Sex bias in clinical judgment among school psychologists

Using an analogue case study format, sex bias in clinical judgment among school psychologists was examined. The sex of an adolescent student was varied in the case studies, and two types of problems were presented in this 2 × 2 (sex of student by problem type) design. School psychologists were asked to read a case study and answer a series of questions relating to the extent of perceived disturbance and the importance of intervention. The main finding of the study was that it was rated as more important to intervene when the case study subject was a male, but there were no sex differences on the disturbance rating. Research and practical implications are discussed.     

Current Research on Child Maltreatment: Implications for Educators

The increasing rate of child abuse and neglect is a special concern for educators who are legally mandated reporters of suspected maltreatment, are often the first to identify and refer children who have been harmed, are in contact with parents and are aware of the family conditions contributing to child maltreatment, and who must often work closely with other professionals in their efforts to support child victims and prevent further abuse. Moreover, children's emotional or behavioral problems, learning disabilities, or other difficulties often reflect broader problems that are associated with abuse or neglect. Consequently, understanding the causes and consequences of child maltreatment, and contemporary child protection efforts, is essential to educators in their efforts to assist victimized children. This article surveys current research on child maltreatment with particular attention to the challenges of child protection, the multidimensionality of child maltreatment (distinguishing physical abuse, physical neglect, sexual abuse, and psychological maltreatment), and hopeful new avenues for prevention. The implications of this research for educational professionals are emphasized.     

Action,Autobiography and Aesthetics in Young Children’s Self-Initiated Drawings

Lark-Horovitz, Lewis, and Luca [1973] described the emergence of ‘subject matter specialists,’ children who create series of self-initiated or voluntary drawings featuring consistent themes, characters, or settings that seem particularly compelling to them. A decade-long study of the images preschool and kindergarten children create when invited to draw in their own sketchbooks in the context of a weekly art class suggests that the choice of what to draw shapes the process of learning how to draw in decisive ways. The interests young children develop and pursue in drawing and in other forms of symbolic play are influenced by gender and by culture, by personality and circumstance. The choices children make inevitably open certain possibilities and foreclose others, shaping early artistic learning in decisive ways. Many early childhood educators [e.g., Katz, 1993] maintain that young children’s learning should be firmly grounded in first-hand experience. However, children whose drawings are autobiographical in content may be less consistent in choosing topics for drawing and prone to pass the time between significant images by drawing designs and symbols which seem less personally meaningful and engaging. Children who draw upon imaginative themes seem to have an inexhaustible source of inspiration ready at hand when they begin to draw. According to Egan [1988], the fictional or mythic nature of these representations may serve young children’s quest to make sense of their experiences in ways that explorations of the everyday do not.     

International Education: Perceptions of Teachers in International Schools

As a contribution to research in the field of international education, this study investigated the views of a number of teachers based in 'international schools' around the world with respect to the importance of a range of different factors in contributing to the experience of international education for students. In considering responses with a view to identifying the key features of such an education from the teacher perspective, responses were categorised in terms of their relationship to a number of dimensions including exposure to other students within school, the influence of teachers, the formal curriculum, links with the local community and informal aspects of school. Results showed a clear perception of the importance of the influence of teachers and of exposure to other students within school, with informal activities being considered least important. Comparison with a previous study investigating the perceptions of undergraduates with respect to their own school-based international education suggests differences in perceived importance between the two groups. Results suggest the direction for future research in this area, including consideration of the perceptions of students still at school with respect to the same set of issues.     

Teaching English Language Learners At Risk for Reading Disabilities to Read: Putting Research into Practice

The purpose of this article is to describe features of interventions that are empirically validated for use with first‐grade students at risk for reading disabilities who are English language learners (ELLs) and whose home language is Spanish. The empirical evidence supporting these interventions is summarized. Interventions for improving oral language and reading abilities with struggling readers who are ELLs taught in either Spanish or English are described as a means to assist school districts and teachers in defining and implementing effective interventions for ELLs at risk for reading difficulties. The interventions described may be useful to educators seeking information about Response to Intervention as a means of identifying ELLs who require services for learning disabilities.     

Knowledge-Enhanced Latent Semantic Indexing

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a popular information retrieval model for concept-based searching. As with many vector space IR models, LSI requires an existing term-document association structure such as a term-by-document matrix. The term-by-document matrix, constructed during document parsing, can only capture weighted vocabulary occurrence patterns in the documents. However, for many knowledge domains there are pre-existing semantic structures that could be used to organize and categorize information. The goals of this study are (i) to demonstrate how such semantic structures can be automatically incorporated into the LSI vector space model, and (ii) to measure the effect of these structures on query matching performance. The new approach, referred to as Knowledge-Enhanced LSI, is applied to documents in the OHSUMED medical abstracts collection using the semantic structures provided by the UMLS Semantic Network and MeSH. Results based on precision-recall data (11-point average precision values) indicate that a MeSH-enhanced search index is capable of delivering noticeable incremental performance gain (as much as 35%) over the original LSI for modest constraints on precision. This performance gain is achieved by replacing the original query with the MeSH heading extracted from the query text via regular expression matches.