Can parents and teachers provide a reliable and valid report of behavioral inhibition?

Reliability and validity of parent and teacher report of behavioral inhibition (BI) was examined among children aged 3 to 5 years. Confirmatory factor analysis supported 6 correlated factors reflecting specific BI contexts, each loading on a single, higher order factor of BI. Internal consistency was acceptable, with moderate stability over 1 year and strong correlation with a brief inhibition subscale from a temperament questionnaire. Children who were rated by mothers and teachers as high BI took longer to initiate contact with a stranger, spoke less often and for shorter periods, and required more prompting to elicit speech compared with low-BI peers in a simulated stranger interaction task. Father report of BI was significantly associated with mean duration of speech and eye gaze.     

Teachers and Issues of Sexual Orientation

This exploratory paper seeks to examine some of the effects of a differing sexual orientation on teachers’ daily lives in the staffroom and classroom. The data analysed were mainly collected in interviews with gay and lesbian teachers. It is hoped that by opening up some of the issues surrounding teachers and sexual orientations, this paper will help to lessen the stigma so typically attached to gays and lesbians who work in occupations that deal with young children or in jobs that entail moral responsibility.     

The Practical Feasibility of Diary Studies for INSET

Although diary studies have previously been employed for research purposes on INSET courses, the value and effectiveness of log‐keeping from the perspective of the consumer, i.e. the course participants and institution, have not beenfully investigated. This study focused on the use of the diary on intensive inservice courses as a means of formalising participant response to teaching input from the dual perspective of pedagogy and evaluation. The practical implications of introducing diaries as a formai component of INSET are examined and ways explored of adapting the journal to this context.     

Pathways to Children’s Academic Performance and Prosocial Behaviour: Roles of physical health status,environmental, family,and child factors

The objective of this article is to examine the pathways by which children’s physical health status, environmental, family, and child factors affect children’s academic performance and prosocial behaviour, using a theoretically‐based and empirically‐based model of competence development. The model proposes that 3 types of relational processes, dealing with opportunity, support, and skill development through participation, lead to competence. Structural equation modelling was performed on cross‐sectional, parent‐report data for approximately 10,000 Canadian children aged 6–11 years from the 1994–95 National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. The analyses controlled for family socioeconomic status and child’s age and sex, and included 3 groups of children (those with activity‐limiting conditions, non‐activity‐limiting conditions, or no health problems). There was little evidence that children with chronic conditions were at direct risk for poorer outcomes. Children with activity‐limiting conditions were at increased indirect risk for academic difficulties through the role played by cognitive functioning. Cognitive functioning and hyperactivity/inattention difficulties were the major predictors of academic performance. Recreational participation and behavioural functioning were the main predictors of prosocial behaviour. The pathways in the model also indicated the importance of family functioning, social support to parents, and neighbourhood cohesion. In conclusion, the findings indicate the utility of the model of competence development in understanding the pathways and processes by which various factors affect children’s academic and social outcomes.     

Planning for student involvement in a program of supplemental instruction

Implementing a program of supplemental instruction (SI) in the present climate of transition in South Africa requires attention to involving students in planning and conducting the new program. Involved in this process are political opportunities and constraints. This paper recounts the steps (and missteps) taken in beginning an SI program in high risk courses in two academic departments at Border Technikon: Accounting and Management. It documents the steps taken to enlist support of the Student Representative Council (SRC) in setting policy, selecting tutors, and maintaining the program's funding base. We maintain that a successful SI program must draw upon the energies of tertiary level students, both in roles as learners in the high risk courses and as student leaders at an advanced level. Some students may experience both roles. For this process to be more than an imposition from the outside, the program must be a partnership with faculty and students sharing a stake in the outcomes. Both groups must see that they benefit from the smooth working of the SI system. Our results to date indicate that such a joint ownership is occurring. During 1996, he served as the Director of the Academic Development Centre at Border Technikon, East London, South Africa, under the Educators for Africa Program of the International Foundation of Education and Self-Help.     

The role of hybrid learning spaces in enhancing higher education students’ employability

Graduate employment rates and self-reported employability are increasingly a feature of higher education funding measures. However, graduate outcomes do not denote the whole learning experience of the student nor is the student experience reducible to a single statistic. This paper discusses a design-centric approach to employability development which was enacted within a hybrid learning space. The study engaged 52 final-year speech pathology students, their lecturer, the lead researcher and a career practitioner (advisor) at an Australian university. Students first created personalized employability profiles using an established online self-reflection tool. The online tool produced a personalized report and enabled students to access developmental resources relating to employability and student success. The project team used anonymized student data to transform a previously generic “careers” workshop into a targeted workshop in which students explored individual and cohort findings and participated in developmental activities informed by the data. The initiative’s contribution to learning space research is in its composition as a hybrid learning space in which educators and students engaged as learners and developers of their online learning spaces, and educators collaborated to analyze student data and inform learning and teaching enhancements within the same study period. It is anticipated that the data from subsequent years will inform the curricular review, particularly if subsequent student cohorts express similar concerns. Implications for higher education policy and practice are discussed.     

The influence of teachers’ interests,personalities and life experiences in intercultural languages teaching

This paper reports on a study that investigated teachers’ perceptions about the significance of intercultural understanding (IU) in the modern foreign languages (MFL) curriculum. The research was conducted in the wake of a National Curriculum revision in 2007 in England that for the first time listed ‘IU’ as one of the four key concepts underpinning the study of languages in the Programme of Study. In contrast to other writers who frequently explain MFL teachers’ attention to intercultural learning as a consequence of their (lack of) knowledge about intercultural languages theory or pedagogy, or as the result of contextual factors, our findings suggest that the significance attached to IU seems to be profoundly affected by the interests, personalities and life experiences of individuals. This finding emerged from a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 teachers in 13 secondary schools in the North-West of England between May 2008 and June 2009. We illustrate our point by mapping the narratives of four teachers, conveyed through pen-portraits, with an adapted version of Kelchtermans’s personal interpretive framework, and thus draw on narrative inquiry as our research approach. We claim that our hitherto relatively unnoticed finding, i.e. the central influence of the teacher as an individual on intercultural language teaching, has important implications for MFL teacher education. We suggest that the stories of the four teachers could be used as a professional development tool to identify motivators and inhibitors in developing IU that may resonate with practitioners’ own beliefs and practice, and that parallel to this, our adapted Kelchtermans’s framework may be used as a blank template to scaffold self analysis. Whilst this article considers teacher development in intercultural languages education, it also seeks to make a contribution to the literature on the usefulness of teacher narrative as a professional development tool.     

Changing Epistemological Beliefs in Pre-service Teacher Education Students

A teaching programme designed to foster the reflection on and development of more sophisticated epistemological beliefs was implemented with 29 pre-service graduate teacher education students at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. As part of the year-long teaching programme, students were required to reflect in journal entries on the content of an educational psychology unit in relation to their epistemological beliefs. The students engaged in this teaching programme (the research group) were interviewed in relation to their beliefs at the beginning (Time 1) and conclusion (Time 2) of the teaching programme. Students in a comparison group were not encouraged to explicitly reflect on their epistemological beliefs. They were asked to complete written statements about their beliefs about knowing at the beginning (Time 1) and end (Time 2) of the year-long unit. Schommer's (1988, 1990) epistemological beliefs questionnaire was administered to both the comparison and research groups at Time 1 and Time 2. This questionnaire measured beliefs about knowing. The results of both the quantitative and qualitative data analysis indicated that the group of students engaged in the teaching programme experienced more growth in sophisticated epistemological beliefs. The success of the teaching programme has implications for how teacher educators develop learning environments.