IMPACTS OF TRADITIONAL BULLYING AND CYBERBULLYING ON THE MENTAL HEALTH OF MIDDLE SCHOOL AND HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

A critical debate within the field of school psychology has centered on the relationship between bullying and cyberbullying in terms of prevalence, overlap, and impact. The current study sought to address the following questions: (1) Does cyberbullying create new victims or merely a new means of victimization? (2) Does cyberbullying uniquely contribute to negative outcomes above and beyond those of traditional bullying? Utilizing an anonymous survey to examine students’ experiences with cyberbullying, traditional bullying, and negative psychological symptoms, it was found that the vast majority of students who were bullied online were also victims of in‐person bullying. Both forms of victimization were independently associated with negative outcomes. However, when controlling for traditional bullying, cyberbullying did not remain a predictor of negative mental health outcomes. In contrast, when controlling for cyberbullying, traditional bullying remained a significant predictor of negative mental health outcomes. These results suggest that although traditional and cyber forms of bullying tend to target the same victims, traditional bullying is more uniquely associated with negative psychological outcomes.     

Pedagogy through the pearl metaphor: teaching as a process of ongoing refinement

Using the analytical tools of broadening, burrowing and storying and restorying, this narrative inquiry examines a middle school teachers’ knowledge of her pedagogical practices through the strand of pearls’ metaphor that she employs to explain her teaching to herself, a beginning teacher whom she mentors and ourselves as researchers. Throughout the discussion, careful attention is paid to the pearl metaphor’s emergent, novel qualities and how the metaphor is held and expressed in the teacher’s unfurling practice. In the final analysis, four significant themes are unpacked: (1) the image of teacher as curriculum maker; (2) the idea of pearls, non-pearls and yellowed pearls; and (3) the concept of metaphors and the nature of metaphorical truth. Finally, a discussion of the veracity of the strand of pearls as way to understand teaching practice concludes the article.     

A Curriculum Innovation Framework for Science, Technology and Mathematics Education

There is growing concern about falling levels of student engagement with school science, as evidenced by studies of student attitudes, and decreasing participation at the post compulsory level. One major response to this, the Australian School Innovation in Science, Technology and Mathematics (ASISTM) initiative, involves partnerships between schools and community and industry organisations in developing curriculum projects at the local level. This project fulfils many of the conditions advocated to engage students in learning in the sciences. ASISTM is underpinned by the notion of innovation. This paper describes the findings of case study research in which 16 ASISTM projects were selected as innovation exemplars. A definition of innovation and an innovation framework were developed, through which the case studies were analysed to make sense of the significance of the ideas and practices, participating actors, and outcomes of the projects. Through this analysis we argue that innovation is a powerful idea for framing curriculum development in the sciences at the local level that is generative for students and teachers, and that these ASISTM projects provide valuable models for engaging students, and for teacher professional learning.     

H. Craig Heller. Interviewed by Laura L. Mays Hoopes

Note from the Editor     

Missing the Boat with Technology Usage in Early Childhood Settings: A 21st Century View of Developmentally Appropriate Practice

Technology use permeates virtually all aspects of twenty-first century society, though its integration in early childhood settings and recognition as a developmentally appropriate practice remains problematic. A position is taken that education professionals may be ‘missing the boat’ by not embracing technology usage as a developmentally appropriate practice. Concerns are presented that both preservice education and inservice professional development require substantial improvement if early childhood education professionals are to both recognize the role of technology in developmentally appropriate practice and develop skills in using it in classroom settings.     

Bioinformatics and the Undergraduate Curriculum Essay

Recent advances involving high-throughput techniques for data generation and analysis have made familiarity with basic bioinformatics concepts and programs a necessity in the biological sciences. Undergraduate students increasingly need training in methods related to finding and retrieving information stored in vast databases. The rapid rise of bioinformatics as a new discipline has challenged many colleges and universities to keep current with their curricula, often in the face of static or dwindling resources. On the plus side, many bioinformatics modules and related databases and software programs are free and accessible online, and interdisciplinary partnerships between existing faculty members and their support staff have proved advantageous in such efforts. We present examples of strategies and methods that have been successfully used to incorporate bioinformatics content into undergraduate curricula.     

Aversive parenting in China: associations with child physical and relational aggression

This study assessed the combined and differential contributions of Chinese mothers and fathers (in terms of spouse-reported physically coercive and psychologically controlling parenting) to the development of peer-reported physical and relational aggression in their preschool-age children (mean age of 5 years). Results of the two-group (boys and girls) latent sum and difference structural equation model showed that combined parenting effects were slightly more prevalent than differential effects in predicting aggression. Furthermore, physical coercion was predictive of aggression in boys whereas psychological control was primarily associated with aggression in girls. Findings extend our understanding of relational aggression and the meaning of aversive parenting, particularly within the Chinese cultural context.     

MapReduce indexing strategies: Studying scalability and efficiency

In Information Retrieval (IR), the efficient indexing of terabyte-scale and larger corpora is still a difficult problem. MapReduce has been proposed as a framework for distributing data-intensive operations across multiple processing machines. In this work, we provide a detailed analysis of four MapReduce indexing strategies of varying complexity. Moreover, we evaluate these indexing strategies by implementing them in an existing IR framework, and performing experiments using the Hadoop MapReduce implementation, in combination with several large standard TREC test corpora. In particular, we examine the efficiency of the indexing strategies, and for the most efficient strategy, we examine how it scales with respect to corpus size, and processing power. Our results attest to both the importance of minimising data transfer between machines for IO intensive tasks like indexing, and the suitability of the per-posting list MapReduce indexing strategy, in particular for indexing at a terabyte-scale. Hence, we conclude that MapReduce is a suitable framework for the deployment of large-scale indexing.     

“Evaluation gone Awry”: The teacher experience of the summative evaluation of a school reform initiative

Written as four scenes that span a five-year period, this article examines the summative evaluation of an organized school reform programme in the United States from the teacher perspective. The study provides fine-grained details of how the evaluation of the particular reform effort went “awry” in the view of some teachers who directly participated. The inclusion of two teacher narratives particularly demonstrates how practitioners' intents and desires became overtaken by evaluators' stances and theoretical frames. The international value of the research is that it discusses problems of summative evaluators entering longitudinal reform endeavors too late in the change process, difficulties relating to non-participant observation, issues associated with not negotiating final evaluation reports, and failure of evaluation studies to enter into human subjects agreements with teachers. Lastly, the lack of congruence between formative planning and evaluation and summative evaluation constitutes an overarching theme.