Maladjustment of bully-victims: validation with three identification methods

Although knowledge on the psychosocial (mal)adjustment of bully-victims, children who bully others and are victimised by others, has been increasing, the findings have been principally gained utilising a single method to identify bully-victims. The present study examined the psychosocial adjustment of bully-victims (as compared with pure bullies and pure victims) identified by Olweus’ global measures, peer nominations and a profile method based on Olweus’ multiple measures of bullying/victimisation forms. The sample included 17,586 students from grades 3 to 8 (9–15 years old) in Finland. Bully-victims formed the smallest group, whose subjective experience of maladjustment differed from that of the bullies, rather than that of the victims. Both the prevalence and the relative maladjustment of bully-victims varied across identification methods, gender and school level.     

Implementing the KiVa antibullying program: recognition of stable victims

Teachers do not always recognise students who are victimised by their peers. In this study, we examined the recognition of stable victims in 76 schools beginning to implement the KiVa antibullying programme. We focused on 348 victims (9–15 years) who reported victimisation at the pretest and still at wave 2, after five months of programme implementation. Only 24% of these stable victims received the attention of school personnel during the school year. Multilevel logistic regression analyses revealed that male victims were recognised more often than female victims, but only in elementary school level. Peer reputation as a victim, as well as telling an adult about one’s plight increased the likelihood of recognition by school personnel, whereas bullying others (in addition to being victimised) decreased it. The study emphasises the importance of encouraging school personnel to put more effort in reaching the victimised students.     

Benefits of the Comprehensive Child Development Program as a function of AFDC receipt and SES

The benefits for children at the Pittsburgh site of the federal Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP) were examined as a function of family welfare status (Aid to Families with Dependent Children; AFDC) and SES. The CCDP was the largest attempt by the federal government to provide two-generation, case-managed, comprehensive services to low-income families. Participating families could set their own goals and choose services to achieve them, but relatively few services were directed specifically at children. Results showed that more Pittsburgh families in the CCDP treatment group (N = 120) left AFDC than in the control group (N = 120), consistent with results from a national evaluation of the CCDP. Children whose families were on AFDC regardless of treatment group had lower mental test scores, even after controlling for family SES, a result suggesting that AFDC receipt over and above income level was associated with poorer child mental performance. The CCDP was associated with higher children's mental scores plus improvements over time in achievement scores only for children in families who were not on AFDC, even after controlling for SES. Such parents were more likely to choose parenting and child goals and services, which in turn were associated with higher child mental scores. In contrast, parents who were on AFDC tended to choose adult-centered goals and services, which did not benefit children. Therefore, in contrast to the national evaluation, which found no benefits of the CCDP for children, these analyses showed that the CCDP did produce benefits for children whose parents were not on AFDC, who tended to choose parenting and child services.     

Students’ Perceptions of E‐learning in University Education

This paper examines students’ perceptions of e‐learning taking students at Jönköping University in Sweden as an example. The students had experiences from two years of e‐learning on campus. Students (n = 150) filled in a questionnaire with closed as well as open‐ended questions. The answers were analysed in a multiple regression analysis, putting the students’ perceptions in relation to gender, age, previous knowledge of computers, attitudes to new technology, learning styles and the way of implementing e‐learning at the university. Advantages and disadvantages of e‐leaming were categorized in a qualitative content analysis. The main conclusion from the study was that the strategy of implementing the e‐leaming system at the university was more important in influencing students’ perceptions than the individual background variables. Students did not regard access to e‐learning on campus as a benefit. Male students, students with previous knowledge of computers and students with positive attitudes to new technologies were all less positive to e‐leaming on campus than other students.     

Training of component reading skills

Fifteen reading-disabled boys, classified according to reading subskill deficits, formed three subgroups: Oral Reading, Associative, and Sequential. On the rationale that training procedures emphasizing accuracy and speed of response to letters, syllables, and words would improve reading skills, the children were trained daily for two and one-half months. Two schedules of testing and training allowed for an untrained control group and a follow-up group. The results indicated that the computer-assisted training procedures were not only effective in improving component reading skills, but in addition there was a transfer of training to achievement measures of reading word recognition. This study lends support to the hypothesis that training according to subgroup classification, using training procedures which incorporate an application of the automaticity theory and a combination of task-analytic and process-oriented models, is an effective training approach for reading-disabled children. This research was funded by a grant from the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children Foundation, Toronto, Canada, and a scholarship from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council, Ottawa, Canada.     

Interpersonal Violence and Sexual Assault: Trauma-Informed Communication Approaches in University Counseling Centers

A university in the United States Mountain West utilized grant resources to track counseling services for students who were currently experiencing or who had historically experienced relationship violence, sexual assault and/or stalking. This report reflects on the first 2 years of this program, including an overview of prevalence and reporting rates of interpersonal violence from university students. Given the prevalence of recent and historic interpersonal violence among university students, suggestions are offered for bringing a trauma-informed and communication-focused perspective to the solution-focused brief therapy model used in many university counseling centers. A case study outlining these approaches is offered.     

Pathway to success: using students’ insights and perspectives to improve retention and success for university students from low socioeconomic (LSE) backgrounds

In an increasingly complex landscape of diversification and massification, universities are grappling with challenges of student attrition. This paper presents findings from a project investigating how students from low socio-economic backgrounds at a regional Australian university perceive challenges and supports associated with retention and success. Twenty-seven students received intensive one-to-one support from a Faculty-embedded ‘academic advisor’, and reflected on this support, their overall student experience, and strategies to enhance student success. Students identified a range of challenges that they experienced across an academic year (personal circumstances, lack of preparedness for university study, timely access to support, course/programme difficulties) and what worked well for them (academic advisor, University support services, growing confidence in self as competent student, peer support). A range of strategies for enhancing student success were identified by students, namely consistency across teaching design and delivery, transparency of delivery modes, mandatory orientation, access to a dedicated academic advisor, and increased peer connectedness. The applicability and viability of the proposed strategies within current higher education settings are explored.     

The geometric module in the rat: independence of shape and feature learning in a food finding task

Rats found food in a rectangular enclosure in three experiments testing how learning about a distinctive feature near a goal interacts with learning based on the geometry of an enclosure. Rats trained to follow a feature in square and triangular enclosures and to use geometry in the rectangle followed the feature when it was in the rectangle (Experiment 1). Rats trained with the feature in a geometrically consistent corner of the rectangle learned about both geometry and the feature (Experiment 2). Training with the feature in the square did not block learning of geometry when both predicted the location of food in the rectangle (Experiment 3). The “geometric module” (Cheng, 1986) may have a special status in spatial learning.     

Knowledge development of tweens in RE – the importance of school class and communication

This article draws on empirical findings from an religious education (RE) test done by 52 pupils in three different classes on two occasions at the beginning and end of the 2011/2012 academic year. The purpose is to examine whether RE knowledge development can be identified generally, whether there are differences between classes, and if so whether they can be related to communication patterns and describe directions of knowledge development within RE. A sociocultural perspective on learning is used, stressing the importance of communication and the discursive practices the individual is a part of for what is learnt. The findings show that RE developments over the course of the academic year can be identified in all three classes, and that there are differences among the classes in both achievement levels and developments, indicating variety in the degree to which the discursive practices of the classes facilitate RE learning. Among the individual communicative factors, ‘asking questions’ when one is curious or does not understand shows to be one important factor. The greatest developments seem to be among less complex and learning-about forms of RE knowledge.     

Identifying Essential Epistemic Heuristics for Guiding Mechanistic Reasoning in Science Learning

Mechanistic reasoning, or reasoning systematically through underlying factors and relationships that give rise to phenomena, is a powerful thinking strategy that allows one to explain and make predictions about phenomena. This article synthesizes and builds on existing frameworks to identify essential characteristics of students’ mechanistic reasoning across scientific content areas. We argue that these characteristics can be represented as epistemic heuristics, or ideas about how to direct one’s intellectual work, that implicitly guide mechanistic reasoning. We use this framework to characterize middle school students’ written explanatory accounts of two phenomena in different science content areas using these heuristics. We demonstrate evidence of heuristics in students’ accounts and show that the use of the heuristics was related to but distinct from science content knowledge. We describe how the heuristics allowed us to characterize and compare the mechanistic sophistication of account construction across science content areas. This framework captures elements of a crosscutting practical epistemology that may support students in directing the construction of mechanistic accounts across content areas over time, and it allows us to characterize that progress.