Project start: An evaluation of a community‐wide school‐based intervention to reduce truancy

The study evaluated the effectiveness of a community‐based court intervention aimed at reducing truancy in a large urban school district. A quasi‐experimental design was used to assess attendance outcomes for 567 truants matched on demographics and drawn from three categories of intervention (no court referral, traditional court referral, and court referral with community‐based services). A court group by time ANOVA was conducted. Truancy levels remained high and unchanged for nonreferred truants throughout the study. Both court groups showed a significant drop in absences 30 days post court. During the subsequent 30‐day period, the community‐based court maintained the reduced rates, while the traditional court group showed higher truancy levels than the community‐based court group. No significant interaction effects were found between court groups and sex, age group, or ethnic categories. At one year follow‐up, the community‐based court group continued to show significantly lower levels of unexcused absences compared to the other two experimental groups. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 42: 657–667, 2005.     

Teacher perspectives on their alternative fast-track induction

The purpose of this study was to explore the professional challenges and concerns of 30 second career teachers (SCTs) participating in an alternative fast-track induction program during their first year of teaching. Additionally, the study investigated their perspectives of the institutional support provided to them. The main source of data was online case study discussions and reflective journals which were analyzed qualitatively through content analysis. The results suggest that the challenges and concerns of SCTs trained through a fast-track program are essentially not dissimilar from novice teachers trained in traditional programs. Even though SCTs entered the profession with extensive life and work experience, they seemed to perceive the same mismatch experienced by other first-year teachers between what they had expected and what they actually encountered. Their main challenges and concerns centered on: classroom teaching, teacher–student relations, the extensive workload, and their emotional involvement. Nevertheless, these SCTs demonstrated the ability to apply strategies acquired in their previous professions to cope with the professional challenges they had encountered in the school context. Drawing on transition theory proposed by Schlossberg, the process of transition into the teaching profession was explored. Applying Schlossberg’s model, the professional concerns and the types of strategies used by SCTs to cope with the various challenges were identified. This theory also provided the framework for understanding the perceptions of SCTs of the institutional support provided to them and the use they made of it throughout this year. Implications for teacher education programs are discussed.     

Developmental Relations Among Behavioral Inhibition,Anxiety, and Attention Biases to Threat and Positive Information

This study examined relations between behavioral inhibition (BI) assessed in toddlerhood (n = 268) and attention biases (AB) to threat and positive faces and maternal‐reported anxiety assessed when children were 5‐ and 7‐year‐old. Results revealed that BI predicted anxiety at age 7 in children with AB toward threat, away from positive, or with no bias, at age 7; BI did not predict anxiety for children displaying AB away from threat or toward positive. Five‐year AB did not moderate the link between BI and 7‐year anxiety. No direct association between AB and BI or anxiety was detected; moreover, children did not show stable AB across development. These findings extend our understanding of the developmental links among BI, AB, and anxiety.     

Theological and Pedagogical Implications of the Role of Zionism in Reform Jewish Manifestos: A Bridge from Vision to Praxis

In this article, we explore the transition from philosophical and theological manifestos to their practical and educational implementation as we analyze the official American Reform-Judaism discourse as curricular text. This analysis provides a tool for a discussion of the relationships between vision and its implementation particularly for educators and leaders. We highlight the possibilities of dialogue among educators, rabbis-in-training, and leaders to aid in the formation of new visionary documents and, in doing so, affect the dynamics of paving new directions. We demonstrate a model that may be used to investigate such translations from vision to a lived experience and back to reconstruction of a vision.     

The Effect of a History-Based Course in Optics on Students' Views about Science

In light of the convincing claims extolling the multifaceted merit of the “genetic” (historical) approach in designing learning materials (Matthews 1994), we developed an experimental course in optics. We tested the new materials and determined their effectiveness in a year long course given in several 10th grade high school classes. A special feature, which soundly contrasted our course from a typical one, was its essential incorporation of historical contents: the ideas, views and conceptions which constituted the early understanding of light and vision. In this report, we present that part of the assessment which concerns the course's impact on the students’ views about science and some related technological and cultural issues. In our analysis, we used a special hierarchical organization to represent pertinent data. Strong differences were found between the views elicited in the experimental group and parallel data regarding students in the control group. In our view, this demonstrated the advantage of utilizing historical materials in an aspect which is additional to our first intention – to improve students’ disciplinary knowledge. Such materials naturally address issues of much broader general interest, appropriate for physics education as opposed to physics training. Touching on a variety of features of science the materialspositively effect students’ views about science.