International education,the formation of capital and graduate employment: Chinese accounting graduates’ experiences of the Australian labour market

Since the late 1970s, international education has steadily gained in popularity in China. An emerging middle class seeks to strengthen its position in China’s rapidly stratifying society under its socialist market economy with the shift from wealth creation for all to wealth concentration for a few. Previously, a foreign qualification was considered a passport to success in either the host or home country’s labour market. But the growing popularity of overseas study, coupled with the massification of the Chinese higher education, means Chinese international students are seeking to distinguish themselves in an increasingly competitive global labour market. This longitudinal study of international graduates, backgrounded by Australian employer perceptions, examines the journeys of 13 Chinese accounting graduates as they attempt to transition from an Australian university into the Australian labour market. Bourdieu’s thinking tools of field, capital, disposition and habitus are utilised to consider how different cultural, social and linguistic capitals inform employer understandings of ‘employability’ meant Chinese accounting graduates significantly adjusted their life goals.     

Multidimensional Scaling Analysis of Growth and Change

Latent growth curve modeling provides a powerful and flexible tool for researchers to study individual differences in change as well as the correlates and predictors of change. Recent developments in estimation and hypothesis testing procedures are largely based on confirmatory structural equation approaches. In this article, an alternative exploratory approach is proposed for the analysis of growth and change using multidimensional scaling (MDS). When applied to growth data, it is a growth pattern recognition technique that partitions individual differences into initial level and growth pattern components. When applied to other longitudinal data, it can be used to study change patterns. A math achievement data set is used to illustrate the growth modeling method and a mood variable is used to illustrate change modeling. The strengths and limitations of the MDS growth profile analysis are discussed.     

Improving the Predictive Validity of Reading Comprehension Using Response Times of Correct Item Responses

Response times have often been used as ancillary information to improve parameter estimation. Under the dual processing theory, assuming reading comprehension requires an automatic process, a fast, correct response is an indicator of effective automatic processing. A skilled, automatic comprehender should be high in response accuracy and low in response times. Following this argument, several questions were addressed in this study. First, individuals with higher ability endorsed a correct response more quickly in the reading comprehension assessment, suggesting correct response times provide useful information in discriminating individuals of different abilities. Second, in terms of predicting an external criterion of reading proficiency, the increment of predictive validity of categorized correct response times was larger than the incremental validity of continuous response times based on both correct and incorrect response times. An index reflecting both accuracy and response time yielded higher incremental validity than indices reflecting response time only. Results support response time as manifesting a dimension of interest in its own right, over its inclusion as an ancillary dimension in a multidimensional model.     

Environmental Education Research in the Classroom: a shared methodological reflection by the teacher and the researcher

This article constitutes an attempt by a teacher and a researcher to jointly present their dual perspectives on the experience of a pilot phase of school‐based research. The discussion focuses upon the methodological difficulties that we each experienced both before, and during, the period of the research. In light of these, the article discusses concrete ways in which the methodology of the broader study could be improved, and considers the deeper issues relating to teacher‐researcher interaction which have emerged through this shared methodological reflection. We see this article as contributing to the growth of collaborative writing by researchers and research participants, and furthering the ongoing methodological dialogue within environmental education research.     

Students as Partial Employees: A Metaphor for the Student-Institution Interaction

We propose a new metaphor for describing the interaction between students and their institutions of higher education, students as partial employees. Several current metaphors anchored in the quality movement are reviewed to provide a background for this new way of viewing today's college students. This article provides the readers with examples of the metaphor in use and describes why the partial employee transcends the academic and administrative structures of higher education.     

Cognition and creativity

Cognitive research on creativity is both traditional and innovative. It is traditional in the sense that many of the well-recognized processes, structures, and stores from mainstream cognitive psychology have been used to understand creative thinking. It is innovative because there is a need to understand processes which are not recognized unless one is specifically interested in creativity. Some of these are inherently subjective, a fact which is often disregarded by those hoping for a traditionally scientific analysis. Still, much of the interest in the cognitive sciences concerns how new constructs come into being; and anyone interested in that is in fact thinking about creativity. That is creativity. This article reviews several traditional cognitive topics, including knowledge, memory, classification, judgment, and categorization, and describes how each can influence creative thinking. It also presents an original model of creative thinking with problem finding, ideation, and judgmental processes as primary components, and knowledge and motivation as secondary (contributing but not controlling) components. Several issues are covered, including the relegation of motivation, the distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge, and the potential for knowledge to both facilitate and inhibit creative ideation.     

Dynamic prediction characteristics of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory

OBJECTIVES: Risk measures are commonly used to evaluate outcomes in child abuse prevention and intervention programs. This study examined whether pre-intervention to post-intervention changes on the Child Abuse Potential Inventory (CAP) Abuse Scale corresponded to actual changes in risk for future reports of maltreatment and evaluated the validity of several algorithms for classifying clinically significant change. METHOD: Participants in the study were 459 parents participating in any one of 27 community-based family preservation and family support programs. Most parents were low-income mothers with a variety of social risk indicators, about a third of whom would be classified as high-risk by the CAP Abuse Scale. Participants were administered the CAP at program enrollment, then at completion of the intervention (median time=150 days), then followed for an average of approximately 2 years for future official maltreatment reports. Dynamic predictive validity of the CAP Abuse Scale was modeled by comparing survival models using a time-dependent structure of pre- and post-intervention scores to identically structured models using only a pre-intervention score. RESULTS: Pre-intervention CAP Abuse Scale scores demonstrated incremental future predictive validity. However, score changes failed to correspond to changes in likelihood of future abuse. Models using pre-intervention scores only were more predictive than time-dependent score models, and pre-intervention scores were better predictors than post-intervention scores of post-intervention CPS referrals. Common algorithms for classifying clinically significant change yielded results that could be counter-intuitive and misleading. For example, participants classified as improved on these algorithms were actually at similar or even higher risk than those classified as unchanged or worse. CONCLUSIONS: The results strongly supported the static predictive validity of the CAP and the use of the CAP for screening purposes. The results did not support the dynamic predictive validity of the CAP. Results of exploratory analyses suggested the possibility that the changes observed on the CAP Abuse Scale reflected changes in subscales assessing subjective distress or parenting attitudes, which may be markers for initial risk but when changed, do not necessarily translate into actual changes in future maltreatment behavior. Although replication and extension are needed before drawing firm conclusions, the current study raises questions about the common practice of using risk instruments as proxy measures for child maltreatment risk in intervention and prevention programs.