Teachers’ Lives in Context: A Framework for Understanding Barriers to High-Quality Teaching Within Resource Deprived Settings

There is a profound for more effective schools, especially within resource-poor communities in low- and middle-income countries. A wide range of literature identifies teachers as the most critical component of schools in regards to student learning. Despite this, there is a dearth of literature on how teachers' experiences influence their ability to attend school, remain in the teaching profession, and provide high quality teaching within the classroom. This study presents a theoretical framework for understanding the role of teachers' lives in context (skills, knowledge, and attitudes; poverty and health; contextual supports/barriers to teaching) in influencing teacher effectiveness. This framework builds upon Tseng and Seidman's (2007) systems framework for understanding youth social settings in order to incorporate teachers' lives into a larger model of educational effectiveness. This synthesis reveals significant gaps in our understanding of teachers' experiences and how they affect teaching. At the teacher attendance, attrition, and pedagogical quality and a key moderator of educational interventions. Implications for research, practice, and policy are discussed.     

Peer Teachers With Autism Teaching 3D Modeling

ABSTRACT

Few autism programmes address the needs of adolescents and young adults, and those that do are unlikely to include individuals with autism in the design and evaluation of the programme. This study involved nine youth with autism (ages 16–25) in the development and evaluation of a peer teaching programme where they taught three-dimensional modelling to other students with autism spectrum disorder. The methodology was participant-oriented research where the students with autism were co-designers and programme evaluators in the research. This approach highlighted their unique strengths and abilities and shifted the power such that they were leaders and not simply the recipients of knowledge from instructors. Four themes emerged through the qualitative analysis of the students’ perceptions of the peer teaching programme: 1) the meaning of peer teaching, 2) motivations for peer teaching, 3) challenges and 4) coping with the challenges of the role.     

An approach to psychosexual counselling

Summary In considering in this paper the origins, development and need for psychosexual counselling to be an integral part of the provision of a counselling service, one must not lose sight of the fact that some higher educational institutions still have no general counselling provision.It is interesting to note that in the UK at a time when the age of consent and voting age were lowered to eighteen years (Family Law Reform Act, 1969, operational 1970 and Representation of the People Act, 1969), and students were rejecting the idea of wardens and academic tutors acting in loco parentis, the National Union of Students (at their annual conference in 1969) passed a resolution pressing for Counselling Services to be established in each higher educational institution-staffed by fully trained personnel, Milner (1974). Nine years later this resolution has not yet been fully implemented.The university community represents a cross-section of the population, any of whom may have a psychosexual problem and seek help from the counselling service. Counsellors must be trained to treat psychosexual problems as part of their normal range of activities.Storr (1960) points out that it is The individual as well as the disease that needs treatment. This applies in counselling as it does in medicine, so that the counsellor should be able to treat the individual as a whole, and at the same time treat his psychosexual problem.University of Reading     

Behavioural additionality of R&D subsidies: A learning perspective

The use of R&D grants as a policy instrument has been motivated by economic arguments of market failure. Neo-classical econometric studies have analysed the additionality of one Euro of subsidies on both the investments of companies in the R&D process and the output of that R&D process. More recently, behavioural additionality has been launched as a third form of additionality. In contrast to input and output additionality, behavioural additionality is related to changes in the processes that take place within the firm. In this paper, we analyse the determinants of the behavioural additionality of R&D grants. To explain the mechanism through which behavioural additionality is obtained, we use organizational learning theory as a guide to formulate our hypotheses. Hypotheses are tested using a telephone survey of 192 recipients of R&D grants provided by the IWT in Flanders in 2001–2004, matched to a sample of 84 firms that undertake innovation activities but which had never had a grant bid accepted. We find that congenital learning and interorganizational learning lead to increased behavioural additionality. However, these learning effects decrease with the number of subsidized projects that are undertaken by the company.     

Vocabulary Is Important for Some,but Not All Reading Skills

Although there is evidence for a close link between the development of oral vocabulary and reading comprehension, less clear is whether oral vocabulary skills relate to the development of word-level reading skills. This study investigated vocabulary and literacy in 81 children aged 8 to 10 years. In regression analyses, vocabulary accounted for unique variance in exception word reading and reading comprehension, but not text reading accuracy, decoding, or regular word reading. Consistent with these data, children with poor reading comprehension exhibited oral vocabulary weaknesses and read fewer exception words correctly. These findings demonstrate that oral vocabulary is associated with some, but not all, reading skills. Results are discussed in terms of current models of reading development.     

Three types of conduct‐problem boys in an educational setting

Third grade boys identified as being disruptive to on‐going classroom activities were grouped according to their teacher's ratings of their behaviour characteristics as unco‐operative (Type I), easily flustered (Type II), and unco‐operative and easily flustered (Type III). No significant differences in performance existed between types on individually administered tests of perception and psycholinguistic abilities. On group administered tests of academic achievement and intelligence, the uncooperative boys did significantly better than the other two types. It was also determined that the easily flustered boys did substantially better on individually administered measures of IQ. than they did on group administered measures. These findings suggest that teachers should avoid using group tests to evaluate disruptive boys they perceive as being easily flustered.     

Effectiveness of the PPVT-R for screening gifted students

The PPVT-R and the WISC-R were administered to a sample of 35 students, grades 1 through 8, who were nominated for possible participation in gifted programming. The correlation between the PPVT-R and Full Scale IQ was .27, which probably was affected by the restricted range of ability assessed. The PPVT-R showed modest incremental effectiveness beyond informal referral procedures in predicting toward a WISC-R criterion score.     

Concept learning by pigeons: Matching-to-sample with trial-unique video picture stimuli

Pigeons were trained to match-to-sample with several new methodologies: a large number of stimuli, computer-drawn color picture stimuli, responses monitored by a computer touch screen, stimuli presented horizontally from the floor, and grain reinforcement delivered onto the picture stimuli. Following acquisition, matching-to-sample concept learning was assessed by transfer to novel stimuli on the first exposure to pairs of novel stimuli. One group (trial-unique), trained with 152 different pictures presented once daily, showed excellent transfer (80% correct). Transfer and baseline performances were equivalent, indicating that the matching-to-sample concept had been learned. A second group (2-stimulus), trained with only two different pictures, showed no evidence of transfer. These results are discussed in terms of the effect of numbers of exemplars on previous failures to find concept learning in pigeons, and the implications of the positive finding from this experiment on abstract concept learning and evolutionary cognitive development.