School phobia and separation anxiety: Diagnostic and treatment comparisons

There exists substantial confusion regarding the comparative diagnostic criteria and treatment implications for school phobia and separation anxiety. A literature survey demonstrates the tendency of school personnel to put all youngsters exhibiting these disorders into one group called “school refusers.” Treatment issues are handled in a similar fashion despite accumulating evidence of treatment-relevant differences between the disorders. Variables that facilitate a finer diagnostic discrimination are presented. After reviewing pertinent treatment distinctions between the two disorders, specific behaviorally oriented methods are recommended.     

How students perceive teachers’ nonverbal and verbal communication at agricultural universities in Austria,Slovenia and Albania

Purpose: This study attempts to close the research gap created by the fact that existing studies neglect the problem of how effectively agricultural professors from different European countries communicate. The aim is to identify similarities and differences in the numbers of agricultural professors perceived by students as engaging in verbal and nonverbal immediacy communication.

Methodology: An online survey was conducted among students of agricultural universities from Austria, Slovenia and Albania.

Findings: The results show that professors of agriculture from Austria, Slovenia and Albania should generally not be satisfied with their own communication patterns and should thus try to improve their communication. The result also reveals cultural differences in the shares of agriculture professors employing different communication patterns in Austria, Slovenia and Albania. Compared to Austrian and Slovenian students, their Albanian peers perceive that most of their professors use nonverbal immediacy communication. According to Austrian students, the majority of their professors use verbal immediacy. On the contrary, Albanian students assessed that some of their professors employ verbal immediacy.

Practical Implications: The results show the professors of agriculture should improve the way they communicate to students. In particular, the Albanian professors should improve their verbal communication especially in terms of providing timely and quality feedback to students.

Theoretical implications: The study reveals differences in immediacy communication among countries (Austria, Slovenia and Albania) which the scientific literature considers to have a high-context culture.

Originality/Value: Given that no study has yet examined how students perceive professors’ communication in different European countries, this research helps understand the characteristics of agricultural professors’ communication.     

Body Dissatisfaction in College Women: Identification of Risk and Protective Factors to Guide College Counseling Practices

This study attempted to identify risk factors that are implicated in the body dissatisfaction of college women and the factors that may facilitate effective prevention and treatment efforts. Data collected from 215 female college students indicated that participants with (a) greater physical self‐concept, (b) less drive for thinness, and (c) greater social self‐esteem manifested less body dissatisfaction.     

Stabbing News

There is a comprehensive body of scholarly work regarding the way media represent crime and how it is constructed in the media narrative as a news item. These works have often suggested that in many cases public anxieties in relation to crime levels are not justified by actual data. However, few works have examined the gathering and dissemination of crime statistics by non-specialist journalists and the way crime statistics are gathered and used in the newsroom. This article seeks to explore in a comparative manner how journalists in newsrooms access and interpret quantitative data when producing stories related to crime. In so doing, the article highlights the problems and limitations of journalists in dealing with crime statistics as a news source, while assessing statistics-related methodologies and skills used in the newsrooms across the United Kingdom when producing stories related to urban crime.     

Community Child Care Inclusion: the development of two children

The development of two children with severe disabilities who were fully included in a community child care centre that implemented a developmentally appropriate play‐based curriculum is chronicled in this paper. The children's development was monitored over the course of a 9‐month school year using the traditional measure of a standardised assessment instrument, as well as monthly observations of the children in various play activities. The data are presented in a case study format and provide evidence that the children in this study made progress in all areas of development. The findings are important in that they show the children with severe disabilities progressed without intensive intervention, indicating that a play‐based curriculum utilising developmentally appropriate practice may provide an effective structure for the instruction of young children with disabilities.     

Where Theories of Mind Meet Magic: The Development of Children's Beliefs about Wishing

In two studies, we probed children's beliefs about wishing. In Study 1, we gathered initial data on 50 3- to 6-year-old children's concepts of wishing and beliefs about its efficacy, with both a semistructured interview and a variety of tasks. Results revealed considerable knowledge about wishing in young children, along with an age-related decrease in beliefs about its efficacy. Parents were not found to encourage differently the beliefs of children at different ages, nor were they found to begin actively discouraging such beliefs at any particular age. A moderate relation was found between environmental supports for wishing and children's beliefs in its efficacy. In Study 2, we continued to probe these issues and also address the nature of the broader conceptual context in which children situate their beliefs about wishing. Participants were 92 3- to 6-year-old children. Results of this study suggest that children may reconcile beliefs in the efficacy of wishing with knowledge about everyday mental-physical relations by situating these beliefs more within their emerging beliefs about magic than within their theories of mind.     

Correlations between the Woodcock-Johnson and the WISC-R for a behavior disordered population

Correlations between the Woodcock-Johnson Test of Cognitive Abilities (WJTCA) and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) were evaluated on a sample of 55 behavior disordered males, 28 of whom were also diagnosed as learning disabled. Concurrent validity for this sample was demonstrated by only a 2.33 point difference between the mean WJTCA Broad Cognitive score and the mean WISC-R Full Scale IQ score. Analysis of Pearson product-moment correlations between each WISC-R subtest and each Woodcock-Johnson cluster score substantiated previous assertions that the WJTCA is unduly weighted with Product-Dominant factors. Construct validity of some of the WJTCA clusters also was questioned. Implications of these results for behavior disordered populations were discussed.     

Exploration of the contribution of teachers’ knowledge about reading to their students’ improvement in reading

Recent studies of elementary teachers’ knowledge about reading have been built on the premise that teachers need thorough knowledge about language and reading processes, but these studies have provided only limited evidence that teachers’ performance on tests of such knowledge contributes to their students’ reading achievement. The present study was designed to examine the contribution of first- through third-grade teachers’ knowledge about early reading to their students’ improvement on tests of word analysis and reading comprehension, controlling for socio-demographic characteristics of students, their prior reading achievement, and teachers’ educational attainment, professional experiences, and socio-demographic characteristics. Preliminary analyses indicated that the test of teachers’ knowledge had adequate psychometric characteristics. However, performance on this measure of teachers’ knowledge did not significantly explain students’ improvement on the two reading subtests. The complexity of the factors that influence teachers’ knowledge acquisition and the context in which the study was carried out offer possible explanations for these results. In addition, teachers’ content knowledge about reading might not be closely associated with the practices they use in reading instruction, and therefore might not be significantly related to their students’ improvement in reading over a year.