Motivational interviewing as a positive response to high‐school bullying

Intervention approaches to bullying are largely preventive in nature, and even these have been shown to be ineffective, if not iatrogenic, with adolescents. Responses to bullying are limited to traditional punitive approaches or “no‐blame” approaches aiming to restore the relationship between the targeted students. Neither of these approaches may effectively engage the perpetrator of bullying at a motivational level, and we propose motivational interviewing (MI) as a means of promoting meaningful behavioral change among youths who bully. We provide a narrative review of MI and map its core features onto the extant literature on self‐reported motivations for bullying, highlighting the ways that MI fits with bullying and could serve as a potent solution that could be deployed by school psychologists and other student support staff members. Qualitative preliminary feedback and initial competency in MI from trained practitioners are presented as preliminary data from a cluster‐randomized control trial, documenting school staff perspectives on the integration of MI into their approach to bullying with recommendations for integrating MI into school settings.     

基于FPGA的TFT-LCD控制器IP核设计

伴随着嵌入式系统的迅速发展,TFT-LCD控制器IP成为SoC芯片中的一个重要部件。文章介绍了一种使用FPGA芯片设计TFT液晶显示屏控制器的方法。该方法加快了数据的处理速度,提高了系统的兼容性,节约了硬件成本。     

The Search for Solutions to Truancy and Other Forms of School Absenteeism

This article explores current thinking and practice on approaches to attendance and truancy in schools. The author argues that despite a wide and sometimes, innovative range of initiatives and approaches there is little evidence that attendance rates within a lot of individual schools are improving. He explores possible reasons for this and offers some ideas for consideration at a national level which might lead to even further and better practice within schools and, amongst the caring professions in order to reduce, combat and prevent truancy and other forms of non–attendance from their existing levels. He argues that this is a difficult and complex task but has some constructive recommendations to make for work at national and local level.     

Notes on a Crisis: The Pandemic and English Schools

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic has created global disruption in education. It has served to highlight pre-existing inequalities, at the same time as it has stimulated new forms of educational provision, notably ‘online learning’. This article focuses on the debates and conflicts provoked by the pandemic’s impact on schooling in England. It aims to show how the historic policy preferences of Conservative governments have been carried forwards into a new situation and suggests how such preferences are at odds with ways of working developed by teachers. It places these different orientations in a broader European context and identifies a common tendency to evoke a meaning of teaching represented as at odds with the policy choices that have characterised government response to the pandemic.     

Book reviews

Book Review

Book reviewsMichael Inbar and Clarice S. Stoll (editors) New York: The Free Press, 1972     

Response Inhibition,Memory, and Attention in Boys with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Newly developed measures of response inhibition, verbal and non-verbal memory, and attention were applied to a sample of boys diagnosed with ADHD (n = 50; 14 predominantly inattentive type and 36 combined type) with no diagnosed comorbid conditions, who had received no stimulant medication for a minimum period of 20 hours prior to test administration. Performance was assessed relative to 50 individually age-matched control boys. Results revealed significant multivariate group differences on all three tests, supported by univariate effects on measures of verbal memory and attentional switching. In all cases, ADHD boys performed more poorly than the control boys. However, contrary to expectations, boys with ADHD made significantly fewer impulsive responses (false positives) on the specific measure of response, despite recording significantly more misses than the controls. Furthermore, no significant differences were observed according to ADHD subtype. The present research therefore demonstrates and more fully characterises the nature of the observed memory and attentional impairments in boys with ADHD and would appear to have clear implications for education and the further development of theory.     

Predicting word-spelling difficulty in 7- to 11-year-olds

Some languages have simple grapheme-phoneme codes in which there is a one-to-one mapping, making them easy to teach and learn, while others have more complicated structures and are more difficult for teachers and students. There is now an increasing number of studies which demonstrate that readers in more transparent orthographies such as Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek and German have little difficulty in decoding written words, while English children have many more problems. Increasingly, lack of orthographic transparency in English is seen as having a powerful negative effect on the development of literacy skills in English-speaking children. In the present study, the word factors associated with poor spelling in 5 school year-groups (ages 7 to 11 years) are identified as: (a) frequency of the word in the English language, (b) length of the word and (c) a measure of the phoneticity of the word. The concept of word phoneticity is explored and data is presented illustrating the predictive model of spelling. The implications the model has for teaching and learning English are discussed, with particular reference to the beneficial effects that greater orthographic transparency would have for children.     

The form of timing distributions in pigeons under penalties for responding early

The peak procedure was used in two experiments. Pigeons in the penalty group in Experiment 1 were rewarded with food in the first phase for the first peck after 12.5 sec had elapsed since the onset of a keylight. In the second phase, reward was withheld if the pigeons pecked within 6.25 sec after keylight onset. Responses in time were tabulated on occasional unrewarded tests in which the keylight was left on for 37.5 sec. Under the penalty contingencies, the response distribution in time remained nearly symmetric about the peak, while the spread of the distribution narrowed, and the time of peak responding came slightly earlier. The yoke group underwent a schedule of rewards similar to that for the penalty group, but without the penalty contingencies. Their response distributions remained similar throughout. The results of Experiment 1 were replicated in Experiment 2, which showed further that the changes due to the penalty contingencies did not generalize to the use of another key on which the penalty contingencies were not in effect. The narrower spread under the penalty contingencies is explained in terms of a change in threshold for when to start responding, and more weight being given to timing versus responding in the presence of the signal per se. No explanation was found for the change in the time of peak responding.