Confronting Challenges to the Liberal Arts Curriculum: Perspectives of Developing and Transitional Countries

Contemporary international higher education scholarship tends to focus on the global financial crisis,on massification,privatization,cross-border education,university ranking,and student mobility.However,few studies deal with the development of liberal arts programs around the world and they are often related to Western systems of higher education or that of the US,where liberal arts education has long been seen as a fundamental issue.Comparative studies,however,could help scholars to become aware of critical trends and reforms,also the impact they might have on a global society.     

Riding to the Rescue While Holding On By a Thread: Physical Activity in the Schools

The public health burden of obesity, overweight, and physical inactivity suggests schools be actively involved in prevention and treatment. Schools were challenged to take action by the Surgeon General in 2001. Few resources have been allocated to support the schools and in the presence of budget and high stakes testing pressure, resources are decreasing. Sources of support (research, professional organizations, government, coalitions/foundations) often criticize schools and teachers while providing erroneous information and no support. Teachers have responded to recommendations by including lifetime activities, health related fitness, and increasing MVPA. Approximately half the recommended minutes per week are provided in schools where there is any PE, many (5-33%) schools have no PE for their students. Three recommendations for scholars and leaders in the field include the following: Provide clear and consistent messages and interpretation of the scientific and theoretical information about physical activity; secure funded mandates for daily PE; be supportive not critical.     

Conceptions of teaching held by academic teachers

This study examines conceptions of teaching held by academic teachers in the fields of science and social science, in two universities: a distance university in the UK and a traditional one in Australia. A five level classification of conceptions of teaching is proposed. A process of arriving at this scheme is discussed and a formalised coding system is presented which helps to delimit, with greater confidence, the boundaries of each conception, and helps to order conceptions, to compare conceptions proposed by other researchers, and to place individuals within conceptions. The same coding system is then used to define the concepts of student-centered and teacher-centered approaches to teaching. There is a strong suggestion that teaching conceptions are context-dependent.     

Children''s Beliefs about Strategies to Reduce Parental Anger

Age and sex differences in beliefs about strategies for reducing parental anger were assessed. The central question was whether direct intervention strategies are the most effective for, and reflect more advanced understanding of, anger reduction. In Study 1, 120 children ages 4-9 years generated strategies they believed would lessen a parent's anger elicited by 3 situations of increasing complexity. Across ages children proposed direct intervention strategies for the simplest situation, and there was an age increase in suggesting direct intervention strategies for the more complex situations. In Study 2, 180 children, ages 4-12 years, and their parents rated the effectiveness of the strategies generated for the most complex situation (interparental argument). There was no longer a unilinear age increase in believing direct intervention strategies effective. Unlike with older and younger children, there was no agreement between 7-9-year-olds and their parents on the efficacy of direct intervention strategies.     

Rethinking the World Bank Agenda for Chinese Higher Education Reform

This article explores the way in which the World Bank has worked effectively with China in higher education. It investigates whether or not the cooperation between the two has changed in line with their changing relationship. More specifically, it discusses whether the World Bank’s China agenda reflects the reform package of socio-institutional neoliberalism which the World Bank has tended to promote worldwide in the era of the Post-Washington Consensus, and how China’s higher education reform has been influenced by the agenda. The article argues that as China is transferring its role from that of a recipient country to that of a donor country, it is increasingly important to position itself as a global player. Other than mastering the game rules of the international community, China should also expand its influence within and through these major international organizations.     

Enhancing Overseas Chinese Graduate Employability: The Case of Chinese Graduates with Finnish Academic Qualifications

This paper explores ways to enhance overseas Chinese graduate employability by taking Finnish-educated Chinese students/graduates as an example. In so doing, it understands that graduate employability development is a joint effort of multiple stakeholders including students, graduates, academics, program coordinators, employers, and policymakers. Accordingly, it provides arguments and suggestions for how to enhance the employability of these graduates in terms of the labor market context, employers’ beliefs and actions, the responsibilities of higher education institutions, and student/graduate commitment. It also points out two major challenges faced by overseas Chinese graduates as well as their educational providers, which are linked respectively to gaps between what graduates acquire in higher education and what is required in the labor market, as well as gaps from the employers’ perspective: areas where employers need to understand more about universities and catch up with new ideas generated by them.     

Disorganized Behavior in Adolescent–Parent Interaction: Relations to Attachment State of Mind,Partner Abuse,and Psychopathology

Disoriented, punitive, and caregiving/role‐confused attachment behaviors are associated with psychopathology in childhood, but have not been assessed in adolescence. A total of 120 low‐income late adolescents (aged 18–23 years) and parents were assessed in a conflict‐resolution paradigm. Their interactions were coded with the Goal‐Corrected Partnership in Adolescence Coding Scales. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the three disorganized constructs (punitive, caregiving, and disoriented interaction) were best represented as distinct factors and were separable from a fourth factor for collaboration. The four factors were then assessed in relation to measures of attachment disorganization, partner abuse, and psychopathology. Results indicate that forms of disorganized behavior first described in early childhood can also be reliably assessed in adolescence and are associated with maladaptive outcomes across multiple domains.     

Success,failure and emotions: examining the relationship between performance feedback and emotions in diagnostic reasoning

Students experience a variety of emotions following achievement outcomes which stand to influence how they learn and perform in academic settings. However, little is known about the link between student outcome emotions and dimensions of performance feedback in computer-based learning environments (CBLEs). Understanding the dynamics of this relationship is particularly important for high-stakes, competency-based domains such as medical education. In this study, we examined the relationship between medical students’ (N = 30) outcome emotion profiles and their performance on a diagnostic reasoning task in the CBLE, BioWorld. We found that participants could be organized into distinct emotion groups using k-means cluster analyses based on their self-reported outcome emotion profiles: an expected positive emotion cluster and negative emotion cluster and an unexpected low intensity emotion cluster. A clear relationship was found between emotion clusters and diagnostic performance such that participants classified to the positive emotion cluster had the highest performance; those classified to the negative emotion cluster had the lowest performance; and those classified to the low intensity emotion cluster had performance outcomes that fell between the other two. Our discussion focuses on the theoretical implications of emotion classification and design recommendations for learning environments and emotional interventions in computer-based contexts.