Counseling Interview Techniques: A Comparison of Theory and Practice

The purpose of this study was to analyze counseling interview techniques learned while in counselor preparation in relationship to those techniques that secondary school counselors considered useful in actual secondary school counseling.     

The one-in-ten: quantitative Critical Race Theory and the education of the ‘new (white) oppressed’

ABSTRACT

This paper challenges the notion that quantitative data – as a numeric truth – exist independent of a nation’s political and racial landscape. Utilising large-scale national attainment data, the analysis challenges the belief that ‘White working class’ children in England, especially boys, are ‘the new oppressed’ – as a former equality adviser has publicly claimed. The analysis applies Quantitative Critical Race Theory, or ‘QuantCrit’, an emerging quantitative sub-field of Critical Race Theory in education. The paper argues that far from being ‘oppressed’, White boys continue to enjoy achievement advantages over numerous minoritised groups; especially their peers of Black Caribbean ethnic origin. Additionally, the analysis uniquely exposes racialised trends of ‘equivalency’ in core subject qualifications, whereby minority ethnic children are over-represented in certain lower-status qualifications that are counted as equivalent in education statistics but not in the real world labour market. The analysis concludes that knowing misrepresentations of quantitative data are at the heart of an institutional process through which race and racism are produced, legitimised and perpetuated in education.     

The Talking Drawings Strategy: Using Primary Children’s Illustrations and Oral Language to Improve Comprehension of Expository Text

Listening and reading comprehension can be assessed by analyzing children’s visual, verbal, and written representations of their understandings. “Talking Drawings” (McConnell, S. (1993). Talking drawings: A strategy for assisting learners. Journal of Reading, 36(4), 260–269 is one strategy that enables children to combine their prior knowledge with the new information derived from an expository text and “translate” those newly-acquired understandings into other symbol systems, including an oral discussion with a partner, a more detailed drawing, and written labels for the drawing. The Talking Drawings strategy begins by inviting children to create pre-learning drawings. These initial drawings are a way of taking inventory of a child’s current content knowledge about a particular topic. After pre-learning drawings are created and shared, children listen to or read an expository text (e.g., information book, passage from a textbook) on the same topic as their drawing. Pairs of students discuss the information and either modify their pre-learning drawings to be more detailed or create completely new drawings that reflect the recently-acquired information. Students are encouraged to label their drawings with words in a diagram or schematic fashion. By evaluating the “before” and “after” artwork, educators can identify advances in students’ reading and listening comprehension of the terminology, facts, and principles on a particular topic.     

Impact of degree program satisfaction on the persistence of college students

Many theories on college retention recognize the significance of student satisfaction as a positive factor in students’ persistence. Yet, there are few theories that address the relationship of degree program satisfaction to study behaviour and dropout. This paper explores the impact of degree program satisfaction on academic accomplishment and dropout. The impact of degree program satisfaction was studied within a multitheoretical framework. The results of the study show that student accomplishment not only depends on differences in academic ability but also on degree program satisfaction. Decreased degree program satisfaction appears to diminish both study motivation and study behaviour. The authors discuss some implications for current educational practice.     

Genetic influences in different aspects of language development: the etiology of language skills in 4.5-year-old twins

The genetic and environmental etiologies of diverse aspects of language ability and disability, including articulation, phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and verbal memory, were investigated in a U.K. sample of 787 pairs of 4.5-year-old same-sex and opposite-sex twins. Moderate genetic influence was found for all aspects of language in the normal range. A similar pattern was found at the low end of the distribution with the exception of two receptive measures. Environmental influence was mainly due to nonshared factors, unique to the individual, with little influence from shared environment for most measures. Genetic and environmental influences on language ability and disability are quantitatively and qualitatively similar for males and females.     

Increase in retention of a taste aversion by weanling rats after a long interval

Weanling rats were tested for retention of an aversion to a novel flavor (chocolate milk) that had been conditioned as a single-element conditioned stimulus (CS) or in compound with a novel ambient odor (banana). The presence of the ambient odor during conditioning had no effect on flavor aversion shortly thereafter, confirming previous results. The flavor aversion observed 21 days after conditioning, however, was significantly stronger for pups conditioned with the single-element CS than for those given the flavor-odor compound as the CS. This retention effect was due to a surprisingincrease in the conditioned aversion observed 21 days after conditioning with the single-element CS. A second experiment confirmed this paradoxical increase in retention of the aversion to chocolate milk. This experiment also verified that no such increase occurred in retention of the conditioned aversion to a different flavor (saccharin), whether the initial aversion was strong or weak. The results may be explained in terms of generalized latent inhibition from consumption of mother’s milk.