Spoken language development in oral preschool children with permanent childhood deafness

This article documented spoken language outcomes for preschool children with hearing loss and examined the relationships between language abilities and characteristics of children such as degree of hearing loss, cognitive abilities, age at entry to early intervention, and parent involvement in children's intervention programs. Participants were evaluated using a combination of the Child Development Inventory, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, and the Preschool Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals depending on their age at the time of assessment. Maternal education, cognitive ability, and family involvement were also measured. Over half of the children who participated in this study had poor language outcomes overall. No significant differences were found in language outcomes on any of the measures for children who were diagnosed early and those diagnosed later. Multiple regression analyses showed that family participation, degree of hearing loss, and cognitive ability significantly predicted language outcomes and together accounted for almost 60% of the variance in scores. This article highlights the importance of family participation in intervention programs to enable children to achieve optimal language outcomes. Further work may clarify the effects of early diagnosis on language outcomes for preschool children.     

Using National Education Longitudinal Data Sets in School Counseling Research

National longitudinal databases hold much promise for school counseling researchers. Several of the more frequently used data sets, possible professional implications, and strategies for acquiring training in the use of large‐scale national data sets are described. A 6‐step process for conducting research with the data sets is explicated: determining research questions, accessing the data set, understanding the study's sample design, determining an analytic sample, considering pertinent data analysis issues, and understanding the limitations of using the data sets. Suggestions for preparing school counseling researchers and potential themes for future research are outlined.     

Arts engagement outside of school: Links with Year 10 to 12 students’ intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy in responding to art

This study draws on student engagement factors to examine the relationship between students’ non-school-based arts experiences on their intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy to participate in visual arts responding tasks. Visual arts responding in the curriculum includes learning about artists and artworks, decoding art and making critical judgements, and is important in building twenty-first century learning skills such as critical thinking and communication. A total of 266 Year 10 to 12 students from 18 schools in Western Australia (WA) participated in the quantitative research, which explored outside-school arts engagement as well as cognitive and psychological engagement factors in their current year of secondary schooling. The findings showed that while being an art consumer appears to impact on intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy, producing art as a hobby outside of school does not appear to do so. The research raised questions about links between practice and theory, and how to promote students’ engagement in responding.     

Differences in mobile health app use: A source of new digital inequalities?

This article provides a more differentiated understanding of mobile health consumers, and considers whether health app use may contribute to new digital inequalities. It focuses on factors associated with mobile health app use, and identifies which factors explain the use of different types of health apps. Data from a large representative sample of the Dutch population (N = 1,079) show that mobile health app users were generally younger, higher educated, and had higher levels of e-health literacy skills than non-users. Interestingly, different usage patterns were found for specific types of health apps. Theory and policy implications are discussed.     

From education for peace to education in conflict: changes in UNESCO discourse, 1945–2015

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the global education community has focused significant attention on the promotion of education in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, embodied in the growth of a new sub-field called Education in Emergencies. This article points out the surprising distinction of this new sub-field from the more established and closely related field of peace education. It examines United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) documents for insight into the changing global ideas that have facilitated the shift in focus from peace to conflict. Empirically, we draw on a quantitative content analysis of more than 450 UNESCO documents published between 1945 and 2015. We find that education for peace remains a constant, if evolving, concern in these texts, but that a powerful emphasis on individual rights has shifted the discursive focus away from inter-state relations and towards the educational needs of young people. In the documents, conflict is now theorised as a threat to education and peace is re-envisioned not just as the desirable outcome of education, but also as its pre-condition. We show how this ideational transformation has re-cast an expansive array of conflicts, natural disasters, and other emergencies as threats to education.     

Emotion regulation and academic perceptions in adolescence

Although studied extensively in the field of adolescent mental health, the role of emotion regulation (ER) in the academic functioning of adolescents is not well understood. This study examined the role of ER in adolescents’ perceptions of themselves and their learning environments. We compared adolescents with high and low levels of ER on perceptions of school achievement and attitudes towards school and their perception of their parents’ academic involvement. Students completed surveys about perceptions of their learning and parental involvement, as well as their ER abilities. Results indicated that students with higher emotion dysregulation endorsed more negative self-perceptions of their own academic abilities, had more negative attitudes towards school, and rated their mothers and fathers as more controlling in relation to their learning. These results demonstrate the importance of ER in the academic context, particularly in the home learning environment.     

Causal Attributions and Reading Achievement: Individual Differences in Low-Income Families

In this study the development of causal attributions about reading within low-income families was examined. Specifically, relations between children's reading achievement and their causal attributions were investigated as well as relations between the children's attributions about themselves and their parents’ attributions about them. A total 513 students from Grades 3, 6, and 9, and one parent of each student, all from low-income families, participated. Students and parents independently rated the importance of seven causal variables (effort, intellectual ability, liking for reading, the teacher, help at home, difficulty of reading material, and luck) for the students’ good and poor reading outcomes. The major findings were that (a) at each grade, students’ attributions were reliably related to their reading achievement on the Gates–MacGinitie reading comprehension test, with attributions to ability, liking for reading, and help at home especially critical; (b) at each grade, parent attributions were reliably associated with student attributions; and (c) as students’ grade in school increased, they focused more on themselves and less on others as causal determinants of their reading performance. The implications of these findings for research and education are discussed.     

The effects of POWERSOURCE© assessments on middle-school students’ math performance

This paper describes results from field testing of middle-school math formative assessments alongside professional development and instructional resources. We employed a randomised, controlled design to address the question: Does using our formative assessment strategies improve student performance on assessments of key mathematical ideas relative to a comparison group? This study also provided data on the instructional sensitivity of the assessments, which is part of the validation needed for formative assessments. Teachers were recruited from two districts and seven middle schools. Nineteen treatment and 17 comparison group teachers and their students were included in study analyses. Scores on extended response and short-answer questions indicated that students in the treatment group performed better than students in the comparison group who received the formative assessments alone. These findings demonstrate both the feasibility and value of including performance task-types in a brief assessment context.     

‘Human nature’: Chemical engineering students’ ideas about human relationships with the natural world

While importance of environmental ethics, as a component of sustainable development, in preparing engineers is widely acknowledged, little research has addressed chemical engineers’ environmental concerns. This study aimed to address this void by exploring chemical engineering students’ values regarding human–nature relationships. The study was conducted with 247 3rd–4th year chemical engineering students in Israeli Universities. It employed the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP)-questionnaire to which students added written explanations. Quantitative analysis of NEP-scale results shows that the students demonstrated moderately ecocentric orientation. Explanations to the NEP-items reveal diverse, ambivalent ideas regarding the notions embodied in the NEP, strong scientific orientation and reliance on technology for addressing environmental challenges. Endorsing sustainability implies that today's engineers be equipped with an ecological perspective. The capacity of Higher Education to enable engineers to develop dispositions about human–nature interrelationships requires adaptation of curricula towards multidisciplinary, integrative learning addressing social–political–economic–ethical perspectives, and implementing critical-thinking within the socio-scientific issues pedagogical approach.