Belief correlates of perceived addiction in young smokers

Results from a survey of smoking prevalence and smoking beliefs among 10,579 pupils from 10 co-educational comprehensive schools from the Bristol conurbation suggest that there is more to adolescent smoking than a vulnerability to peer group pressure. Those adolescents who saw themselves as more addicted, those who anticipate more difficulty in stopping and/or reported more craving for cigarettes had more «external control» beliefs about their health, emphasized to a greater extent intrinsic enjoyment and the calming effect of smoking and rejected ideas that smoking by young people is motivated by the desire to look grown up or feel important. Young smokers appear to attribute their behaviour to the intrinsic benefits of smoking itself rather than to external pressure or to the desire to conform to peer group norms. The implications of these findings for health education programmes are discussed.     

Exploring the structure of the Watson–Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal: One scale or many subscales?

Critical thinking (CT) has been of longstanding interest among scholars, educators, and others who are concerned with thinking skills. The Watson–Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA) is the oldest and among the most widely used and studied CT measure. It was constructed around five subscales (or CT skills): inference, recognition of assumptions, deduction, interpretation, and evaluation of arguments. This paper describes a two part analysis of the psychometric properties of the WGCTA, based on 13 sets of subscale inter-correlations and 60 sets of subscale means retrieved from published studies. We performed a meta-analysis on the inter-correlations of the10 combinations of subscales and found that all of the average correlations that resulted were significant, but that all but one was significantly heterogeneous. Subsequently, we conducted principal components analysis on 60 subscale means of two different versions of the WGCTA. Each produced a one-factor solution, accounting for 82.69% and 79.55% of the total variance, respectively. Together these two parts of this study suggest that the WGCTA should be viewed as a measure of general competency, and that the subscales should not be interpreted individually.     

Investigating teachers’ explanations for aggressive classroom discipline strategies in China and Australia

Student misbehaviour can provoke aggressive teacher management (e.g. yelling in anger), adversely effecting students’ learning and attitudes toward school. To investigate this phenomenon, data were obtained from 75 Chinese (typically Eastern) and 192 Victorian (typically Western) secondary teachers who self-reported aggressive management. Results: 49% of Chinese and 59% of Australian teachers adopt aggressive behaviours rarely to sometimes; and, 9% of Chinese and 13% of Australian teachers sometimes or more frequently. The teachers were assessed for levels of support for Attribution, Attachment or Efficacy theory as explanations. The only significant differences were found for Attachment theory with Chinese teachers reporting significantly more support. National setting explained 29% of the variance independent of gender, levels of aggression and years of experience.     

Young adults and everyday-life information: The role of news media

There is a paucity of research examining the everyday-life information seeking of young people, especially investigating the role that the news media has in providing information to young people for use in their everyday lives. A qualitative, interpretivist approach is adopted, involving 34 students, ages 18 to 25, from an Australian university. First, 20 students were interviewed about their news seeking (including topics and sources). Then 14 students participated in verbal protocol analysis, which involved a series of tasks concerning online and print newspapers. Lastly, students were interviewed about how they sought everyday-life information and whether they thought that they had incidentally acquired or encountered information on everyday-life topics in online or print newspapers in the recent past. Findings indicated that, contrary to expectations, traditional print media still played a role for young people, and social media were perceived as important for communication with friends, rather than for news gathering. Purposeful information seeking was more likely to occur online, but both print and online newspapers retained an incidental role in providing information to students for their everyday lives. Participants used a range of media to suit their particular needs and purposes. Thus, access to a wide variety of sources is important for everyday-life information seeking (ELIS) by young people.     

Gateway finder in large graphs: problem definitions and fast solutions

Given a graph, how to find a small group of ‘gateways’, that is a small subset of nodes that are crucial in connecting the source to the target? For instance, given a social network, who is the best person to introduce you to, say, Chris Ferguson, the poker champion? Or, given a network of people and skills, who is the best person to help you learn about, say, wavelets? We formally formulate this problem in two scenarios: Pair-Gateway and Group-Gateway. For each scenario, we show that it is sub-modular and thus it can be solved near-optimally. We further give fast, scalable algorithms to find such gateways. Extensive experimental evaluations on real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods.     

Transformational Teaching: Theoretical Underpinnings, Basic Principles, and Core Methods

Approaches to classroom instruction have evolved considerably over the past 50?years. This progress has been spurred by the development of several learning principles and methods of instruction, including active learning, student-centered learning, collaborative learning, experiential learning, and problem-based learning. In the present paper, we suggest that these seemingly different strategies share important underlying characteristics and can be viewed as complimentary components of a broader approach to classroom instruction called transformational teaching. Transformational teaching involves creating dynamic relationships between teachers, students, and a shared body of knowledge to promote student learning and personal growth. From this perspective, instructors are intellectual coaches who create teams of students who collaborate with each other and with their teacher to master bodies of information. Teachers assume the traditional role of facilitating students’ acquisition of key course concepts, but do so while enhancing students’ personal development and attitudes toward learning. They accomplish these goals by establishing a shared vision for a course, providing modeling and mastery experiences, challenging and encouraging students, personalizing attention and feedback, creating experiential lessons that transcend the boundaries of the classroom, and promoting ample opportunities for preflection and reflection. We propose that these methods are synergistically related and, when used together, maximize students’ potential for intellectual and personal growth.     

Word Reading Fluency: Role of Genome‐Wide Single‐Nucleotide Polymorphisms in Developmental Stability and Correlations With Print Exposure

The genetic effects on individual differences in reading development were examined using genome‐wide complex trait analysis (GCTA) in a twin sample. In unrelated individuals (one twin per pair, n = 2,942), the GCTA‐based heritability of reading fluency was ~20%–29% at ages 7 and 12. GCTA bivariate results showed that the phenotypic stability of reading fluency from 7 to 12 years (r = 0.69) is largely driven by genetic stability (genetic r = 0.69). Genetic effects on print exposure at age 12 were moderate (~26%) and correlated with those influencing reading fluency at 12 (genetic r = 0.89), indicative of a gene–environment correlation. These findings were largely consistent with quantitative genetic twin analyses that used both twins in each pair (n = 1,066–1,409).     

Comorbidity of PTSD in anxiety and depressive disorders: Prevalence and shared risk factors

The present study aims to assess comorbidity of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in anxiety and depressive disorders and to determine whether childhood trauma types and other putative independent risk factors for comorbid PTSD are unique to PTSD or shared with anxiety and depressive disorders. The sample of 2402 adults aged 18–65 included healthy controls, persons with a prior history of affective disorders, and persons with a current affective disorder. These individuals were assessed at baseline (T0) and 2 (T2) and 4 years (T4) later. At each wave, DSM-IV-TR based anxiety and depressive disorder, neuroticism, extraversion, and symptom severity were assessed. Childhood trauma was measured at T0 with an interview and at T4 with a questionnaire, and PTSD was measured with a standardized interview at T4. Prevalence of 5-year recency PTSD among anxiety and depressive disorders was 9.2%, and comorbidity, in particular with major depression, was high (84.4%). Comorbidity was associated with female gender, all types of childhood trauma, neuroticism, (low) extraversion, and symptom severity. Multivariable significant risk factors (i.e., female gender and child sexual and physical abuse) were shared among anxiety and depressive disorders. Our results support a shared vulnerability model for comorbidity of anxiety and depressive disorders with PTSD. Routine assessment of PTSD in patients with anxiety and depressive disorders seems warranted.