From Noncompliance to Columbine: Capturing Student Perspectives to Understand Noncompliance and Violence in Public Schools

The paper reviews a number of ethnographic studies of students in U.S. secondary schools to help understand the causes of a range of student behaviors from minor non-compliance to lethal violence. Based on these studies, as well personal experience, the authors suggest that educators and educational researchers approach and understand student perspectives on school life. Such perspectives often reveal the logic of non-compliance, and show that aspects of school structure and practice can exacerbate or contribute to violence. Student non-compliance and alienation can escalate into violence if the student view is not regularly consulted in schools.     

African international doctoral students in New Zealand: Englishes,doctoral writing and intercultural supervision

While the experiences of international doctoral students, especially those from Asian countries, have been well researched, fewer studies have explored the experiences of African students in Southern countries like Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This article reports on doctoral writing and student and supervisor perspectives on English languages in a small study of supervisors and African students in New Zealand. It challenges deficit constructions of African students and illustrates how the growing internationalisation of higher education is adding to the complexities of doctoral writing, raising questions as to how students and supervisors recognise and navigate differences in Englishes and doctoral writing. It makes a number of recommendations about how supervisors might work effectively with African and other doctoral students.     

Planning for Andrew: the use of COACH and VISTA in an inclusive preschool program

This case study chronicles the use of two educational planning tools, COACH (Choosing Outcomes and Accommodations for Children: A Guide to Educational Planning for Students with Disabilities) and VISTA (Vermont Interdependent Services Team Approach: A Guide to Coordinating Educational Support Services) for Andrew, a 4‐year‐old child with Down syndrome, who attends a general education preschool. The article documents the decisions his team made using COACH and VISTA and describes the findings of follow‐up interviews with his parents, preschool teacher, special educator, and speech/language pathologist. The findings offer insights into the benefits and limitations of these approaches at the preschool level. Implications for facilitating communication and decision‐making among team members are discussed.     

The effect of induced mood states on performance profile areas of perceived need

The performance profile technique is now widely used by a range of sports scientists, usually as the first step in implementing a training programme. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of altered mood states on areas of perceived need for an individual identified by the performance profile. Sixty-seven university sports science students (30 females, 37 males) participated in the study. They completed their performance profile and a shortened version of the Bi-polar Profile of Mood States before and after four separate mood manipulation treatments (happy, sad, neutral, control). The participants were allocated at random to one of four groups and completed the treatments in a counterbalanced order. Mood manipulation checks identified that both the happy and sad manipulations were successful. Profile areas of perceived need, identified through discrepancies in an individual's perceptions of ideal and current state, were not affected by the sad and neutral manipulations or by the control condition. However, areas of perceived need were significantly lower after the happy mood manipulation than before the treatment. Our results show that asking individuals to complete their profiles when in a happy mood state is likely to affect judgements and result in an underestimation of perceived need for improvement.     

Assessing the institutional choice process of student-athletes

The primary purpose of this investigation was to determine the relative importance of the attributes that student-athletes use when determining their choice of a university. A second purpose was to compare previous athletic institutional choice studies with the results of this study to determine if the most important attributes were similar and to compare and contrast methodologies. Six hundred five Division I student-athletes (344 baseball players and 261 softball players) from all eight national geographic regions of the NCAA participated in this study. The experimental procedure was based on Information Integration Theory and a 2(10) fractional factorial design that resulted in 32 "choice sets." These choice sets were composed of universities described by 10 attributes. This framework required that the student-athletes choose from among three university profiles, thereby realistically simulating the decision process. The results for the aggregate sample show that the "Amount of Scholarship" attribute was the most important factor in the institutional choice process. Many demographic variables were analyzed (sex, race, amount of scholarship received as a freshman, amount of perceived financial need, self-reported grade-point average, questionnaire completion procedures, in-state/out-of-state status, NCAA region, and rank in high school) in conjunction with the choice set data in a post-hoc framework. The results for a subset of these variables are reported in this paper; differences (in the order of importance of the attributes) were found among groups. A primary finding of this study is that a student-athlete's perceived financial need has a critical impact on the institutional choice process.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Simulation of electrophoretic stretching of DNA in a microcontraction using an obstacle array for conformational preconditioning

Recently our group has reported experiments using an obstacle array to precondition the conformations of DNA molecules to facilitate their stretch in a microcontraction. Based upon previous successes simulating electrophoretic stretching in microcontractions without obstacles, we use our simulation model to study the deformation of DNA chains in a microcontraction preceded by an array of cylindrical obstacles. We compare our data to the experimental results and find good qualitative, and even quantitative, agreement concerning the behavior of the chains in the array; however, the simulations overpredict the mean stretch of the chains as they leave the contraction. We examine the amount of stretch gained between leaving the array and reaching the end of the contraction and speculate that the differences seen are caused by nonlinear electrokinetic effects that become important in the contraction due to a combination of field gradients and high field strengths.