Modifying Defining Issues Test (DIT) as a tool for assessing secondary students’ social–emotional competencies

This paper discusses the use of an alternative instrument to assess the social–emotional competence (SEC) of secondary school students in Singapore. The instrument was used in a larger study to explore an approach to infuse social–emotional learning in the curriculum for children in school. The design of this research instrument is based on the Rest’s (Development in judging moral issues. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1979) Defining Issues Test (DIT) originally developed based on Kohlberg’s moral dilemma (Kohlberg in child psychology and childhood education: a cognitive developmental view. Longman, New York, 1987). The modified DIT instrument which focuses specifically on social–emotional development presents scenarios that are most likely encountered by adolescents and seeks the students’ responses to five open-ended questions related to the scenarios. The verbatim written responses were coded and categorized to assess their SECs. The instrument was able to elicit the self-management strategies of the secondary students, which was not as easily assessable with alternative instruments measuring SECs. The findings also highlighted the psychosocial developmental stage and moral development of the adolescents in the study from the SEC responses that they made.     

难舍难分的乒乓球

正我们再来和大家分享一个有趣的物理实验。借助生活中的常见工具,你在家里也能重现出经典的力学场景。【实验材料】你需要准备:两个乒乓球,直尺,剪刀,橡皮泥,吸管,一把电吹风【操作步骤】     

The functional equivalence between movement imagery, observation, and execution influences imagery ability

Based on literature identifying movement imagery, observation, and execution to elicit similar areas of neural activity, research has demonstrated that movement imagery and observation successfully prime movement execution. To investigate whether movement and observation could prime ease of imaging from an external visual-imagery perspective, an internal visual-imagery perspective, and kinesthetic modality, 36 participants (M age = 20.58; SD = 3.11; 18 women and 18 men) completed an adapted version of the Movement Imagery Questionnaire-Revised under four modes of delivery (movement prime, external observation prime, internal observation prime, and image-only). The results revealed that ease of imaging was significantly greater during the movement and observation prime conditions compared to the image-only condition (p < .05). Specifically when priming external visual imagery and internal visual imagery, observation facilitated ease of imaging only when the perspective was congruent with the imagery perspective. The results support the use of movement and observation to facilitate ease of imaging, but highlight the importance of considering the visual perspective when using observation.     

Deliberate imagery practice: the development of imagery skills in competitive athletes.

The aim of this study was to examine mental imagery within the context of the deliberate practice framework. Altogether, 159 athletes from one of three different competitive standards (recreational, provincial and national) completed the Deliberate Imagery Practice Questionnaire, which was designed for the present study to assess the athletes' perceptions of the importance of imagery along the three deliberate practice dimensions of relevancy, concentration and enjoyment. The results indicated that national athletes perceived imagery to be more relevant to performing than recreational athletes. In addition, athletes of a higher standard (i.e. provincial and national) reported using more imagery in a recent typical week and they had accumulated significantly more hours of imagery practice across their athletic career than recreational athletes. Finally, the relationships among the dimensions of deliberate practice did not lend conclusive support to either the original conception of deliberate practice or a sports-specific framework of deliberate practice.     

‘That happened to me too’: young people’s informal knowledge of diverse genders and sexualities

Abstract

This paper explores how young people of diverse genders and sexualities share information about sex, sexualities and genders. Formal approaches to education often fail to consider young people’s communication and information exchange practices, including the circulation of peer knowledge through social media. In the wake of recent Australian backlash against the Safe Schools Coalition, we can observe how homophobia and queerphobia in the broader community can impact upon young peoples’ ability to learn about themselves and their bodies through formal education. Yet young people of diverse genders and sexualities can be observed to support each other in peer spaces, utilising their knowledge networks. This paper explores young people’s informal learning practices, the capacity of peer networks to support and educate young people, and the challenges of recognising such networks in a culture in which health and education discourses present them as ‘risk subjects’ rather than ‘health agents’. These issues are discussed in relation to our own experiences in research and health promotion, including one author’s role as a youth peer educator. Drawing on our workplace experiences, we provide a number of anecdotal examples which highlight the complexities of informal knowledge practice and information circulation, and the ways these can challenge and reform professional health, education, and research approaches.     

Student experiences of NAPLAN: sharing insights from two school sites

This paper provides insight into middle school students’ perceptions and reactions to their participation in the Australian National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). A case study was conducted over 10 months at two Queensland schools with different approaches to NAPLAN implementation. Student voice was elicited via focus groups and 35 students provided drawings and words describing their experience in four stages: preparing, sitting, completing and receiving their results. Thematic content analysis of the textual data and trait and holistic coding of the visual data revealed five themes and suggests that the approach adopted by the school may impact on students’ NAPLAN experiences. This study privileges student voice and enables access to student experiences as they participate in a testing regime which is now a feature of the Australian school assessment landscape.     

Intelligent educational systems: identifying and decoupling the conversational levels

Intelligent educational systems (IESs) have traditionally been thought of in terms of their functional subsystems. The three obligatory subsystems are those containing domain knowledge, a model of the learner's current state, and teaching knowledge. We argue that it is useful to reconceptualise IESs: we should think of them from the point of view of the multiple levels of conversational interaction that they support with a learner. We suggest that in many cases it is useful to identify a task level at which the learner is working, and a higher discussion level at which the learner and system converse about, and reflect on the primary task. If the two levels can be to some extent decoupled, meaning that each level has less than complete knowledge of the other level, IES development might be simplified. In some cases an IES might be built by the addition of a discussion level component to an existing computer tool, simulation, game or microworld. A critical requirement for a decoupled IES is a representation for communication between levels; study of human tutoring is needed to guide identification of suitable representations.     

Reading and summarizing challenging texts in first and second languages

The thinking processes of 14 adult Anglophone students of French performing challenging reading and summarizing tasks were compared in their first and second languages. Individuals proved to use equivalent proportions of higher-order problem solving strategies while writing and reading in both languages. These varied with people's levels of literate expertise in their mother tongue, correlating with the qualities of written summaries they produced in both languages. Uses of these problem solving strategies appeared unrelated to participants' levels (beginning and intermediate) of second language proficiency. Analyses of the verbal reports reveal thinking processes which are common to reading and summary writing in first and second languages but which appear to vary with people's literate expertise and relevant knowledge. Findings are interpreted in relation to Cummins' (1984) theories of the cross-linguistic interdependence of cognitive-academic skills and Van Dijk and Kintsch's (1983) model of discourse comprehension. Implications are drawn for theories of bilingual cognition, further research, and instruction in second language reading and writing.     

Analysis of Parent, Teacher, and Consultant Speech Exchanges and Educational Outcomes of Students With Autism During COMPASS Consultation

The significant increase in the numbers of students with autism combined with the need for better trained teachers (National Research Council, 2001) call for research on the effectiveness of alternative methods, such as consultation, that have the potential to improve service delivery. Data from 2 randomized controlled single-blind trials indicate that an autism-specific consultation planning framework known as the collaborative model for promoting competence and success (COMPASS) is effective in increasing child Individual Education Programs (IEP) outcomes (Ruble, Dal-rymple, & McGrew, 2010; Ruble, McGrew, & Toland, 2011). In this study, we describe the verbal interactions, defined as speech acts and speech act exchanges that take place during COMPASS consultation, and examine the associations between speech exchanges and child outcomes. We applied the Psychosocial Processes Coding Scheme (Leaper, 1991) to code speech acts. Speech act exchanges were overwhelmingly affiliative, failed to show statistically significant relationships with child IEP outcomes and teacher adherence, but did correlate positively with IEP quality.