Mental health professionals' experiences reporting suspected child abuse and maltreatment

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to provide systematic data on the experiences of mental health professionals (e.g., psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers) who reported cases of suspected child abuse and maltreatment concerning their clients. METHOD: Mail surveys were completed by 258 mental health professionals known to have reported a case of suspected child abuse and maltreatment to the New York State Central Register (NYSCR) in 1993. Subjects were asked to complete a survey describing their experience with making reports, referring to a specific case they reported. RESULTS: About 40% did not inform the client about the limits of confidentiality until reportable material came up. Most clinicians reported that informing clients about the limits of confidentiality did not deter them from entering treatment. Many clinicians learned about abuse/maltreatment after approximately 3 months into therapy. Even very experienced clinicians usually consulted with others before making the report. Clinicians most typically informed the client about the report directly and before it was made, but did not call the NYSCR in the presence of the client. Following the report, most clinicians performed additional activities such as calling clients and scheduling additional sessions. When clients evidenced resistance to continuing therapy, it usually dissipated after a brief period of time. In over 72% of the cases, making the report did not disrupt the relationship and in many instances it was helpful in the therapeutic process; about 27% were continuously resistant or terminated therapy shortly after the report was made. CONCLUSIONS: Implications for practice, training, program development, and research are discussed.     

The effects of preexposure to a warning or a safety signal on the acquisition of a two-way avoidance response in rats

Rats that were given nonreinforced preexposure to either a warning signal or a safety signal were significantly retarded in the subsequent learning of a two-way shock-avoidance response compared to rats that were not preexposed. These results are consistent with Mackintosh’s “learned-irrelevance” formulation of latent inhibition. They do not support a prediction derived from an extension of Kalat and Rozin’s “learned-safety” hypothesis. These findings suggest that preexposures in the total absence of aversive events do not endow a stimulus with safety properties.     

What is individualized instruction?

Individualized instruction is aphylum rather than aspecies of approaches to teaching. Problems of definition, usage, and shifting point of view contribute to the increasingly indiscriminate use of the term. One way of analyzing the collection of individualized programs, practices, and materials is to sort outfamilies of approaches and to organize them into a simple classification system according to their distinguishing characteristics. The differentspecies within families can be more precisely described in profiles that outline the treatment given to each major element of instruction. The ideal implicit in the programs seems to be separate, appropriate instruction for each student, but the ideal program has yet to be developed.

---

Résumé L'Instruction individualisée est unphylum plûtot qu'uneespèce d'approche à l'enseignement. Les problèmes de définition, d'usage, et de point de vue changeant contribuent au fait qu'on emploie ce terme de plus en plus sans discrimination. Une méthode d'analyser la collection des programmes et des matériaux individuels est de classer par catégories desfamilles d'approches selon leurs caractéristiques spécifiques. On peut décrire les divers genres dans les familles de façon plus précise en esquissant la méthode de traiter chaque élément d'instruction. II semble que l'idéal implicite des programmes est l'instruction séparée et propre à chaque étudiant, mais on n'a pas encore développé le programme idéal.

---

---

This article is based on a monograph in preparation at Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University. It will appear in the seriesTheory and Research in Teaching, A. A. Bellack, general editor.     

Universal and language-specific constraints on phonemic awareness: evidence from Russian–Hebrew bilingual children

The study tested phonemic awareness in the two languages of Russian (L1)–Hebrew (L2) sequential bilingual children (N = 20) using phoneme deletion tasks where the phoneme to be deleted occurred word initial, word final, as a singleton, or part of a cluster, in long and short words and stressed and unstressed syllables. The experiments were designed to test the effect of four linguistic factors on children’s phoneme deletion: phoneme position (initial, final), linguistic context (singleton, cluster), word length and stress. The results indicated that word length and stress confirmed previous findings in other languages demonstrating the universal validity of these factors. However, phoneme position and linguistic context gave rise to novel findings in the languages studied and provided evidence for language-specific effects on phonemic awareness reflecting onset-rime versus body-coda syllable structure differences. The results are discussed within the framework of universal versus language-specific constraints on phonemic awareness performance in different languages.