Death due to natural causes in abused children

Two families are discussed. In each family a child is abused and subsequently dies. Death was said to be due to natural causes. Difficulty usually arises in providing adequate help and care for these families     

Newborn pain cries and vagal tone: parallel changes in response to circumcision

Clinical studies have demonstrated that the cries of chronically stressed, medically compromised infants are characteristically higher and more variable in pitch than those of healthy infants. Other studies have indicated that the vagal tone of chronically stressed infants is significantly reduced in comparison to that of normal infants. A neural model of cry production has been proposed which suggests that decreased vagal tone among infants at risk may, in fact, be related to these increases in cry pitch. Using routine, unanesthetized circumcision as a model of stress, we were able to examine the relation between cry acoustics and vagal tone in normal, healthy newborns undergoing an acutely stressful event. Vocalizations, heart, and respiratory waveforms were continuously recorded from 49 (32 experimental; 17 control) 1-2-day-old, full-term infants during preoperative, surgical, and postoperative periods. Vagal tone, as measured by the amplitude of respiratory sinus arrhythmia extracted from heart period data, was significantly reduced during the severe stress of circumcision, and these reductions were paralleled by significant increases in the pitch of the infants' cries. In addition, individual differences in vagal tone measured prior to circumcision surgery were predictive of physiological and acoustic reactivity to subsequent stress. These results emphasize the potential role of vagal control of the autonomic nervous system during stress.     

Life-career counselling issues for youth in coastal and rural communities. The impact of economic, social and environmental restructuring

The young people in communities affected by economic andsocio-political changes have multiple counselling issues and needs. This paper presents the initial phase findings of a longitudinal research project focused on life-career education and counselling support for youth living in small coastal and rural communities in British Columbia, Canada. Increased understanding of these issues willhelp counsellors support these youth and their families.     

Acquisition of reading and written spelling in a transparent orthography: Two non parallel processes?

Reading and written spelling skills for words and non-words of varying length and orthographic complexity were investigated in normal Italian first and second graders. The regularity and transparency of the mapping between letters and phonemes make Italian orthography an unlikely candidate for discrepancies between reading and spelling to emerge. This notwithstanding, the results showed that reading accuracy is significantly better than spelling. The difference is particularly striking in first graders, but it is still evident in 2nd graders, though most strongly on non-words. The data show that reading and written spelling are non parallel processes and that the developmental asynchrony reflects a partial structural independence of the two systems.     

Bridge21 – exploring the potential to foster intrinsic student motivation through a team-based,technology-mediated learning model

It is generally accepted that intrinsic student motivation is a critical requirement for effective learning but formal learning in school places a huge reliance on extrinsic motivation to focus the learner. This reliance on extrinsic motivation is driven by the pressure on formal schooling to ‘deliver to the test’. The experience of the use of ICT in formal learning is marked with a naive and largely unfulfilled assumption that it would of itself promote a ‘game-changing’ shift in student motivation. This study investigates the effectiveness of a team-based, technology-mediated model called Bridge21 to encourage intrinsic student motivation. The data for the study come from 425 secondary school students, average age 16 years, who participated in workshops of 3.5 days in duration. The workshops took place in an out-of-school learning environment in one academic year. Bridge21 seeks to provide a vehicle to allow the transfer of control of learning from the teacher to the team and in this way to encourage and promote student autonomy. The principal findings reported in this paper are that participation in the workshops had a direct positive impact on the students’ perceptions around their learning and on their intrinsic motivation to learn.     

Student achievement and education system performance in a developing country

The global spread of national assessment testing activities, and the growing pressure to move beyond basic measures of participation in educational monitoring, means that student achievement measures are likely to become increasingly relevant indicators of systemic progress in the developing world. Using data from the CESSP project in Cambodia, this paper incorporates a standard decomposition framework to go beyond simple comparisons of average achievement levels over time in order to better understand the underlying dynamics of change. The results show that recent improvements in student achievement in Cambodia are attributable in part to changes in the composition of student cohorts, although there is some evidence of a tradeoff between increasing participation rates and average achievement. There is also some encouraging evidence that school quality is improving, especially in lower grades where the leveling off of participation is creating a policy window of opportunity. The framework can be easily applied to a growing body of assessment data in the developing world to aid both inter- and intra-national monitoring of education system progress.