Chinese Students’ Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help

In this study 1,453 Chinese high school and college students’ attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help and factors contributing to attitude differences were examined. Results revealed that Chinese students possessed generally positive attitudes and their attitudes were significantly associated with gender, prior counseling contact and prior knowledge about counseling and psychology. Previous help-seeking behavior for a major problem was predictive of respondent attitudes. Students with a broad range of help-seeking preferences had more positive attitudes than students with a narrower range. Students who sought help from parents or teachers perceived counseling more positively than students not seeking such help; this result was more significant for high school students. College students’ attitudes differed more in the area of whether or not to seek help. In addition, family structure was related to two dimensions of attitudes toward help seeking—interpersonal openness and stigma tolerance, but not to attitudes toward seeking psychological help.     

Responsiveness and Affective Processes in the Interactive Construction of Understanding in Mathematics

This paper reports on important learning processes emerging during adult mathematics classes that used a teaching approach compatible with a social constructivist theory of knowing. A cyclical teaching model encouraged much discussion about the mathematical problems presented to paired groups. Whole-class student-led sharing sessions allowed students to continue their interactive constitution of meaning and solutions.Comparisons of pre- and post-course scores on attitude and belief questionnaires indicated significant increases in positive attitudes and beliefs about mathematics and about themselves doing mathematics.The overall positive changes in scores on questionnaires are explained in terms of recurrent patterns in thinking inferred from data obtained by observation, interview, and reflective comments. Changes are explained in terms of the interactive effects of affective and heuristic processing during problem solving. Affective processes precipitated students' responsiveness, modifying the immediate learning context which, in turn, influenced the students' thinking, creating a snowballing effect on learning and affect. Changes were clearly facilitated by the interaction between students and by their shared understandings.     

The Research Training Experiences of Doctoral Students Linked to Australian Cooperative Research Centres

This paper reports on the research trainingexperiences of Australian doctoral studentsworking in or funded by Cooperative ResearchCentres (CRCs), notes how their levels ofsatisfaction compare with those of theircounterparts in regular university science andtechnology disciplines and assesses to whatextent the CRC program is achieving its hopeswith respect to PhD training. Findings arebased on data from a survey of all enrolled PhDstudents in two research-intensive universitiesin Australia, together with supplementary datafrom student and supervisor interviews. Findings indicate that in the main, CRC-relatedPhD students fare well compared with theircounterparts in regular university departmentsand that on a number of indicators CRC-relatedstudents recorded higher levels of satisfactionwith their course experience. This situationsuggests that CRCs are playing a significantand worthwhile role in research training inAustralia.     

The problematic place of a woman physical education instructor: an historical case study

In this article the author's problematize the position of women in state school physical education, focusing in particular on the ‘instructors’ who were appointed to work with women teachers and senior girls, and prepare trainees at the Teachers College in South Australia. In exploring this little researched area, the article explores shifting representations of the woman ‘instructor’ from the 1920s to the late 1940s, highlighting the interplay of key discourses associated with age, gender, marital status, character, disciplinarity and physical activity. In addition, the authors explicate ways in which these discourses were interwoven in the career of May Cleggett, who for most of the period was the only woman physical education instructor in South Australian state schools.     

Measuring Motivation to Learn Chinese and English Through Self-Reported Feelings and Behaviours

The socio-educational approach to measuring language motivation has its focus on social attitude rather than language-relevant feelings and behaviours in the classroom context. The development of two scales for measuring elementary students' motivation to learn Chinese and English reported here is an exploration of a psychology-based approach which may be more meaningful to language teachers. The scales share common items and cover both affective and behavioural aspects of language learning. Very high internal consistency was found for both scales. Discriminant validity was established with reference to student backgrounds, including overall academic performance, gender, language examination grade, home language, and self-evaluation of language ability.     

Language Motivation,Use and Achievement

“How is it that some people can learn a second or foreign language so easily and so well while others, given what seem to be same opportunities to learn, find it almost impossible?” (Gardner and Lambert, 1972: 131). This seemingly simple question triggered off a series of studies which has kept researchers rather busy since 1960.