The relationship between attitudes toward corporal punishment and the perception and reporting of child maltreatment.

OBJECTIVE: This study examined the effect of workers' attitudes toward corporal punishment on the workers' perception and reporting of child maltreatment. Three hundred twenty-five (325) potential entry level workers participated in this study. METHOD: Responding to vignettes in multi-item scales, study participants 1) rated their approval of parental discipline involving corporal punishment; 2) rated the seriousness of incidents of probable maltreatment; and 3) indicated whether or not they would report the incidents of maltreatment to child protective services. Data were analyzed using correlation analyses and multiple regression procedures. RESULTS: 1) Respondents with higher scores for approval of corporal punishment were less likely to perceive maltreatment; 2) respondents with higher scores for approval of corporal punishment were less likely to report maltreatment; 3) the likelihood that a respondent would report maltreatment was a joint function of the respondent's perception of the seriousness of an incident and approval of corporal punishment. CONCLUSION: Attitudes about corporal punishment are important predictors of reporting behavior. Social service agencies face a challenge to provide workers with training which will enable them to detect and report maltreatment despite workers' individual beliefs about discipline and punishment.     

K-12 Calculator Usage and College Grades

We find that students in the big mathematics service courses at the Johns Hopkins University who were encouraged to use calculators in K-12 have somewhat lower grades than those who weren't. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Applying Kaplan-Meier to Item Response Data

Some IRT models can be equivalently modeled in alternative frameworks such as logistic regression. Logistic regression can also model time-to-event data, which concerns the probability of an event occurring over time. Using the relation between time-to-event models and logistic regression and the relation between logistic regression and IRT, this article outlines how the nonparametric Kaplan-Meier estimator for time-to-event data can be applied to IRT data. Established Kaplan-Meier computational formulas are shown to aid in better approximating “parametric-type” item difficulty compared to methods from existing nonparametric methods, particularly for the less-well-defined scenario wherein the response function is monotonic but invariant item ordering is unreasonable. Limitations and the potential for Kaplan-Meier within differential item functioning are also discussed.     

Marquage de l’importance et traitement des eléments dans un texte: Effets immédiat et différé

An expository text is presented, in which two types of importance signals are manipulated: a linguistic signal (a sentence calling attention on the following target-sentence’s contents); a paralinguistic signal (underlining a part of the target-sentence). Reading times (RT) allocated to the various text sentences were measured. The underline affects not only RT for the target-sentence itself (increased in case of underline), but also RT for the preceding linguistic signal (shortened when the targetsentence is underlined), and RT for the following sentence (shortened when the two types of signals are simultaneously present). The interpretation of these results is grounded on the importance signals’ function in activating some high level representations (here bounded to a specific rhetorical structure: analogy), the effects of which can be delayed on the following sentence’s integration. The necessity is argued to take over the connection between relevant representations, marks likely to activate these representations, and devices likely to call reader’s attention on these marks.     

Cognitively based models of courseware development

Many researchers are attempting to develop automated instructional design systems to guide subject matter experts through the courseware authoring process, a process that usually includes analysis, design, production, implementation, and maintenance. What is lacking in many existing efforts, however, is a systematic method for analyzing the interplay between user characteristics, the authoring environment, and the resulting quality of computer-based instruction (CBI). In this article, a cognitively oriented method for developing a useful and predictive model of the process of designing CBI is proposed, and its use in three small-scale case studies in Air Force training settings is reported.     

Reflections on international comparative education survey methodology: a case study of the European Survey on Language Competences

This paper reflects on the methodology used in international comparative education surveys by conducting a systematic review of the European Survey on Language Competences (ESLC). The ESLC was administered from February to March 2011, with final results released in June 2012. The survey tested approximately 55,000 students across 14 European countries with the goals of (1) providing comparative data on foreign language competence and (2) informing policy on language learning and teaching. The paper argues that there is a gap between the purpose of international comparative education surveys such as the ESLC and the methodology used, and thus also the ability of the data to feed into and inform policy. It is suggested that further methodological advances and improvements are needed if surveys are to produce data that give a clearer and more in-depth understanding of what actually goes on in classrooms and positively impact on learning and teaching.     

Significant learning in catholic religious education: the case of Temuco (Chile)

ABSTRACT

The object of this article is to reveal the teaching strategies used by teachers for religious education in Temuco, Chile. The paradigm used was qualitative and the design was a single interpretative case study. The data were collected by semi-structured interviews with pupils and religious education (RE) teachers. The results show convergences of successful strategies, such as the use of conversations to form opinions related with the pupils’ everyday interests. We conclude that significant learning for catholic religious education in schools (CRES) includes teaching strategies associated with individual and collective reflections and conversations on topical social issues. Thus, religious education may enable us to advance towards a pluralist approach to the teaching of religion.