The Court Is Now in Session: Professor Discourse on Student Attrition

This article presents the results of a discourse analysis of semi-structured interviews with professors from nine Russian universities. This analysis focuses on narratives of student attrition and its causes and reveals the generally accusatory nature of the professor discourse. All the narratives can be integrated and described in terms of the metaphor of the trial. In its most obvious form, the accusation that students are to blame for attrition is developed as a type of discourse that can be called prosecutorial, but it can also be developed in speeches resembling those made by defense attorneys and judges. These three types of discourse build figurative barriers between the university and professors, on the one hand, and students, on the other hand. These barriers encourage professors to feel uninvolved in student attrition. Not one of the three discourse types articulates the university's mission or problematizes the principles and goals of its activities. We suggest that the “bad student” discourse reflects some real problems associated with the massification of education and inevitable changes to the student body. An analysis of the professor discourse allows us to hypothesize that their response to these changes is limited to stating the problems and disassociating themselves from them. The construction of figurative barriers may result in professors' self-distancing not only from students, but also from the changes affecting the education system. Such self-distancing complicates the process of adapting to these changes and makes it difficult to control.     

A Review and Analysis of Selected School Climate Measures

Although it is widely agreed that there is no universally accepted definition for school climate, most professionals ground it in shared beliefs, values, and attitudes reflecting the quality and character of life in schools. In this article, we review and analyze measures accessible to school personnel charged with documenting and monitoring school climate. We document core features of four scientifically sound and comprehensive measures of school climate. We believe our work serves as a selective consumer's guide for school personnel engaged in important levels of decision-making related to monitoring and improving the quality and character of interactions that represent academic and behavior standards in schools.     

Cognitive moderators of children's adjustment to stressful divorce events: the role of negative cognitive errors and positive illusions

This study examined whether children's cognitive appraisal biases moderate the impact of stressful divorce-related events on psychological adjustment in 355 children ages 9 to 12, whose families had experienced divorce within the past 2 years. Multiple regression indicated that endorsement of negative cognitive errors for hypothetical divorce events moderates the relations between stressful divorce events and self- and maternal reports of internalizing and externalizing symptoms, but only for older children. Positive illusions buffer the effects of stressful divorce events on child-reported depression and mother-reported externalizing problems. Implications of these results for theories of stress and coping, as well as for interventions for children of divorced families, are discussed.     

The dimensions of maltreatment: introduction

This special issue includes an introduction and seven papers exploring dimensions of maltreatment including type, severity, chronicity, and substantiation status of referrals to CPS, utilizing a subsample of the LONGSCAN studies. Each paper examines one of the dimensions of maltreatment from various perspectives to determine if different conceptualizations of a dimension, examined in isolation, account for different amounts of variation in child outcomes. A final paper assesses the relationship of the combined maltreatment dimensions, including interactions, on a single sample of maltreated children from the LONGSCAN study. This final paper explores the individual contribution of the "best" conceptualizations of the maltreatment dimensions in relation to each other, and to the 10 child outcomes of interest. Implications of the findings from these papers for future research on dimensions of child maltreatment are discussed in two independent commentaries.     

Comparing the effects of different book reading techniques on young children’s language development

The purpose of this research study is to compare the effects of digital, dialogic and traditional reading on children’s language development aged 48–66 months. Fifty-six randomly selected children enrolled in three different classrooms in a public preschool in Turkey participated in the study. The three classrooms were again randomly assigned as digital, dialogic and traditional reading groups. During the reading activities, a total of 24 storybooks were read by each group every three times in 8 weeks. While the children’s language scores (the receptive and expressive language scores) resulted in a significant increase in dialogic reading, the children’s language scores in a digital and traditional reading group slightly changed during the intervention. Alternatively, qualitative data suggested that the interaction between teacher and children and between children and children were very limited in a digital and traditional reading group and that limited interaction during reading was the underlying cause of the insignificant increase in children’s language scores.

     

Cultural conflicts of the child‐centered approach to early childhood education in Taiwan

This paper discusses the cultural conflicts around the Western notion of child‐centeredness in Taiwanese preschools. The implementation and translation of Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) in Taiwan is highlighted as an example to understand productions of differences, norms and cultural conflicts in Taiwanese early childhood education. Throughout this paper, it is argued that multiplicities and differences are not acknowledged but instead are dangerously ignored while assumptions are made about a singular norm and homogeneous universal standard. From this perspective, it is asserted that the global circulation of a particular Western notion of child‐centeredness should be (re)conceptualized as a cultural construct through which a particular system of reasoning or cultural knowledge is perpetuated.     

Rediscovering Development in Infancy

This commentary endorses J. Kagan’s (2008) conclusion that many of the most dramatic findings on early perceptual, cognitive, and social competencies are ambiguous. It supports his call for converging research operations to disambiguate findings from single paradigms and single response indices. The commentary also argues that early competencies must be placed into a longitudinal framework, thereby allowing researchers to (a) identify whether regressive phenomena play a role in skill development, (b) understand what functions (if any) given skills play in their precocious manifestations and whether these functions are comparable in later instantiations of skills, and (c) avoid rich interpretations by identifying how robust a suspected competency is across contexts.     

Estimate of students’ workload and the impact of the evaluation system on students’ dedication to studying a subject in first-year engineering courses

In order to adapt current subjects to the ECTS credits system, it is necessary to estimate how much time a student has to invest in learning a subject. The Polytechnic Engineering School of the University of the Basque Country has made an initial study to investigate this matter in several subjects. A weekly questionnaire design was used for all the students in the class, supplemented, when necessary, by an individual interview, with student collaboration. The results indicate that the study rhythm and the number of hours are strongly conditioned by the evaluation system.     

‘Unless you are collaborating with a big name successful professor,you are unlikely to receive funding’

Women consistently remain underrepresented in senior academic roles within the academy worldwide. Academics increasingly require research funding to conduct research, leading to publications, both of which can then be used for promotion applications. This article explores fourteen academic women's experiences of the research funding process in New Zealand, to provide insights into one aspect of why this inequity continues. The findings identify institutional, personal, and funding issues that impact on women's application behaviour. Addressing these may assist in developing women's careers as academics and provides us with a more in-depth understanding of the issues than have previously been gleamed from large quantitative studies.