Anger Management Using a Cognitive‐behavioural Approach for Children with Special Education Needs: A literature review and meta‐analysis

This review examines the use of a cognitive‐behavioural approach to anger management in children with special needs in community settings. Eighteen experimental studies involving a total of 408 children were located. The participants were mainly of high school age, with an IQ above 80, and with behavioural or emotional disorders. A moderate effect was observed for improvement in the three dimensions of anger: behaviour, cognition and emotion – although conclusions need to be very tentative. The interventions employed varied greatly in their characteristics and there were concerns about the quality of many studies. Further research is needed to investigate the interaction between intervention features and participant characteristics.     

A reflective learning taxonomy for an educational tour

This study is to investigate the reflective learning in a group of secondary school students who participated in an educational tour to Liannan, which is located in a rural area in Guangdong Province, Mainland China. The specific aim is to develop a framework to describe the learning in an educational tour. For this purpose, data were collected through students?? reflective writing in daily journals and end-of-trip sharing passages, triangulated with participant observation and interviews. The data analysis involved the use of grounded theory??s constant-comparative technique??an inductive method for generating hypotheses that are grounded in data. During the analysis of the data, the types of student learning which emerged were categorized in a Reflective Learning Taxonomy for an educational tour, comprising seven levels which are developmental in nature. The interpretative framework based on such a taxonomy of reflective learning reveals the rich context of learning in an educational tour and so makes a contribution to research on learning outside the classroom.     

How Can Released State Test Items Support Interim Assessment Purposes in an Educational Crisis?

State testing programs regularly release previously administered test items to the public. We provide an open-source recipe for state, district, and school assessment coordinators to combine these items flexibly to produce scores linked to established state score scales. These would enable estimation of student score distributions and achievement levels. We discuss how educators can use resulting scores to estimate achievement distributions at the classroom and school level. We emphasize that any use of such tests should be tertiary, with no stakes for students, educators, and schools, particularly in the context of a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. These tests and their results should also be lower in priority than assessments of physical, mental, and social–emotional health, and lower in priority than classroom and district assessments that may already be in place. We encourage state testing programs to release all the ingredients for this recipe to support low-stakes, aggregate-level assessments. This is particularly urgent during a crisis where scores may be declining and gaps increasing at unknown rates.     

獐牙菜属植物的起源, 散布和分布区形成

本文根据植物类群的系统发育和地理分布统一的原理，讨论了獐牙菜属植物的起源、散布和分 布区的形成。獐牙菜属包括11组16系154种，间断分布在亚洲、欧洲、北美洲和非洲。中国西南部- 喜马拉雅地区汇集了大多数种类、不同演化水平的类群以及形形色色的特有类群，成为该属的多样化 中心和多度中心。该属的原始类群和外类群也集中分布在中国西南山地，极有可能是该属的起源地。该 属的分布区类型中出现了各式的间断分布，根据有该属植物分布的大陆间及大陆与岛屿间分离和连接 的时间推测，该属的起源时间至少不会晚于晚白垩纪，也许更早，可追溯到中白垩纪。通过分类群间亲 缘关系和现代分布分析，显示出该属植物从起源地向周围和一定方向散布，形成了三个主要散布途径。在散布过程中植物本身也发生演化和就地特化，形成新的类群。     

An exploratory study on collaborative modes of professional development and learning for teachers of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

This study aims to deliver a school‐based mode of training for in‐service teachers of students with ASD in Hong Kong. The training is delivered following the phases of implementation science, namely, exploration, installation, and implementation. The project team used the theory of mind approach, which enables teachers to engage with students with ASD and to focus on recognizing and reacting to emotions. Participants in this study included four educators from a teacher education institution, three expert teachers, and 19 in‐service teacher trainees. The most salient responses came from trainees who were provided with the opportunity to apply learned skills in their own classrooms immediately and to share the knowledge and skills in dealing with students with ASD in the post‐conference meetings.     

A path-dependence perspective on the adoption of Internet of Things: Evidence from early adopters of smart and connected sensors in the United States

As an integral part of the Internet of Things (IoT), smart and connected sensors are emerging information and communication technologies that collect and transmit real-time data from various urban domains to inform decision-making. While smart sensors and IoT technologies have great potential to transform public service provision, their adoption in the public sector seems to be slow and incremental. Using cross-sectional data of 65 large and mid-sized cities in the United States, we examine what affects local governments' adoption of smart and connected sensors. We propose a path-dependence explanation for the incremental adoption and test if a local government's sensor adoption behavior is shaped by its existing policy priorities and managerial practices in related fields. Our results show that local governments' early adoption of smart sensors is likely to stem from their needs in specific policy domains. We also find that a local government's historical paths on urban sustainability and data-driven decision-making practices can predict its trajectory of sensor deployment, in terms of the scope and the integration of smart sensors across different urban domains. Surprisingly, a local government's e-government progressiveness is not a significant predictor. Our results confirm the incremental change in smart sensor adoption and provide implications for local governments' IoT planning.     

Effect on development of proportional reasoning skill of physical experience and cognitive abilities associated with prefrontal lobe activity

The present study tested the hypothesis that maturing prefrontal lobes play a role in the development of proportional reasoning skill because the prefrontal lobes are involved in the inhibition of task‐irrelevant information and the representation of task‐relevant information. The hypothesis that reasoning development is in part dependent upon physical experience was also tested. Students (all males) who failed to solve a diagnostic proportions task were administered several tests of prefrontal lobe functions. The students were then randomly assigned to manipulative or verbal tutoring groups. Both groups received a series of individual testing, tutoring and testing sessions on proportional reasoning. As predicted, performance on the prefrontal lobe tasks (measures of inhibiting ability, planning ability, dissembedding ability, and working memory capacity) significantly predicted performance on proportional reasoning tasks following tutoring. Students' computational skills were not a significant predictor. Also, the manipulative group's proportional reasoning performance was significantly higher than that of the verbal tutoring group. Therefore, the present results provide support for the hypothesis that maturing prefrontal lobes and physical experience play roles in the development of proportional reasoning skill. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 1171–1182, 2000