Childhood depression: Rethinking the role of the school

Schools play a privileged and strategic role in the lives of children acting as their principle environment away from home. Additionally, schools act as part of the community linking families and neighborhoods. These characteristics make schools a relevant setting for mental health service delivery and support to children and parents. In this article the role of the school environment on the development of childhood depression and as a leverage point in the prevention and treatment of depression will be discussed. Rationales for this viewpoint, as well as practical suggestions for reducing the deleterious effects of schooling on children's emotional well‐being, are offered. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

School‐based interventions for students with substance abuse

Experimentation with substances is typical for many young people, but unfortunately some will go on to develop substance abuse problems that substantially affect their lives. Successfully intervening with students who use or abuse substances is a challenge for school mental health professionals across the nation. There is a need for evidence‐based practices that school professionals can use when working with students who have substance abuse problems. This article provides school professionals in secondary settings with current information on student substance use rates, evidence‐based individual and group interventions, and discussion of the 42 Code of Federal Regulations, Part 2 (42 CFR). © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Time Course of Visual Attention in Infant Categorization of Cats Versus Dogs: Evidence for a Head Bias as Revealed Through Eye Tracking

Previous looking time studies have shown that infants use the heads of cat and dog images to form category representations for these animal classes. The present research used an eye-tracking procedure to determine the time course of attention to the head and whether it reflects a preexisting bias or online learning. Six- to 7-month-olds were familiarized with cats or dogs in upright or inverted orientations and then tested with a novel cat and novel dog in the same orientation. In the upright orientation, infants fixated head over body throughout familiarization; with inversion, no head preference was observed. These findings suggest that infant reliance on the head to categorize cats versus dogs results from a bias that pushes attention to the head.     

Identification of beneficial mass-included inerter-based vibration suppression configurations

Vibration suppression capabilities of linear passive vibration absorbers, such as traditional tuned mass damper (TMD), and recently proposed inerter-based vibration absorbers, have been studied for multiple mechanical systems. In particular, significant performance advantages have been obtained with a specific device making use of both inerter and mass elements, namely the tuned mass damper inerter (TMDI). However, there are still countless mass-included inerter-based configurations that have not been studied, which can potentially provide more preferred dynamic properties. In this paper, an immittance-function-layout (IFL) is introduced, which can cover a large range of topological connection possibilities with both mass and inerter elements. With the recently proposed structural immittance format, a systematic approach is established to identify the most beneficial IFL type mass-included inerter-based configurations with pre-determined number of each element type. Vibration suppression performance with single-IFL type device and two parallel-connected IFLs (i.e. dual-IFL) type devices are investigated in this paper. Three optimal configurations are identified for mitigating the maximum inter-storey drift of an example 3-storey building model subjected to base excitation. With this 3-storey building model, results show that, for the optimum single-IFL configuration, the performance improvement is 7.3% compared with the optimum TMDI, and with identified beneficial dual-IFL configurations, up to 34.9% performance advantages are obtained. Furthermore, consistent performance gains are shown under real-life earthquake inputs and with a 10-storey building model using identified absorber configurations.     

Automating the Construction of Internet Portals with Machine Learning

Domain-specific internet portals are growing in popularity because they gather content from the Web and organize it for easy access, retrieval and search. For example, www.campsearch.com allows complex queries by age, location, cost and specialty over summer camps. This functionality is not possible with general, Web-wide search engines. Unfortunately these portals are difficult and time-consuming to maintain. This paper advocates the use of machine learning techniques to greatly automate the creation and maintenance of domain-specific Internet portals. We describe new research in reinforcement learning, information extraction and text classification that enables efficient spidering, the identification of informative text segments, and the population of topic hierarchies. Using these techniques, we have built a demonstration system: a portal for computer science research papers. It already contains over 50,000 papers and is publicly available at www.cora.justresearch.com. These techniques are widely applicable to portal creation in other domains.     

A machine learning approach to investigating the effects of mathematics dispositions on mathematical literacy

Mathematics competency is fast becoming an essential requirement in ever greater parts of day-to-day work and life. Thus, creating strategies for improving mathematics learning in students is a major goal of education research. However, doing so requires an ability to look at many aspects of mathematics learning, such as demographics and psychological dispositions, in an integrated way as part of the same system. Large-scale assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) provide an accessible and large volume of coherent data, and this gives researchers the opportunity to employ data-driven approaches to gain an overview of the system. For these reasons, we have used machine learning to explore the relationships between psychological dispositions and mathematical literacy in Australian 15-year-olds using the PISA 2012 data set. Our results from this strongly data-driven approach re-affirm the primacy of mathematics self-efficacy and highlight novel complex interactions between mathematics self-efficacy, mathematics anxiety and socio-economic status. In this paper, we demonstrate how education researchers can usefully employ data-driven modelling techniques to find complex non-linear relationships and novel interactions in a multidimensional data set.     

A view from the inside: Collaborating with students to flip the classroom in real time

This article details decisions made to flip a small, public administration graduate-level course in real time. Interweaving student feedback with instructor notes and reflections gives a unique, personal look into a scenario-based course that changed weekly. We detail this dynamism, highlighting successes and failures in flipping the classroom. Students were positively able to apply administrative theories in real time but struggled to maintain relevance and connection to the readings. The narrative details how we all collaborated on an innovative pedagogical practice to apply public sector theories in real time.     

Variation in children's classroom engagement throughout a day in preschool: Relations to classroom and child factors

This study examined sources of variability in preschool children's positive and negative engagement with teachers, peers, and tasks, and how that variability was related to both classroom activity settings (e.g., teacher-structured time, outdoor time, transitions) and child factors (age, gender). Participants were 283 socioeconomically and linguistically diverse children drawn from 84 classrooms, 34–63 months old (M = 50.8, SD = 6.5). Each child's engagement was observed and rated multiple times within a single day. Results suggested that children's engagement varied significantly across the preschool day. Activity settings that provided children with a greater degree of choice (free choice and outdoor time) were associated with more positive engagement with peers and tasks, while teacher-structured activities were associated with more positive engagement with teachers. Transitions emerged as a difficult part of the day, associated with less positive engagement with teachers and tasks. Older children were rated higher on peer and task engagement. These findings, together with previous research, suggest that both characteristics of the classroom setting and child factors are associated with children's classroom engagement throughout a day in preschool.     

Self-Regulation and Task Engagement as Predictors of Emergent Language and Literacy Skills

Research Findings: A growing emphasis in the literature on children’s self-regulation signals the need for increased understanding of the ways in which young children become active players in the acquisition of knowledge. In particular, self-regulation may be linked to subsequent academic achievement through greater engagement with the learning tasks and activities made available in the preschool classroom. This study tested preschoolers’ (N = 603) observed task engagement in the classroom as mediating the relations between directly assessed self-regulation and changes in their language and literacy outcomes during the preschool year. Findings indicate that self-regulation is directly related to observed task engagement as well as changes in a host of language and literacy skills. Engagement with tasks and activities in the classroom also partially mediates the association between self-regulation and changes in expressive vocabulary. Mediation through task engagement was not found for receptive language or early literacy skills. Practice or Policy: Findings suggest that the development and evaluation of clearly articulated preschool curricula designed to promote academic achievement by fostering self-regulation is an important direction for future research.