USING CONSULTATION TO SUPPORT ENGLISH LEARNERS: THE EXPERIENCES OF BILINGUAL SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGISTS

Through semi‐structured interviews, this study explored 11 bilingual school psychologists’ (BSPs) consultation experiences with teachers of English learners (EL) to determine referral concerns, recommendations made, challenges encountered, preparation experiences, and skills most needed. The most common referral issue concerned students’ academic performance and teachers’ attempts to parse out language acquisition difficulties from learning problems. Principal consultation challenges included the scarcity of trained professionals, teacher bias, and the stress of competing school priorities. BSPs relied most on their interpersonal skills and relationship building skills, as well as their knowledge of EL‐focused interventions and their problem identification skills. Recommendations to their monolingual school psychology colleagues included the need to actively seek out a) language and culture resources, b) relevant professional development opportunities, and c) consultations with fellow BSPs. Study limitations and implications are discussed.     

Income and Social Rank Influence UK Children's Behavioral Problems: A Longitudinal Analysis

Children living in low‐income households face elevated risks of behavioral problems, but the impact of absolute and relative income to this risk remains unexplored. Using the U.K. Millennium Cohort Study data, longitudinal associations between Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire scores and absolute household income, distance from the regional median and mean income, and regional income rank were examined in 3‐ to 12‐year‐olds (n = 16,532). Higher absolute household incomes were associated with lower behavioral problems, while higher income rank was associated with lower behavioral problems only at the highest absolute incomes. Higher absolute household incomes were associated with lower behavioral problems among children in working households, indicating compounding effects of income and socioeconomic advantages. Both absolute and relative incomes therefore appear to influence behavioral problems.     

Les accidents domestiques chez l'enfant handicape et sa famille

Abstract

A review of the literature on integration was commissioned by the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This drew on literature from around the globe and was conducted by leading experts in five different countries. The review was organized in terms of categories of disability. This paper introduces the review and sets it in the context of emerging developments in integration. The pros and cons of using a categorical approach are discussed. Attention is drawn to key issues arising in the literature ‐ efficacy, characteristics of effective integration programmes and attitudes to integration. Finally, some pointers for the future development of integration are considered.     

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false-belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality. In false-belief tasks, children are asked to reason about the behavior of agents who have false beliefs about situations. Although a large body of evidence indicates that most children pass false-belief tasks by the end of the preschool years, the evidence we present in this monograph suggests that most children do not understand false beliefs or, surprisingly, even true beliefs until middle childhood. We argue that young children pass false-belief tasks without understanding false beliefs by using perceptual access reasoning (PAR). With PAR, children understand that seeing leads to knowing in the moment, but not that knowing also arises from thinking or persists as memory and belief after the situation changes. By the same token, PAR leads children to fail true-belief tasks. PAR theory can account for performance on other traditional tests of representational ToM and related tasks, and can account for the factors that have been found to correlate with or affect both true- and false-belief performance. The theory provides a new laboratory measure which we label the belief understanding scale (BUS). This scale can distinguish between a child who is operating with PAR versus a child who is understanding beliefs. This scale provides a method needed to allow the study of the development of representational ToM. In this monograph, we report the outcome of the tests that we have conducted of predictions generated by PAR theory. The findings demonstrated signature PAR limitations in reasoning about the mind during the ages when children are hypothesized to be using PAR. In Chapter II, secondary analyses of the published true-belief literature revealed that children failed several types of true-belief tasks. Chapters III through IX describe new empirical data collected across multiple studies between 2003 and 2014 from 580 children aged 4–7 years, as well as from a small sample of 14 adults. Participants were recruited from the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. All participants were native English-speakers. Children were recruited from university-sponsored and community preschools and daycare centers, and from hospital maternity wards. Adults were university students who participated to partially fulfill course requirements for research participation. Sociometric data were collected only in Chapter IX, and are fully reported there. In Chapter III, minor alterations in task procedures produced wide variations in children's performance in 3-option false-belief tasks. In Chapter IV, we report findings which show that the developmental lag between children's understanding ignorance and understanding false belief is longer than the lag reported in previous studies. In Chapter V, children did not distinguish between agents who have false beliefs versus agents who have no beliefs. In Chapter VI, findings showed that children found it no easier to reason about true beliefs than to reason about false beliefs. In Chapter VII, when children were asked to justify their correct answers in false-belief tasks, they did not reference agents’ false beliefs. Similarly, in Chapter VIII, when children were asked to explain agents’ actions in false-belief tasks, they did not reference agents’ false beliefs. In Chapter IX, children who were identified as using PAR differed from children who understood beliefs along three dimensions—in levels of social development, inhibitory control, and kindergarten adjustment. Although the findings need replication and additional studies of alternative interpretations, the collection of results reported in this monograph challenges the prevailing view that representational ToM is in place by the end of the preschool years. Furthermore, the pattern of findings is consistent with the proposal that PAR is the developmental precursor of representational ToM. The current findings also raise questions about claims that infants and toddlers demonstrate ToM-related abilities, and that representational ToM is innate.     

Accuracy and precision of loadsol® insole force-sensors for the quantification of ground reaction force-based biomechanical running parameters

Force plates represent the “gold standard” in measuring running kinetics to predict performance or to identify the sources of running-related injuries. As these measurements are generally limited to laboratory analyses, wireless high-quality sensors for measuring in the field are needed. This work analysed the accuracy and precision of a new wireless insole forcesensor for quantifying running-related kinetic parameters. Vertical ground reaction force (GRF) was simultaneously measured with pit-mounted force plates (1?kHz) and loadsol^® sensors (100?Hz) under unshod forefoot and rearfoot running-step conditions. GRF data collections were repeated four times, each separated by 30 min treadmill running, to test influence of extended use. A repeated-measures ANOVA was used to identify differences between measurement devices. Additionally, mean bias and Bland–Altman limits of agreement (LoA) were calculated. We found a significant difference (p?® devices for these parameters. For these same parameters, the LoA analysis showed that 95% of all measurement differences between insole and force plate measurements were less than 12%, demonstrating high precision of the sensors. However, highly dynamic behaviour of GRF, such as force rate, is not yet sufficiently resolved by the insole devices, which is likely explained by the low sampling rate.     

Testgütekriterien der „Profilanalyse nach Grießhaber“. Evaluation eines Verfahrens zur Erfassung grammatischer Fähigkeiten von ein- und mehrsprachigen Grundschulkindern

A diagnostic goal of the “Profile analysis according to Grießhaber” is the assessment of the grammatical ability to place verbs in German sentences in the correct syntactical position. To evaluate the test quality for the first time, 403 monolingual and multilingual primary school children were randomly assigned to three different test materials: Test material that specifically stimulated the target competence led to the best test results. This indicates a low objectivity of application. In addition, ceiling effects for primary school children were detected, which means that the profile analysis can only slightly differentiate among the grammatical abilities of the children. Retest reliability and objectivity of analysis are also too small. In summary, the test quality of the assessment tool should be improved with respect to all of the test quality criteria considered. Hence, we recommend standardizing the profile analysis better and adding more sensitive diagnostic criteria for primary school aged children. Other aspects of profile analysis, for example the improvement of diagnostic competencies of teachers, are recommended for future research.     

The dangers of relentless pursuit: teaching,personal health,and the symbolic/real violence of Teach For America

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the pressures experienced by teachers as they strive to embody the Teach For America (TFA) motif of ‘relentless pursuit’. It draws on interviews conducted with 36 teachers and uses a Bourdieuian analysis to consider the mechanisms of control manifested through socialization and corps member habituation. The findings suggest that corps members experience both symbolic and self-imposed overt violence as they aim to meet the demands of TFA. This has implications for the increasing number of teachers in programs around like TFA as well as the broader discourses of teacher accountability and the teaching profession.     

Stairway to employment? Internships in higher education

This article aims to shed light on the current debate regarding the role of internships in higher education in graduates’ employability. In specific, it analyses empirical data on a large-scale study of Portuguese first-cycle study programmes, in order to explore indicators of the professional value of internships in the employability of higher education graduates. Results demonstrate that study programmes that include internships tend to significantly enhance graduates’ employability, particularly within the universe of polytechnic and public higher education institutions. Besides the instrumental value of internships, the impact of the nature and structure of the internship on the percentage of unemployed graduates are also discussed. Mandatory internships and the inclusion of multiple, shorter internships throughout the degree are negatively associated with unemployment levels. Results indicate work-based learning can be used as a successful strategy to bridge theoretical knowledge and practice and enhance graduate employability. These findings provide important insights for the evaluation and/or the design of internship programmes in higher education.     

Examining the developmental trajectories of adolescent sexual offenders

The aim of the current study was to assess the validity of the sex-plus versus sex-only categorization method for distinguishing between different types of adolescent sex offenders (ASOs; Butler & Seto, 2002). It is hypothesized that this categorization method has utility when attempting to distinguish between generalist and specialist ASOs (Seto & Pullman, 2014). Additionally, further classification of ASOs was attempted using a well known juvenile delinquency classification scheme, early-onset versus late-onset offenders (Moffitt, 1993). The current study was an archival analysis of clinical files from a sample of 158 male ASOs seen for clinical assessment at a Metropolitan Family Court Clinic. Results indicate that sex-plus offenders are more antisocial, exhibit more psychiatric issues, and have greater deficits in general social skills compared to sex-only offenders. Conversely, sex-only offenders were found to have more atypical sexual interests, and were more likely to have greater deficits in romantic relationships compared to sex-plus offenders. Due to a power related limitation, little support was found for the use of the early-onset versus late-onset classification scheme with ASOs. Overall, these results provide further support to the validity of a sex-only versus sex-plus distinction. Given these results mirror those found in the generalist/specialist literature regarding the etiology of ASOs, sex-only and sex-plus offenders may indeed have different etiological pathways: sex-plus offenders are more driven by general antisociality factors, as the generalist perspective suggests, and sex-only offenders are more driven by special factors, as the specialist explanations suggest.