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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Performativity and grassroots politics: on the practice of reshuffling mafia power

Recent uses of performativity have been engaged with bridging the gap between the economy and politics. The concept of performation has for instance been used to enable discursive and material assemblages that challenge this dichotomy, with the general aim of transforming the economy. While the overall intent of this article is to contribute to this bridging, its direction of travel is the opposite: to bring the economy into politics. Specifically, it situates the notion of performativity within studies on grassroots politics in a material sense. First, it discusses some of the leading scholarship on grassroots movements, focusing on their take on the economy. It moves on to suggest that some of the problems that are identified can be addressed using performativity theory, the benefits of which are discussed in the second part. Finally, it empirically illustrates the theoretical discussion by analysing the performativity of the discourses, things and people that are jointly fighting the Mafia today. The article places social movement studies in dialogue with scholarship which is preoccupied with the economic-political cleft, in order to encourage thinking of the economy as a space for political possibility and social struggle, rather than seeing it as a place of capitalocentrism, structural exploitation and inescapability.     

Transforming Praxis in Science Through Dialogue Towards Inclusive Approaches

Research in Science Education - This paper offers analyses from a project examining the construction of narrative assessments within elementary science investigations. We examined how positioning...     

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.     

Incidental spatial memory in the domestic dog (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Canis familiaris</Emphasis>)

We built upon previous work by Fujita et al. (2012, Animal Cognition, 15(6), 1055–1063) to create an experiment that investigated the presence of incidental memory for the spatial location of uneaten food in the domestic dog. Here, we dissociated potentially incidental spatial memory from the incidental memory for the characteristics of objects, in this case, food bowls. Eighteen household domestic dogs of various breeds and age were presented with four bowls. Each bowl contained either a novel object, treats the dog could consume, treats it could not consume, or it was left empty. Following a delay, the dogs returned to the laboratory and were presented with empty bowls in the same spatial orientation as the initial exposure and could move freely between bowls. This experiment required no previous training outside of basic obedience and so avoids the possibility that performance on the test was a conditioned response. We hypothesized that domestic dogs would be able to remember the location of uneaten food when presented with an unexpected memory test. We found that dogs in this study showed no evidence that they encoded spatial location in the absence of other cues that could be used to distinguish food bowls at specific locations. This suggests that dogs in previous experiments were more dependent on incidentally encoding the “what” and “in what” of this task than the “where,” in the absence of features making each location distinct.     

Young students’ aesthetic experiences and meaning-making processes in an outdoor environmental school practice

This study uses John Dewey’s theoretical concept of ‘aesthetic experience’ in empirically exploring expressions of cognition and emotion in students’ meaning-making processes. A case study was conducted in one class of Grade 6 students during a single school semester. This article reports results from five outdoor days. The empirical material consists of observations, field notes, logbook entries, interviews and students’ written reflections. The students’ meaning-making processes were analyzed through the Deweyan theory of an initial phase involving anticipation, an activity phase with courses of actions and a concluding phase with reflections that serve as fulfillments. Expressions of aesthetic experience were identified in four important components of the students’ meaning-making processes: prior personal experiences; responses to environments and artifacts; social interaction; and situations allowing for responsibility, trust and independence. A more in-depth process-oriented analysis revealed that aesthetic experiences are vital in continuous meaning-making processes.