Right Tracks—Wrong Rails: The Development of Generic Skills in Higher Education

Higher education is being encouraged to provide the graduates needed by commerce and industry in order to ensure economic development and enhance competitiveness. Throughout Europe and America, recent findings indicate that employers show a preference for teamwork, communication, and self-skilIs above knowledge, degree classification, intelligence, and reputation of the institution the graduate attended. Progressively less emphasis on traditional degrees and more on the validation of competence is clearly discernible. But the question persists: Are our higher education institutions meeting the challenge? Employing a large-scale extensive questionnaire, this study explores student and academic staff views within a higher education institution in the U.K. Results indicate that while staff and students ascribe equal importance to key generic skills, they differ in their views of the extent to which a number of such skills are currently being developed through course content. It is time for higher education to address explicitly the issue of the place of transferable skis in the curriculum. This problem is not unique to Europe. Indeed, the need for a concerted effort by teachers and policymakers in higher education to help rebuild American workforce competence has been repeatedly highlighted. Development work in this area should be a priority.     

Psychometric Properties of the Parenting Stress Index in a Sample of Low-Income African-American Mothers of Infants and Toddlers

Examined the psychometric properties of the Parenting Stress Index (PSI) in 191 low-income, urban African-American mothers of infants and toddlers recruited from a primary health care facility. The subscales of the PSI had acceptable levels of internal consistency and stability over six months. Concurrent validity, examined through self-report and observational measures, revealed high convergence with mothers reporting consistent levels of stress across measures. Factor analysis suggested a 3-factor solution including parent, child, and parent-child interaction factors. In comparison with the nonnative sample, mothers reported elevated levels of stress on three of the seven parent subscales and all of the child subscales. These findings support the consistency of the psychometric properties of the PSI across samples that vary in ethnicity and socioeconomic status.     

The second deficit: An investigation of the independence of phonological and naming-speed deficits in developmental dyslexia

An increasing body of dyslexia researchdemonstrates, in addition to phonologicaldeficits, a second core deficit in theprocesses underlying naming speed. Thehypothesized independence of phonologicalawareness and naming-speed variables inpredicting variance in three aspects of readingperformance was studied in a group of 144severely-impaired readers in Grades 2 and 3. Stepwise regression analyses were conducted onthese variables, controlling for the effects ofSES, age, and IQ. Results indicated thatphonological measures contribute more of thevariance to those aspects of reading skill thatinvolve decoding or word attack skills;naming-speed measures contribute more to skillsinvolved in word identification. Subtypeclassification findings were equally supportiveof the independence of the two deficits: 19%of the sample had single phonological deficits;15% had single naming-speed deficits; 60% had double-deficits; and 6% could not be classified. The implications of these findingsfor diagnosis and intervention are discussed.     

The Selfie Study: Archetypes and Motivations in Modern Self-Photography

Photographic self-portraits have existed since the mid-19th century, but the emergence of digital photography and social media as tools that facilitate rapid visual communication have contributed to a surge of self-photographs, or selfies, and the practice has become a ubiquitous part of today's culture. This exploratory research employed a Q-method analysis to quantitatively and qualitatively identify what archetypal motivations exist among individuals who take and share selfies. The findings largely validated past scholarship on the uses and gratifications of photography, new media, and visual rhetoric individually, but also identified that the motivation to take and share selfies is a complex balance of preservation, communication, and entertainment for most individuals who engage in the practice.