilised as a learning activity for the acquisition of adequate problem schemata. The task is designed as a part of the so-called UBP-program (UBP=Understanding Based Problem solving) currently being developed, for education in science. The result of an evaluative study for the field of mechanics is presented. The UBP-task appears apt to improve problem-solving skills at a less advanced level of physics education (e.g., 10th grade), especially for students normally performing poorly—who are often girls.     

Social Information Processing,Moral Reasoning,and Emotion Attributions: Relations With Adolescents’ Reactive and Proactive Aggression

Connections between adolescents’ social information processing (SIP), moral reasoning, and emotion attributions and their reactive and proactive aggressive tendencies were assessed. One hundred mostly African American and Latino 13‐ to 18‐year‐olds from a low‐socioeconomic‐status (SES) urban community and their high school teachers participated. Reactive aggression was uniquely related to expected ease in enacting aggression, lower verbal abilities, and hostile attributional biases, and most of these connections were mediated by adolescents’ attention problems. In contrast, proactive aggression was uniquely related to higher verbal abilities and expectations of more positive emotional and material outcomes resulting from aggression. Discussion focused on the utility of assessing both moral and SIP‐related cognitions, and on the potential influence of low‐SES, high‐risk environments on these findings.     

Emotion,understanding, and social skills among boys at risk of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

There is growing interest in the role of emotional competence in middle school children's adjustment and functioning, yet many populations remain underresearched. Few studies have explored the emotional competence, especially emotion understanding, of children with, or at risk of, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and even fewer have examined the role emotion understanding plays in these children's social skills. Our study investigates a profile of the emotion understanding capacities of Israeli boys at risk of ADHD and evaluates its association with their social skills. One hundred and fifty‐two boys (grades 4–6) were each assigned to an at‐risk (n = 66) or comparison (n = 86) group based on their scores on an ADHD symptoms questionnaire (Conners Rating System–Revised). The two groups were matched on age, socioeconomic status and class, and school environment. Group comparisons revealed that relative to their non–at‐risk counterparts, at‐risk boys demonstrated less mature emotion understanding. Finally, our findings indicate that poor emotion understanding plays a more notable role in the social functioning of at‐risk than non–at‐risk children. This study's contribution to the understanding and school treatment of children with ADHD emotional and social competencies is discussed. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Gold 型Bent函数的两个注记

Bent 函数一直是密码学研究中的重要课题,如何判断给出的布尔函数是否为bent函数是必须要解决的问题.通过对Gold型函数中指数的分析,得到了Gold型函数成为bent函数的充要条件,此充要条件是Leander文献中定理的部分推广,用该结论判断bent函数更加简便.同时还讨论了多个迹函数之和成为bent函数的一个充要条件.     

Neurobiological features common to memory modulation by many treatments

Evidence reviewed here suggests that many treatments that retroactively enhance or impair memory in rats and mice may act by releasing epinephrine from the adrenal medulla: (1) When administered shortly after training, epinephrine injections modulate memory storage processes; (2) plasma epinephrine levels assessed shortly after training predict later performance of learned responses in several situations; and furthermore, (3) peripherally administered adrenergic antagonists block the effects on memory of epinephrine and of many other treatments that enhance and impair memory. In addition, the rapid forgetting exhibited by juvenile and aged rodents can be retarded (i.e., memory is improved) by posttraining epinephrine injections, suggesting that age-related memory deficits may reflect inadequate functions of those neuroendocrine systems responsible, in part, for regulating memory storage. These results, together with the additional finding that epinephrine enhances the establishment of a neurophysiological analogue of memory, long-term potentiation, suggest that the hormone regulates neurobiological processes responsible for memory formation.