Relationships between school climate,bullying and delinquent behaviours

Given that schools are, potentially, powerful sites for influencing adolescent behaviour, it is important that there is greater understanding of the psychosocial aspects of the school climate that can be leveraged for this purpose. The research reported in this article used structural equation modelling (with data from a sample of 6120 students at Australian high schools) to examine the influence of the psychosocial school-level environment on students’ self-reported experiences of bully victimisation (i.e. being victims of bullying) and engagement in delinquent behaviours. Further, we examined whether bully victimisation mediated the relationships between school climate variables and delinquent behaviours. School connectedness and rule clarity were negatively associated with both bully victimisation and delinquency (p < 0.05), and teacher support was negatively associated with bully victimisation (p < 0.01), confirming the importance of these aspects of the school-level environment. However, affirming diversity and reporting and seeking help both had positive influences on bully victimisation (p < 0.05), raising concerns about the ways in which these aspects of the school-level environment might have been promoted. Importantly, bully victimisation was found to mediate the influence of five of the six school climate constructs on delinquent behaviours (p < 0.001). This study advance our understanding of how specific aspects of the school climate influence the prevalence of bullying and delinquent behaviour, adding weight to the call for educators to actively monitor and enhance psychosocial aspects of the school climate in order to improve student behavioural outcomes.     

College tuition costs and early career socioeconomic achievement: do you get what you pay for?

The effects of college tuition costs on early career educational, occupational and economic achievements were estimated for a national sample of black and white college students. The findings suggest that attending a relatively high tuition college has a net positive influence on such outcomes as educational attainment, occupational status, income and women's entry into sex-atypical careers. These effects remained significant even when controls were made for student background characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic origins, secondary school achievement, educational and occupational aspirations); the academic selectivity, private/public control, size and graduate orientation of the college attended; and one's specific college experiences (e.g., academic major, academic achievement and social involvement). The findings are discussed in terms of several plausible causal mechanisms.     

Foundations of system theory: multidecomposable systems

The paper discusses multilinear, and more generally multidecomposable, machines. An m-linear machine is shown to be realizable as a network of k-linear machines for k?(m-1), linked by certain memoryless m-linear maps. In this way, an m-linear machine can be broken down into linear machines and multilinear memoryless maps.     

Long-term persistence of two-year college students

This paper employs a theoretical model to explain the long-term persistence of students who began their postsecondary education in two-year institutions. The model was estimated on a national sample of 825 students who initially enrolled in 85 two-year institutions in the fall of 1971, and who were followed over a nine-year period. Although there were differences in the factors associated with persistence for men and women, the results tend to confirm the importance of person-environment fit as a salient influence on degree persistence and completion in postsecondary education. Measures of academic and social integration had the most consistent pattern of positive direct effects, and much of the influence of student precollege traits was indirect.     

Analyzing the use of Facebook among university libraries in Hong Kong

In recent years, many academic libraries have started adopting social media by, for example, establishing their own Facebook pages. Our research investigates the current Facebook usage among seven university libraries in Hong Kong. Using a mixed-method research approach, we examined the characteristics of academic libraries Facebook usage and its effectiveness to engage with their patrons, based on online observations and Web content analysis from the publicly available data of the Facebook pages.Our results indicated that most libraries in Hong Kong adopted Facebook as a marketing tool, yet the user engagement level in these pages is low. In addition, we also discovered that communication-related posts and video-type posts can attract the most attention of patrons. Based on these outcomes, we provided some recommendations on the application of Facebook for academic libraries.     

Influences on Community College Students' Educational Plans

This study analyzed data from 285 students attending 5 community colleges to identify the institutional and college experience variables influencing end-of-first-year educational degree plans. Controlling for an extensive array of important confounding influences, the estimated average precollege degree plans of students at the community college one attended had significant, positive total and direct effects on an individual student's end-of-first-year overall educational degree plans and plans to obtain at least a bachelor's degree. In the prediction of end-of-first-year overall educational degree plans, there were significant conditional effects involving sex, race, and precollege degree plans.     

Influences on women's entry into male-dominated occupations

This article focuses on women's entry into male-dominated occupations in the United States. It looks at the impact of Title IX and related legislation which opened access to colleges and universities to women and examines the effects of initial or pre-enrollment student characteristics, organizational attributes of the college of university, student performance and experiences in higher education and the attributes of employing organizations on women's entry into male-dominated occupations. The article concludes with a model for measuring the relative influence of each.