Child emotional security and interparental conflict

Guided by the emotional security hypothesis developed by Davies & Cummings (1994), studies were conducted to test a conceptual refinement of children's adjustment to parental conflict in relation to hypotheses of other prominent theories. Study 1 examined whether the pattern of child responses to simulations of adult conflict tactics and topics was consistent with the emotional security hypothesis and social learning theory in a sample of 327 Welsh children. Supporting the emotional security hypothesis, child reports of fear, avoidance, and involvement were especially prominent responses to destructive conflict. Study 2 examined the relative roles of child emotional insecurity and social-cognitive appraisals in accounting for associations between parental conflict and child psychological symptoms in a sample of 285 Welsh children and parents. Findings indicated that child emotional insecurity was a robust intervening process in the prospective links between parental conflict and child maladjustment even when intervening processes proposed in the social-cognitive models were included in the analyses. Studies 3 and 4 explored pathways among parental conflict, child emotional insecurity, and psychological adjustment in the broader family context with a sample of 174 children and mothers. Supporting the emotional security hypothesis, Study 3 findings indicated that child insecurity continued to mediate the link between parental conflict and child maladjustment even after specifying the effects of other parenting processes. Parenting difficulties accompanying interparental conflict were related to child maladjustment through their association with insecure parent-child attachment. In support of the emotional security hypothesis, Study 4 findings indicated that family instability, parenting difficulties, and parent-child attachment insecurity potentiated mediational pathways among parental conflict, child insecurity, and maladjustment. Family cohesiveness, interparental satisfaction, and interparental expressiveness appeared to be protective factors in these mediational paths. No support was found for the social learning theory prediction that parent-child warmth would amplify associations between parental conflict and child disruptive behaviors.     

Promoting participation at a time of social and political turmoil: what is the impact of children’s and young people’s city councils?

Youth councils are examined as spaces of citizenship education where young people are educated as political subjects. At a time of political and economic instability data were collected in a Catalan city through tests and focus groups involving 112 students, three teachers and two youth council managers during one academic year. Students’ political trust decreased and their cynicism towards politics increased; there were no changes in students’ anticipated future participation. The article avoids drawing simplistic causal links between students’ involvement in a council and the expression of their views. The participants also discuss the councils as performance sites. It is speculated whether, in students’ views, this metaphor of performance applies not only to the councils but to the wider political context in which they live. It is argued that youth councils are, in some ways, potentially valuable for promoting participation and recommendations are made in light of the findings.     

Testing the validity of value‐added measures of educational progress with genetic data

Value‐added measures of educational progress have been used by education researchers and policy‐makers to assess the performance of teachers and schools, contributing to performance‐related pay and position in school league tables. They are designed to control for all underlying differences between pupils and should therefore provide unbiased measures of school and teacher influence on pupil progress, however, their effectiveness has been questioned. We exploit genetic data from a UK birth cohort to investigate how successfully value‐added measures control for genetic differences between pupils. We use raw value‐added, contextual value‐added (which additionally controls for background characteristics) and teacher‐reported value‐added measures built from data at ages 11, 14 and 16. Sample sizes for analyses range from 4,600 to 6,518. Our findings demonstrate that genetic differences between pupils explain little variation in raw value‐added measures but explain up to 20% of the variation in contextual value‐added measures (95% CI = 6.06% to 35.71%). Value‐added measures built from teacher‐rated ability have a greater proportion of variance explained by genetic differences between pupils, with 36.3% of their cross‐sectional variation being statistically accounted for by genetics (95% CI = 22.8% to 49.8%). By contrast, a far greater proportion of variance is explained by genetic differences for raw test scores at each age of at least 47.3% (95% CI: 35.9 to 58.7). These findings provide evidence that value‐added measures of educational progress can be influenced by genetic differences between pupils, and therefore may provide a biased measure of school and teacher performance. We include a glossary of genetic terms for educational researchers interested in the use of genetic data in educational research.     

‘Doing’ Persuading: Actively Constructing Knowledge,Voice and Self

I explore a series of incidents in my English classroom, which occurred while I was preparing my students for their high-stakes GCSE English Language exam (‘Paper 2: Writers’ viewpoints and perspectives’). I thereby attempt to confront some of my own failings and biases with regard to non-fiction and the teaching of persuasive writing in particular, as well as to unleash the huge potential I now believe it offers, when combined with the multi-voiced space of a classroom, for creative play and the productive skills of English. In doing so I argue, drawing on Vygotskian notions of the internalisation of concepts and the developmental benefits of play, that in order for truly ‘productive’ learning to occur, students need agency and a sense of empowerment to construct knowledge together, and to experiment with and develop their understanding of and flexibility with their own ‘voice’.     

School-Based Consultation to Improve Concussion Recognition and Response

Many students who have sustained concussions return to school requiring academic adjustments while their brains heal. However, school personnel often are not trained to accommodate these students. This exploratory project examined the usefulness of school-based training paired with ongoing consultation and continued dissemination of information to improve both concussion recognition and response among school personnel. A case study design was employed in which a school district received training that was followed by ongoing consultation and continued dissemination of concussion resources. This study highlights the importance of involving school psychologists in concussion management programs.     

Learning with and from: positioning school students as advisors in pre-service teacher education

This article reports on an innovative pedagogical approach within the Learning Partnerships program in which school students help to ‘teach the teachers’ within pre-service teacher education. Classes of school students join with classes of pre-service teachers to provide input on how teachers can enhance school students’ engagement and wellbeing. The article draws on data collected from 125 students (aged 13–16) and 120 pre-service teachers in these workshops. Findings generated from a mixed methods study combining pre-workshop focus groups (n = Students: 38, Teachers: 33) and post-workshop focus groups (n = Students: 69, Teachers: 15) and post-workshop surveys (n = Students: 96; Teachers: 101) demonstrated that the workshops were mutually beneficial for both students and pre-service teachers. Participants found that workshopping together enhanced their belief in the possibility of positive student–teacher relationships. The pre-service teachers reported greater confidence in communicating with young people about the issues that affect student engagement and wellbeing. The school students reported that they were more willing to use teachers as a source of help. Implications include the need for increased attention to a ‘third space’ for learning in teacher development which provides opportunity for learning with and from young people about how to foster their engagement and wellbeing.     

An International Resource for Learning and Teaching

This article compares the national curriculum data‐handling specifications of the UK, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand and shows how data from the CensusAtSchool project can be used to enhance the data‐handling capabilities of pupils in those countries. These data can also provide enhanced opportunities for the integration of ICT into core curriculum activities. Some ideas to enable teachers of statistics to create classroom teaching material with an international flavour are also provided.     

Language and Williams Syndrome: How Intact Is "Intact"?

It has been claimed that Williams syndrome (WS), a rare neurodevelopmental disorder, is characterized by serious cognitive deficits alongside intact language. The syndrome is often used as a prime example of the modularity of an innate faculty for morphosyntactic rules. We challenge this claim and hypothesize that morphosyntax, although surprisingly good given WS level of mental retardation, is by no means intact. We make an initial test of this hypothesis through an analysis of the receptive language of a group of English-speaking WS individuals on a standardized morphosyntactic test. We then present an experimental study of expressive language that examines grammatical gender assignment in French-speaking WS patients. Despite a Verbal Mental Age selected to be higher than the chronological age of the young control group, these people with WS continue even in adulthood to show clear-cut deficits in their production of an aspect of morphosyntax that normal children acquire effortlessly very early. The results of the 2 studies, one focusing on receptive language and the other on expressive language, challenge the notion that comprehension and use of morphosyntactic rules in WS individuals are intact. The within-domain dissociations regarding the use of grammatical gender assignment across several sentence elements and their difficulties in understanding embedded sentences—two quintessentially linguistic skills—suggest that we must rethink the notion of spared, modular, language capacities in Williams syndrome. We conclude that WS language follows a different path to normal acquisition and may turn out to be more like second language learning.