Individual, family, and neighborhood factors distinguish resilient from non-resilient maltreated children: a cumulative stressors model

OBJECTIVE: Children who are physically maltreated are at risk of a range of adverse outcomes in childhood and adulthood, but some children who are maltreated manage to function well despite their history of adversity. Which individual, family, and neighborhood characteristics distinguish resilient from non-resilient maltreated children? Do children's individual strengths promote resilience even when children are exposed to multiple family and neighborhood stressors (cumulative stressors model)? METHODS: Data were from the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Study which describes a nationally representative sample of 1,116 twin pairs and their families. Families were home-visited when the twins were 5 and 7 years old, and teachers provided information about children's behavior at school. Interviewers rated the likelihood that children had been maltreated based on mothers' reports of harm to the child and child welfare involvement with the family. RESULTS: Resilient children were those who engaged in normative levels of antisocial behavior despite having been maltreated. Boys (but not girls) who had above-average intelligence and whose parents had relatively few symptoms of antisocial personality were more likely to be resilient versus non-resilient to maltreatment. Children whose parents had substance use problems and who lived in relatively high crime neighborhoods that were low on social cohesion and informal social control were less likely to be resilient versus non-resilient to maltreatment. Consistent with a cumulative stressors model of children's adaptation, individual strengths distinguished resilient from non-resilient children under conditions of low, but not high, family and neighborhood stress. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that for children residing in multi-problem families, personal resources may not be sufficient to promote their adaptive functioning.     

Health literacy and consumer health information

The rigours of the past few years have demonstrated the importance of good health literacy levels with the imperative of being able to obtain and interpret information to maintain and improve one's health never more apparent. With this in mind, this issue is focused on consumer health information, the gender and population group differences that exist in information seeking behaviour, the challenges of understanding medical explanations and terminology, and existing criteria to assess and ultimately produce better consumer health information.     

UNIMARC Format Relevance: Maintenance or Replacement?

This article presents an empirical study focused on a qualitative analysis of the UNIMARC format. An analysis of the structural quality of the data provided by the format is evaluated to determine its current suitability for meeting the requirements and trends in data architecture for the information network and the Semantic Web. Driven by a set of quality characteristics that identify weaknesses in the data schema that cannot be bridged by simply converting data to MARC XML or RDF/XML, we conclude that the UNIMARC format is not compliant with the current metadata schema desiderata and must be replaced.     

Retrieving and classifying instances of source code plagiarism

Automatic detection of source code plagiarism is an important research field for both the commercial software industry and within the research community. Existing methods of plagiarism detection primarily involve exhaustive pairwise document comparison, which does not scale well for large software collections. To achieve scalability, we approach the problem from an information retrieval (IR) perspective. We retrieve a ranked list of candidate documents in response to a pseudo-query representation constructed from each source code document in the collection. The challenge in source code document retrieval is that the standard bag-of-words (BoW) representation model for such documents is likely to result in many false positives being retrieved, because of the use of identical programming language specific constructs and keywords. To address this problem, we make use of an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of the source code documents. While the IR approach is efficient, it is essentially unsupervised in nature. To further improve its effectiveness, we apply a supervised classifier (pre-trained with features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs) on the top ranked retrieved documents. We report experiments on the SOCO-2014 dataset comprising 12K Java source files with almost 1M lines of code. Our experiments confirm that the AST based approach produces significantly better retrieval effectiveness than a standard BoW representation, i.e., the AST based approach is able to identify a higher number of plagiarized source code documents at top ranks in response to a query source code document. The supervised classifier, trained on features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs, is shown to effectively filter and thus further improve the ranked list of retrieved candidate plagiarized documents.     

Preschool teachers and classroom aides: Same context,similar perceptions of children's behaviors?

This study explored the correspondence and differences between school staff perceptions of preschool children's social skills and behavior problems. One hundred preschoolers were assessed by 14 pairs of teachers and classroom aides with the Preschool and Kindergarten Behavior Scales – 2^nd Edition (PKBS‐2 Portuguese version). Indexes of agreement and disagreement were calculated. Risk levels and item analyses of PKBS‐2 scores according to both informants' ratings were compared. A higher level of agreement was obtained for social skills scores than for behavior problems (mean correlation of .62). No statistically significant differences between informants were obtained for the risk levels, and item analyses revealed a similar pattern of behaviors that were most and least rated by both informants. Results indicate that the classroom aides' perspective on preschool assessment represents a reliable input, which justifies that they network with teachers in addressing preschoolers' social‐emotional and behavioral challenges.     

Students’ views of assessment in project-led engineering education: findings from a case study in Portugal

According to the demands of the Bologna process, new educational methods and strategies are needed in order to enhance student-centred learning. Project work is one of those approaches. This paper aims to evaluate the impact of project-led education (PLE) on students’ learning processes and outcomes, within the context of a first-year engineering programme. It explores students’ perceptions about assessment procedures and processes. Data collection was based on individual surveys at the end and the beginning of each PLE edition and through focus groups, after a period of six months. Findings are presented according to emerging themes from the data analysis, focusing mainly on students’ perspectives of learning and assessment, the role of formative and summative assessments in PLE and their impact on learning. Implications for improving assessment practices are discussed.     

Is accreditation ‘on the right track’? The views of Portuguese academics

In many countries, quality assurance systems rely on study programme accreditation. As with all quality assurance mechanisms, accreditation should also be continuously improved in order to maintain its relevance as a promoter of study programme quality. A way to move accreditation forward is by taking into account academics’ views, interests and needs about the process, since their support for it is paramount for its success and effectiveness. This paper analyses Portuguese academics’ knowledge and views on accreditation with the aim of understanding if the process is being supported and is on the right route for being effective. It is based on the analysis of 1484 academics’ answers to a questionnaire distributed in 16 higher education institutions. This analysis reveals a moderately positive attitude of academics towards accreditation, reflected in an only moderate knowledge of the process as well as in a mild agreement with its characteristics and implementation features. This suggests that there is room for improvement to bring this quality assurance mechanism closer to academics’ expectations and needs and therefore to improve accreditation’s effectiveness.

     

Perspectives on pedagogical change: instructor and student experiences of a newly implemented undergraduate engineering dynamics curriculum*

Engineering education has been slow to adopt research-based educational innovations. Few prior works on such adoption have investigated the combined classroom experiences of instructors and students when such innovations are being implemented. Therefore, this work focuses on the lived experiences of an instructor and her students when adopting an active, blended, and collaborative learning environment, known as Freeform, in a second-year dynamics course. Weekly reflections from the instructor were processed alongside student interviews using Thematic Analysis to discern prominent themes in their perspectives for comparison and discussion. The results indicate that the instructor navigated internal tensions between her previous instructional preferences and the philosophy and resources of Freeform. Similarly, students had to adapt to this new philosophy and suite of resources that were uncommon for their institution. Ultimately, this work highlights the contextual natures of teaching and learning, and how situational factors can influence educational innovation.     

A Model-Based Inquiry Sequence as a Heuristic to Evaluate Students’ Emotional,Behavioural, and Cognitive Engagement

Research in Science Education - In this study we address the need to promote student engagement with school science and the need to measure a more comprehensive conception of engagement considering...