Factors Influencing Military Police Officers in Their Decision in Selecting Higher Educational Institutions

The active duty personnel in the United States Armed Forces exceed 1,411,932. When combined with reserve units and auxiliary units, the number of personnel surpasses 2 million. Due to the nature of worldwide urban conflict, a great number of military personnel are subjected to, assigned to, or affiliated with some type of criminal‐justice‐related duty. These urban situations and associated policing‐type experiences have captured the interest of many active duty personnel. Countless military members are currently planning honorable discharge and re‐entry into civilian life and seeking educational degrees as a resource for access into a criminal justice career. Educational benefits for veterans offer an enormous advantage to the military personnel. On 1 August 2009, these benefits, which include tuition, books, and housing, were expanded to veterans with at least 90 days of aggregate service on or after the September 11th terrorist attacks. Little is known about this vast group of potential students and what factors play a role in their selecting a college or university. Based on a survey of over 300 active duty military personnel currently assigned to criminal justice duty, the authors were able to extract some important findings on this subject. The factors obtained include, among others, preferred type of course delivery and the importance of official statements of military support. Based on the evidence collected and analyzed, this research exposed and examined several important findings.     

Security of attachment and preschool friendships

Attachment theory proposes that the quality of the mother-child tie predicts the quality of a child's other close relationships. The purpose of this study was to test whether security of attachment to mother is related to the quality of a preschooler's best friendships. 33 4-year-old and their best friends participated (mean age = 46 months). Attachment Q-set data were collected to score security of mother-child attachment. Security data were used to classify the friend pairs as secure-secure or secure-insecure. Best friend dyads were observed for a 1-hour free-play session. Each pair's behavior was described with the Dyadic Relationships Q-set, a measure designed to describe the behavior of a pair of children. Secure-secure pairs were more harmonious, less controlling, more responsive, and happier than secure-insecure pairs. The results are related to previous work on attachment and social competence.     

Maternal responsiveness and child compliance: the role of mood as a mediator

Parpal and Maccoby demonstrated that responsive maternal play increases children's compliance. They suggested that positive mood induction might be one mechanism mediating this effect. Study 1 tested the hypothesis that a responsive maternal play procedure would indeed induce a positive mood. 32 4-year-olds and their mothers participated. Half of the mothers were trained in a responsive play technique prior to a laboratory play session; half of them were not trained. Postplay self-reports of mood indicated that responsive play increased positive mood but did not affect arousal levels. Study 2 tested the hypothesis that experimentally induced positive mood increases compliance in the types of tasks reported in the Parpal and Maccoby's research. 24 4-year-olds were randomly assigned to either a positive or negative mood induction and then tested for response to maternal compliance demands. Children induced into positive moods complied more and complied with shorter latencies than children induced into negative moods. The fact that maternal responsiveness induces a positive mood points to a mechanism that may be significant in both attachment and socialization beyond infancy.     

文化与幼儿教育的澳大利亚视角:多元文化趋势

大多数的澳大利亚儿童在5岁左右进入小学之前，会在幼儿园或学前机构里待上1～2年。30多年前的澳大利亚幼儿园活动，迄今仍能代表澳大利亚学前教育的特点。例如第二次世界大战前，澳洲学前教育的情景是这样的：在家里一个由壁炉、水池、炖锅、刀叉等布置的角落里，儿童摆弄着洋娃娃的小床以及面色粉红的洋娃娃，唱着以袋鼠和树袋熊为主题的歌曲：讲给孩子们的故事大多关于眼前偏远地区的日常生活。二次大战后，政府同意了大约200万人移民澳大利亚，这些新移民大多来自北欧。当时政府对移民采用“同化”政策——将移民融入不列颠澳大利亚化中，于是幼儿园教师最重要的任务是教给儿童足够的英语，以利于这些移民孩子能参与集体活动并在学校生活中充满自信。     

Three‐year results of the Friendly Schools whole‐of‐school intervention on children's bullying behaviour

A group randomized controlled trial tested the efficacy of the Friendly Schools program to reduce student bullying behaviour. This socio‐ecological intervention targeted the whole school, classroom, family, and individual students to reduce bullying behaviour. Self‐report data were collected in 29 schools over three years from a cohort of 1968 eight to nine‐year‐olds. Surveys measured frequency of being bullied, bullying others, telling if bullied and observing bullying. Results indicate that intervention students were significantly less likely to observe bullying at 12, 24 and 36 months and be bullied after 12 and 36 months, and significantly more likely to tell if bullied after 12 months than comparison students. No differences were found for self‐reported perpetration of bullying. The findings suggest whole‐of‐school programs that engage students in their different social contexts appear to reduce their experiences of being bullied and increase their likelihood of telling someone if they are bullied.     

Collaboration and Action Research: a cautionary tale

Action research has become a widely accepted and recommended methodology for teacher research. With the current climate of collaborative planning within primary schools. it has been seen as a process which could exist naturally alongside such activity, with much being made in the rhetoric of its essentially ‘collaborative’ character. But such claims are problematic. They derive importantly from epistemological considerations, but weaknesses may be found in such arguments when they are considered against the reality of the process in action. This article considers the claims for the collaborative nature of action research in the context of the progress of a coordinated inquiry in a primary school, within which the author was involved. Whilst recognising their importance, it challenges the arguments for insisting on collaboration as a prerequisite for the most ‘effective’ action research, suggesting that all action research is fundamentally personal. It also raises the question of whether participation in the process may itself raise conflicts with the need for a collaborative structure to ensure critical reflection and valid knowledge claims, suggesting that action research may at times have effects at a personal level which could produce severe tensions in the maintenance of a collaborative situation.     

Universal and language-specific constraints on phonemic awareness: evidence from Russian–Hebrew bilingual children

The study tested phonemic awareness in the two languages of Russian (L1)–Hebrew (L2) sequential bilingual children (N = 20) using phoneme deletion tasks where the phoneme to be deleted occurred word initial, word final, as a singleton, or part of a cluster, in long and short words and stressed and unstressed syllables. The experiments were designed to test the effect of four linguistic factors on children’s phoneme deletion: phoneme position (initial, final), linguistic context (singleton, cluster), word length and stress. The results indicated that word length and stress confirmed previous findings in other languages demonstrating the universal validity of these factors. However, phoneme position and linguistic context gave rise to novel findings in the languages studied and provided evidence for language-specific effects on phonemic awareness reflecting onset-rime versus body-coda syllable structure differences. The results are discussed within the framework of universal versus language-specific constraints on phonemic awareness performance in different languages.     

The Role of Gender-related Information and Self-Endorsement of Traits in Preadolescents' Inferences and Judgments

The major purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a target child's gender typicality on different aspects of preadolescents' inferences and judgments. The secondary purpose of the study was to investigate the relation between children's self-endorsement of traits and their inferences and judgments. Fifth and sixth graders were shown a video film, portraying a child playing either a gender-appropriate game with members of the same sex or a gender-inappropriate game with members of the other sex. In addition, subjects completed an adapted version of the BSRI and were categorized into sex-typed, androgynous, and undifferentiated subjects. Subjects made a number of different types of judgments and inferences about the target, including inferences about traits, popularity, choice of gift and name, and willingness to engage in activities with the target. All types of inferences and judgments were affected by the variations in the targets' gender-related behaviors, whereas self-endorsement of traits was not related to the inferences and judgments. The results suggest that the gender typicality of the target behavior is salient to preadolescents, regardless of their sex-role orientation.     

Individual differences in infant-mother attachment at twelve and eighteen months: stability and change in families under stress

100 economically disadvantaged mothers and their infants were observed in the Ainsworth and Wittig "strange situation" at 12 and 18 months. Infants were classified as secure, anxiously attached/avoidant, or anxiously attached/resistant. In addition, mothers reported occurrence of stressful events related to the stability of the caretaking environment during the 12--18 month period by completing a 44-item checklist concerning work, finances, family, neighbors, health, etc. 62 infants were assigned to the same attachment classification at both 12 and 18 months (p less than .01). Despite this stability, significantly more infants changes classification than in a recent study of stable middle-class families. With the present sample, anxious attachment was associated with less stable caretaking environments than secure attachment; change from secure to anxious attachment was associated with higher stressful-event scores than stable secure attachment.