Psychological issues in relocation: Response to change

Conclusion Although nearly all individuals will find relocation at least minimally stressful and will experience some stress related symptoms such as emotional reactivity, irritability, and exhaustion, those who find ways to establish security and meaning in their new situation within a reasonable time (2 to 6 months) will suffer less turmoil. The coping strategies that individuals employ will vary; people are generally fairly creative problem solvers. When the stress of a relocation continues beyond a reasonable time individuals experiencing excessive psychological discomfort should seek professional help. Help can best be provided by assisting the individual to overcome the obstacles which are a part of the naturally occurring process of adjusting to a new situation. Framing the experience as a normal reaction to a traumatic or crisis event can help individuals find ways to maintain both a sense of security and meaning, and to regain a sense of perspective.Marcia Hausman is a Counseling Psychologist who received a Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University in 1983. She has been on the staff of the Counseling Center for Human Development at the University of South Florida since 1984. She has moved 12 times, reluctantly.James Reed is a Counseling Psychologist with a Ph.D. from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Born in West Africa, he has moved 16 times since then.     

Seeking a ‘critical mass’: middle-class parents’ collective engagement in city public schooling

A growing body of literature has begun to explore the individual identities, motivations, and school choices of middle-class, typically white, parents who choose to reside in socioeconomically and racially mixed central city neighborhoods. Drawing on qualitative research in three US cities, we argue that a focus on middle-class parents’ collective engagement in schooling is particularly important in under-resourced urban contexts. In these environments, we show, middle-class parents’ use of social networks often extends beyond basic information-sharing about school quality to encompass a range of activities undertaken with other families ‘like them’ who have also chosen to enroll their children in an urban public school. We find that, in some instances, middle-class parents’ collective actions can benefit an entire class or school. Yet in other instances, their activation of social capital can contribute to processes of social reproduction in urban schooling by excluding or marginalizing low-income students and their families.     

Is it formal if it's not physics? (the influence of content on formal reasoning)

Formal reasoning has been studied extensively with tasks that have physics or laboratory content. This study compares laboratory and naturalistic content influences on formal reasoning tasks. Ninety 13-, 15-, and 17-year olds received both laboratory and naturalistic content tasks which required ability to control variables. Expectations about the variables in each task were measured. Results revealed that 8 to 20% of the variance in performance was associated with task content. Content effects were shown to reflect expectations about task variables.     

Use of digital video technology in an elementary school foreign language methods course

This article presents a case study of the use of digital video technology with a new pedagogical approach under a constructivist framework in an elementary school foreign language methods course. Data were collected through interviews with the methods course instructor, field notes, analytical notes from videotaped student presentations of their learning from the video clips, students’ mid‐semester evaluation of the use of video clips, and end‐of‐semester student reflections on open‐ended questions regarding the use of video clips. A careful examination of the data identified themes that illustrate the characteristics of the use of digital video technology under a constructivist framework. Those themes include the flexibility and capability of digital video technology, the development of the video clips, students’ ownership of knowledge, feedback from the students, and evaluation of the use of video clips. This case reports the vision of technology integration being realized. It results from the presence of technology, the instructor's pedagogical knowledge, and his or her content expertise.     

Teacher hiring practices and educational efficiency

This paper analyses the relationship between teacher hiring practices and educational efficiency in Norwegian school districts. The hiring decision is made at the school level by the principal or at the school district level. According to the data, efficiency is the highest in districts where hiring is decentralized. Hiring practices are decided by the school district, and linear estimates of the effect of decentralized hiring on efficiency may be biased because of non-random selection. First, I approach this problem by including a large set of controls in a school district level analysis, which does not alter the qualitative result. Second, I perform a school level analysis with district fixed effects. The results indicate, as expected, that the effect of decentralization is stronger for schools facing excess teacher supply than for schools without excess supply.     

The National Teacher Shortage,Urban Education and the Cognitive Sociology of Labor

The Urban Review - According to the National Center for Education Statistics (Fast facts: back to school statistics, 2018. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 ), there are over 50.7...