Hopes for the future: demographic and personal resources associated with self-perceived employability and actual employment among senior year students

Undergraduates approaching completion of their studies may embrace the prospect of entry into the world of work as a challenge or conversely, may view it with trepidation. This study explores three major personal resources that may be associated with how young undergraduates view their future employability: perceived hope, grit and emotional intelligence. Demographics associated in the literature with perceived chance of employment – gender, age and having a learning disability – were also included in the study. The participants were college students in their senior year (n = 584), studying in a variety of undergraduate programmes. Results show that perceived hope and grit were positively associated with perceived employability whereas the relationship with emotional intelligence was more complex. None of the demographics associated with perceived employability.     

Requisite participant characteristics for effective peer group mentoring

Effective mentorship, due to the developmental nature of the experience, hinges upon the people involved—specifically, the personal characteristics of the mentoring collaborators. In this paper, the author explored requisite participant characteristics for peer group mentoring. One dozen executive-level professional women shared their stories-of-experience as participants in peer mentoring groups. A thematic analysis was utilized to investigate the narrative data from these interviews. Findings suggest that these participant characteristics include (a) an intrinsic interest; (b) a learning disposition; (c) a commitment to the mentoring experience; (d) comfortability with vulnerability and having the courage to share struggles; and (e) an inherent desire to support others in their learning, growth, and development.     

The neural correlates of working memory training in typically developing children

Working memory training improves children's cognitive performance on untrained tasks; however, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. This was investigated in 32 typically developing children aged 10–14 years (19 girls and 13 boys) using a randomized controlled design and multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (Devon, UK; 2015–2016). Training improved working memory performance and increased intrinsic functional connectivity between the bilateral intraparietal sulci. Furthermore, improvements in working memory were associated with greater recruitment of the left middle frontal gyrus on a complex span task. Repeated engagement of fronto-parietal regions during training may increase their activity and functional connectivity over time, affording greater working memory performance. The plausibility of generalizable cognitive benefits from a neurobiological perspective and implications for neurodevelopmental theory are discussed.     

A case study of integration and destreaming: Teachers and students in an Ontario secondary school respond

The direction that secondary school reform should take has become a contested question in the province of Ontario, Canada, during the 1990s. This case study of one secondary school examines some of the issues surrounding the transition years. Two policies, destreaming and integration, mandatedbythe OntarioMinistryof Education in 1993, and fully implemented by 1995, are examined by means of interview and survey. Administrators, teachers and students commented on the transition from elementary to secondary school. We discuss questions related to destreaming (especially how teachers contend with mixed-ability classes) and integration (with a particular focus on mathematics, science and technology).     

Early Childhood Parenting Predicts Late Childhood Brain Functional Connectivity During Emotion Perception and Reward Processing

Seventy-nine 3-year olds and their mothers participated in a laboratory-based task to assess maternal hostility. Mothers also reported their behavioral regulation of their child. Seven years later, functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired while viewing emotional faces and completing a reward processing task. Maternal hostility predicted more negative amygdala connectivity during exposure to sad relative to neutral faces with frontal and parietal regions as well as more negative left ventral striatal connectivity during monetary gain relative to loss feedback with the right posterior orbital frontal cortex and right inferior frontal gyrus. In contrast, maternal regulation predicted enhanced cingulo-frontal connectivity during monetary gain relative to loss feedback. Results suggest parenting is associated with alterations in emotion and reward processing circuitry 7–8 years later.     

Complex Systems Approaches to Educational Research: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

To explore the movement toward increased complex systems (CS) research in education, this special issue of the Journal of Experimental Education was developed to identify some under-examined places where CS approaches have advanced research. The articles provide empirical examples of research leveraging methods and analyses from complexity science. In this introduction article to the special issue, we discuss the authors’ contributions to defining and explicating concepts and methods that fall under the umbrella of CS perspectives and how these methods were used to investigate complex processes in their topics of study. The articles capture the goal of the special issue to demonstrate how the research questions framed by CS assumptions can change our expectations about the very nature of the processes under study in education. We then take a more global perspective and acknowledge the commonalities amongst the papers, including (a) the reliance on intensive data to answer research questions, and (b) the use of dynamic approaches that yield findings about the stability and change of these systems and phenomena.     

Grant‐maintained Heads’ Reflections on Opting Out

This article summarises the views of 222 grant‐maintained (GM) school's head teachers’ experience of, and reasons for, their schools opting out of local authority control. The survey was conducted on the first 499 secondary schools to go GM. The article investigates issues such as admissions, finances and also the effects of GM status (GMS) on the relationships with, and roles of, local education authorities, the Department for Education, parents and governors. The article provides an overview of moves to GMS and highlights prior aims and reflections.     

Mission to Planet Markle: Problem-Based Learning for Teaching Elementary Students Difficult Content and Practices

Research in Science Education - Young children can struggle to learn difficult disciplinary content and important skills for practicing science. Problem-based learning (PBL) may be useful for...     

Correspondence Training as a Means of Improving Study Skills

This study was an attempt to encourage middle school pupils to use time spent on topic (project) work to better effect. They were taught some elements of correspondence training which required them to think ahead, to plan carefully what they were going to do in a certain time period and to make a forecast. At the end of each working session, they were required to look back at what they had achieved and to discuss the outcomes with a partner in terms of their success at forecasting and in achievement. Especially among the more able pupils, there were marked improvements in both quantity and quality of work produced     

CD-ROM talking books: what do they promise?

This study describes one teacher's use of multimedia, specifically CD-ROM talking books, in the classroom. The goal of the investigation was to reveal and analyse how a primary (Grade 3) teacher integrated CD-ROM books into her curriculum. Issues emerging from the study included how features of the software interact with features of classrooms, how patterns of instruction are affected by the infusion of technology, and how students interact with the software, and each other, while reading the CD- ROM books