Effects of Restructuring Training and Cognitive Style

Herman Witkin's research in differentiation theory proposed a conceptual framework describing the cognitive style known as field dependence‐independence. The operational measures of this construct are restructuring skills and interpersonal competencies, and were originally conceived to be fixed in an individual. A recent reconceptual‐isation, however, suggested that there may be some malleability in learning strategies that flow from cognitive style. Learners predisposed to field dependence might gain access to restructuring skills brought to problem‐solving situations by field independents. This study undertook to examine the effects and practicability of restructuring training as a means of addressing individual learner differences. Field independent subjects significantly out‐scored field‐dependent subjects on all three test tasks in the control group. Experimental group field independents did not significantly outscore experimental field dependents. Training enhanced field dependent subject performance on two dependent measures tasks. There was interaction across treatment and field dependence on all three dependent measures.     

RESILIENCE,BULLYING, AND MENTAL HEALTH: FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH IMPROVED OUTCOMES

Resilience is associated with bouncing back from adversity, and the term currently enjoys significant popular appeal. However, understanding of resilience is often superficial. The current paper examined 105 primary and high school students’ experiences of resilience and bullying, and considered resilience as a hierarchical factorial model. The study found that higher levels of resilience subfactors were a protective factor regarding depression and anxiety; that individuals with poorer resilience were more likely to engage in bullying behaviors; that individuals with poorer levels of resilience were more likely to be victims of bullying; and, that gender did not appear to be a major variable regarding resilience and bullying. These findings suggest that resilience interventions that focus on improving specific resilience elements including optimism, trust, tolerance, sensitivity, and impairment may be more efficacious than interventions focused on other resilience elements.     

Evidence‐Based Teaching in Higher Education: Application to Counselor Education

The authors examined best practices in university‐level teaching, as premised on the evidence‐based teaching (EBT) literature found in fields external to counselor education. Findings were reported in relation to 3 areas: developing an effective learning environment, structuring intentional learning experiences, and assessing teaching effectiveness. Implications regarding the training of doctoral‐level counselor educators using EBT practices are discussed.     

Multicultural Children’s Literature as a Context for Teaching Mathematics for Cultural Relevance in Urban Schools

This article reports on a teacher-research study that used multicultural texts as a context for teaching mathematics for cultural relevance during an elementary mathematics methods course. The results of the study reveal that 28 % (5 out of 18) of the teacher candidates (TCs) chose books that were culturally contextual or culturally amenable. However, 89 % (16 out of 18) of the TCs chose texts that were mathematically robust or mathematically peripheral. Four focal TCs were selected to examine how they used the texts with children to teach mathematics concepts. Math lessons fostered academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness. Overall, the results of the study are mixed. We conclude that some TCs’ choice of texts may reflect indifference, passive resistance, low self-efficacy, school culture, and mixed messages from the teacher–researcher. Additional studies that include follow-up interviews and classroom observations are needed to determine the factors that influence TCs’ selections of multicultural texts and their implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy with students.     

Review and criticism

The network tone of voice

Mass Communication in China, John Howkins (New York: Longman, 1982).

Television and Radio in the United Kingdom, Burton Paulu (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981).

Mass Media and Social Change, ed. Elihu Katz and Tamas Szecsko (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications Inc., 1981).

Electronic Colonialism: The Future of International Broadcasting and Communication, Thomas L. McPhail (Beverly Hills, CA.: Sage, 1981).

The First Amendment Under Seige: The Politics of Broadcast Regulation, Richard E. Labunski (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1981).     

SciVal Experts: A Collaborative Tool

SciVal Experts is a resource for finding experts and fostering collaboration. The tool creates researcher profiles with automatically updated publication and grant information and faculty-inputted curriculum vitae, more fully capturing a researcher's body of work. SciVal Experts indexes campus-based “experts” by research topic, allowing faculty to find potential research partners and mentors, furthering translational research opportunities and dissemination of knowledge.     

Editorial

This study was conducted to increase our understanding of learners' perceptions about how the first "class" in an online course should be and to further understand how learners' experiences in the first class contribute to their sense of well-being and engagement in online courses. The study revealed that learners' sense of engagement with courses is more dependent on their connection with the learning materials than with instructors or colleagues, that learners are most comfortable with a generous amount of time to prepare in advance for courses, and that the role of instructors at the beginning of courses is very much a functional one. Instructors are judged on the clarity and completeness with which their course details are presented.     

From the canciÓn de protesta to the nueva trova, 1965-85

A grounded theory was developed to describe the processes of self‐understanding of a group of Chinese women graduate students who were studying in the United States at the time of the research. A basic psychological process, reweaving a fragmented self, was identified from interviews with 20 Chinese women graduate students. Reweaving a fragmented self included three sub‐processes: weaving self, fragmenting self and reweaving self, as occurred across two chronological phases, being women students in their homeland and becoming international women students in a new land. Categories and codes explain and support each of the processes. The implications of this research are theoretical and practical. It contributes to the critical theories of women’s selves in a cultural context by exploring the ways in which these Chinese women graduate students negotiated critical cultural elements in their self‐understanding. It also contributes to American higher education by enhancing educators’ understanding of the diversity of these women students’ experiences, expectations and desires and providing them with information on these students’ self‐understanding.     

Living action research: authoring identities through yaya projects

This article examines the authors’ experiences living action research through an art therapy activity known as YaYa that involved creating and sharing visual representations of themselves as beginning researchers. This activity was part of a graduate course on education action research and students in the course found the activity transformative. The article first explores how four students in the course created and presented their YaYas. It goes on to discuss how the activity provided opportunities for students to imagine and re-imagine authored identities in the figured worlds of teaching and research. The role that visual arts play in transforming consciousness is also used to help understand the powerful impact of the YaYa activity. The YaYa as a visual artistic process opened students up to meaning-making and reconstructing identities that involved not only the mind, but also the emotions, body and spirit. The authors claim that learning action research can itself be a process of action research, and that living such practice is about involving and imagining the whole self in multiple figured worlds.