Development and Testing of a Curriculum to Improve Decision-Making Skills in Middle and High School Students

Adolescence is a key developmental period for developing and strengthening brain circuits that underlie effective decision-making skills, which profoundly impact lifelong health and academic, professional, and economic achievement. But decision-making skills are learned rather than inherent. School presents an ideal environment for the direct instruction and frequent practice of decision-making skills, however, finding time in the school day is a challenge for contemporary educators. We have developed a learning curriculum that involves active student participation to strengthen decision-making skills that is sufficiently flexible and adaptable to be utilized in a wide variety of content-specific classwork. Using this curriculum, students show evidence of improved decision-making skills, including increased consideration of the number of factors that are relevant to their decision, the resources needed to make a particular decision, and both the short-term and long-term consequences of decisions.     

“All methods—and wedded to none”1: The deaf education methods debate and progressive educational reform in Toronto,Canada, 1922–1945

This article is about the deaf education methods debate in the public schools of Toronto, Canada. The author demonstrates how pure oralism (lip-reading and speech instruction to the complete exclusion of sign language) and day school classes for deaf schoolchildren were introduced as a progressive school reform in 1922. Plans for further oralist reforms in 1945 brought significant opposition from a deaf political organisation – the Ontario Association of the Deaf (OAD).

The author situates the Toronto battle over methods between progressive educators and deaf people in the longer historical and larger transnational context of debates over oral and manual methods. The author’s examination of the Toronto methods debate raises and answers crucial critical questions about the contested nature of progressive school reforms by examining grassroots responses to reform. The author also places significant emphasis on the effects of reforms on deaf young people who received instruction. The pure oralist method was never as successful for deaf young people as oralists claimed it could be. Yet deaf youngsters felt more ambivalent about the methods than hearing school officials and parents, and deaf adults, did. Historical issues in deaf education that the author examines continue to be controversial today.     

Natural hazard preparedness in an Auckland community: child and community perceptions

Community engagement in natural hazard preparedness is crucial to ensure sustainable initiatives. Children are important members of communities, and can actively contribute to community preparedness. This article presents research undertaken with 11- to 12-year-old students from a school in Auckland, New Zealand, and leaders associated with the school community regarding their perceptions of the role of schools, communities and children in natural hazard preparedness. The findings show that the students believe they can be effective in promoting preparedness in their school, homes and community, and act as leaders in this capacity. Community leaders stated that preparedness actions should be culturally relevant, community initiated and owned and inclusive of child perspectives. From the combined perspectives of students and community leaders, this work concludes that emergency management must engage in culturally responsive ways with Māori and Pacific communities to enable community preparedness initiatives that are tailored to the cultural values and practices of communities most at risk from natural hazards. Further, it concludes that children have an important voice in community preparedness, which could be encouraged through school and community initiatives.     

Predicting long-term outcomes for women sexually abused in childhood: contribution of abuse severity versus family environment

OBJECTIVE: Child sexual abuse (CSA) has been associated with adverse adult psychosocial outcomes, although some reports describe minimal long-term effects. The search for explanations for the heterogeneous outcomes in women with CSA has led to an examination of a range of CSA-related factors, from the severity of individual CSA incidents to the childhood family environment. This study compares three factors for predicting adult outcomes: a multidimensional CSA Severity Scale, the presence or absence of CSA, and family environment. METHODS: The effect of CSA on adult outcomes was examined among 290 community-dwelling women raised in intact families. Standardized measures and a focused interview were used to collect data, with siblings as collateral informants. RESULTS: Comparison of a multidimensional CSA Severity Scale to a dichotomous measure of the presence or absence of CSA showed that the Severity Scale did not have greater predictive value for adult outcomes than the dichotomous measure, nor was it as parsimonious. Childhood family environment scales added significantly to the predictive ability of the dichotomous measure. CONCLUSION: The specific characteristics of a CSA experience may be less important than the occurrence of CSA and the family environment of women for predicting long-term outcomes.     

Building a new culture of teaching & learning

The search is on for new and powerful ways to engage students, but today's campuses need more than new techniques. They need to build a culture where these new approaches can take hold and thrive.     

It's a Breakthrough – An Account of New Resources for Schools

Breakthrough is a new publicationproviding teachers with informationand activities about scientists pastand present. This short paper discusses theneed for such resources and describesinitial attempts to meet that need on aregular basis.     

Actual Texts,Possible Meanings: The Uses of Poetry and the Subjunctification of Experience

Abstract

Jerome Bruner’s experiment over 30 years ago suggested that imaginative literature had greater affordances for the ‘subjunctification’ of experience by those who heard it read aloud than did transactional prose such as a news article. By ‘subjunctification’, Bruner meant the capacity to use the resource (the short story, for example) to transform one’s experience of the world, to render understanding in more complex ways and to do more than get things done as they have always been done. This paper reports on a small-scale replication of the experiment that sought to measure differences in the affordances of poetry being read aloud compared to hearing a short story or a news article.