Parsons' contribution to career information

Conclusion Parsons' concept of wise vocational choice relied on an understanding of self and a knowledge of the requirements of the work place. The growth of state CIDS programs in the past 20 years to almost 20,000 sites nationally offers a key resource for learning about today's work places. CIDS offer a systematic access to the types of information Parsons saw as critical to rational career planning and development.     

About the Authors

Biography

About the Authors     

Evaluation of a school‐based sex education programme delivered to Grade Nine students in Canada

The effectiveness of a multidimensional Canadian sex education programme was evaluated using 240 Grade Nine students. The intervention was offered by representatives from various community groups and involved instructional classes on anatomy/physiology of the reproductive system and sexually transmitted infections, a video and group discussion on healthy relationships, a form of ‘peer education’ and discussion on teen pregnancy and HIV/AIDS, as well as a parent workshop and newsletter on teen sexuality. Respondents in the intervention and control groups completed a self‐administered questionnaire at baseline and one month after the programme. Compared with the control group, students in the intervention group showed positive changes in the areas of knowledge, sex‐role attitudes, sexual interaction values, and the perception that birth control is important. These results suggest that a collaborative effort of outside professionals from various community organisations and involvement of ‘peer educators’ to provide sexual health education in Grade Nine high school classes may be a useful strategy.     

Reconstructing culture: the promises and challenges as articulated by Latino/a youth

This qualitative study examines how a group of Latino/a high school students living in the Southeast used youth media as a forum to promote a selective pattern of acculturation. The study explores the ways in which the students’ discourse emphasised the maintenance of the students’ home culture and privileged familismo, a cultural construct that holds the needs of the family above the needs of the individual. The doubly precarious issue of gender and biculturalism is examined, and found to be problematic for the female participants who personally struggled with a patriarchal family structure, yet publically promoted family loyalty and respect. The study highlights the female participants’ challenges and the importance of providing a space to examine these challenges.     

A review of observational instruments to assess the motivational environment in sport and physical education settings

To date, the majority of research grounded in achievement goal frameworks (AGT) and self-determination theory (SDT), which has examined the coach-created motivational environment and its correlates, has relied exclusively on athletes’ self-reported perceptions. This limits progress in the field as objective data on real-life events could be used to further identify what coaches and teachers do and say to ‘motivate’ their athletes and students to influence their skill development, performance and well-being. Such information may help inform how coaches and teachers should be trained to create more motivationally adaptive environments and could help extend results derived from self-report measures. This review outlines the observational systems that are currently available and the research related to AGT and/or SDT-based objective assessments of motivational dimensions of the coaching and physical education (PE) environment. Future research could utilise information in this review to employ and/or amend one of the available observation systems to address important questions related to the observed motivational environment in sport and PE.     

Infants' use of lexical-category-to-meaning links in object individuation

Infants watched an experimenter retrieve a stuffed animal from an opaque box and then return it. This happened twice, consistent with either 1 animal appearing on 2 occasions or 2 identical-looking animals each appearing once. The experimenter labeled each object appearance with a different novel label. After infants retrieved 1 object from the box, their subsequent search behavior was recorded. Twenty-month-olds, but not 16-month-olds, searched significantly longer for a second object inside the box when the labels were both proper names than when they were 1 count noun followed by 1 proper name. The effect was not significant when proper names were replaced by adjectives. Twenty-month-olds' understanding of meaning distinctions among several word categories guided their object individuation.