Creating Positive Lived Experiences in Schools for International Relocatee Parents and Their Children

Early Childhood Education Journal - Children benefit from strong home–school relationships. Yet, parents who are immigrants and refugees are expected to follow frameworks for school...     

How is the discipline of publishing studies accommodated within universities?

This paper offers an overview, both internationally and with a particular concentration on the UK, of how the profession‐orientated discipline of publishing studies (PS) is accommodated and established within those universities where it is offered. It presents a combination of data, gained from a survey of professionals teaching PS, desk research into courses of PS in the UK, and from Heidi and HESA. The findings offer information on the size of the field, the location, the employability of graduates and associated staffing and research support structures. While of interest to publishing studies per se, it should also be relevant to those working within other profession‐orientated disciplines; to those considering the employability of graduating students; and to those considering the value of postgraduate studies.     

一个简单的手势

一个简单的帮助,就有可能改变一个人对生活、对生命的看法。     

Bibliography of Bioethics and Index Medicus: comparison of coverage, publication delay, and ease of recall for journal articles on bioethics

Citations selected from the bibliographies of recent texts, a specialized subject bibliography, and review articles were checked in both Cumulated Index Medicus (IM) and the Bibliography of Bioethics (BB) to compare coverage, publication delay, probable causes of indexing and retrieval failure, and the ease with which relevant citations were retrieved. The study also attempted to determine whether BB included appropriate articles from the MEDLINE database in a timely and systematic manner. While 98% of the IM citations appeared within a year of publication, 79% of the BB citations appeared two to three years after their publication dates. The average citation appeared twice as frequently in IM as in BB.     

Delving deeper into the black box: formative assessment,inclusion and learners on the autism spectrum

This paper explores the implementation of formative assessment through the ‘autism lens’ in order to analyse why the process can be exclusionary for some learners on the autism spectrum. The central thesis of the paper is that, where teachers have no understanding of the autism learning style, they are likely to revert to a normative, ‘majoritarian’ construction of learning. Two problems may flow from this. First, majoritarian assumptions about learning could dominate the inferential process that is the foundation stone of formative assessment. This could lead teachers to mis-read what is going on inside the heads of learners on the autism spectrum, and cause them to make partial and inaccurate inferences about their learning. Second, majoritarian assumptions may also inform the interactive process that underpins formative assessment. Social interaction can be challenging for learners on the autism spectrum and can limit or exclude their participation unless sensitive modifications are made to the social and communication environment. The case is, therefore, made for teacher awareness of a ‘minoritarian’ perspective that foregrounds knowledge and understanding of the autism learning style. Arguably, this knowledge and understanding could enable teachers to adapt the formative assessment process so that it is more effective and inclusive for this group of learners.     

A social skills group for children

Abstract

An NHS Trust set up groups to teach social skills to children and adolescents using a cognitive behavioural framework. One group of seven children (five boys and two girls) is described. Parents were invited to a parallel parents' group. Each group lasted for 90 minutes and ran weekly for 6 weeks. Extensive liaison with parents and teachers took place before, during and after the group. Analysis of pre- and postgroup questionnaires sent to parents and teachers indicated improved social functioning, outside the group, for most of the children. Parents valued the dialogue with professionals and often felt supported by them for the first time. Therapists' contact with teachers ensured full knowledge of children's behaviour and the transfer of skills to schools. Cognitive behavioural techniques with children under-going group work require intensive liaison to facilitate generalization of skills learnt.     

Longitudinal confirmatory factor analysis: Common,time‐specific,item‐specific,and residual‐error components of variance

Following Cronbach (1970) and others, it is useful to decompose test score variation into common factor, time‐specific, item‐specific, and residual components. In the traditional approach to factor analysis, only two sources of variance can be estimated: common factor variance and a uniqueness term that confounds specific sources of variation and residual error. When the same items are measured on different occasions, however, it is possible to separate specific variance and residual error. Two approaches, the first‐order approach described by Raffalovich and Bohrnstedt (1987) and a second‐order approach based on Jöreskog and Sörbom (1989; Jöreskog, 1974) are considered initially. The two approaches, although based on different rationales, both suffer a similar weakness in that two of the four sources of variance are confounded. In the Raffalovich and Bohrnstedt approach, time‐specific variance is confounded with common factor variance that generalizes across items and time. In the second‐order approach based on Jöreskog and Sörbom, time‐specific variance is confounded with residual error. Here we demonstrate that by combining features from both approaches we can eliminate these weaknesses and estimate all four of Cronbach's sources of variance, and that this combined approach is easily generalized to a wide variety of applications.     

Unconstrained Structural Equation Models of Latent Interactions: Contrasting Residual- and Mean-Centered Approaches

Little, Bovaird and Widaman (2006) proposed an unconstrained approach with residual centering for estimating latent interaction effects as an alternative to the mean-centered approach proposed by Marsh, Wen, and Hau (2004, 2006). Little et al. also differed from Marsh et al. in the number of indicators used to infer the latent interaction factor and how they were represented, but this issue is separate from the mean versus residual centering distinction that was their primary focus. However, their implementation of the Marsh et al. mean-centered approach failed to incorporate the mean structure that Marsh et al. argued was necessary to obtain unbiased estimates. One might suppose that their new approach would suffer this same problem, an issue not addressed by Little et al. However, we demonstrate here why the Little et al. approach obviates this requirement that heretofore was thought to be necessary for all constrained, partially constrained, and unconstrained approaches. Both the Marsh et al. and Little et al. unconstrained approaches typically result in similar results and are much easier to implement than traditional constrained approaches. They differ primarily in that the Little et al. approach is a 2-step approach involving a potentially large number of separate analyses prior to estimating the structural equation model that apparently does not require the estimation of a mean structure, whereas the Marsh et al. approach is a 1-step approach that includes a mean structure.     

General Growth Mixture Analysis of Adolescents' Developmental Trajectories of Anxiety: The Impact of Untested Invariance Assumptions on Substantive Interpretations

Substantively, this study investigates potential heterogeneity in the developmental trajectories of anxiety in adolescence. Methodologically, this study demonstrates the usefulness of general growth mixture analysis (GGMA) in addressing these issues and illustrates the impact of untested invariance assumptions on substantive interpretations. This study relied on data from the Montreal Adolescent Depression Development Project (MADDP), a 4-year follow-up of more than 1,000 adolescents who completed the Beck Anxiety Inventory each year. GGMA models relying on different invariance assumptions were empirically compared. Each of these models converged on a 5-class solution, but yielded different substantive results. The model with class-varying variance–covariance matrices was retained as providing a better fit to the data. These results showed that although elevated levels of anxiety might fluctuate over time, they clearly do not represent a transient phenomenon. This model was then validated in relation to multiple predictors (mostly related to school violence) and outcomes (grade-point average, school dropout, depression, loneliness, and drug-related problems).     

Disentangling Shape from Level Effects in Person-Centered Analyses: An Illustration Based on University Teachers’ Multidimensional Profiles of Effectiveness

This study compares alternative ways of disentangling the effects of level (the tendency for a person to be high, medium, or low across all factors) and shape (the tendency for a person to have a distinct pattern of factors on which they are high, medium, or low) in profile analyses. This issue is particularly relevant to performance appraisals where it is often useful to identify specific strengths and weaknesses over and above a person global performance, but also to person-centered analyses more generally where the observation of qualitative (shape) differences between profiles is often used as justification for the added value of profiles. Substantively, this study illustrates these issues in the identification of profiles of teachers based on multidimensional students’ ratings of their effectiveness, using an archival data set of 31,951 class-average ratings based on the Students’ Evaluations of Educational Quality (SEEQ) instrument collected over a 13-year period. The results show the superiority of a factor mixture operationalization of teaching effectiveness in which a global effectiveness factor was used to control for unnecessary level effects in the profiles.