Casual Academic Staff in an Australian University: Marginalised and excluded

Abstract

The transition from a planned centralist economy to a market economy over the last decade of the 20th century has presented Russian universities with many profound challenges. These challenges require universities to review and consider their organisational culture and deserve careful study. This paper describes the changes that have taken place at Tomsk Polytechnic University ‐ one of oldest, largest and leading Russian universities.     

Play therapy with emotionally damaged adolescents

Abstract

Adolescence is a critical period of development for all individuals, but particularly for those who have suffered earlier emotional difficulties or abuse. If these problems go unresolved, patterns of behaviour which become established during this period may be more difficult to change later on. However, more traditional talk therapies may be resisted by adolescents. This article argues that non-directive play therapy, given age-appropriate adaptations, offers an approach which, since it encompasses both play and verbal communication, is well suited to addressing adolescent concerns, particularly those of early adolescence.This argument is illustrated by two accounts of therapy with a boy and a girl, both in early adolescence, which show how a more traditional non-directive counselling approach was combined with play therapy by the adolescents themselves, allowing exploration of emotional difficulties on all levels of mental functioning. The cases show how traumatic or painful early memories may be reworked on a bodily and emotional level, without the feeling of over-intrusion risked by a directive or interpretive stance.     

Early years practitioners’ views on early personal,social and emotional development

Current policy guidance stresses the need for early identification of obstacles to learning and appropriate intervention. New standards for learning (Early Years Foundation Stage) place personal, social and emotional development (PSED) as central to learning and development. This paper reports a survey and follow-up interviews with early years practitioners on early identification and intervention of young children with difficulties in PSED. As previous research with primary and secondary colleagues has shown, practitioners find low-level disturbance occurring most frequently. Although aggressive behaviour (hurting others, kicking, hitting and biting) is a concern, not attending or listening and immature social skills (lack of sharing and turn-taking, and inability to relate to other children) is a bigger challenge. Practitioners report a range of strategies for formally teaching relevant skills but point to the greater challenge of supporting recent immigrants where different cultural and social norms need to be understood.     

Book Review

The most important thing for learners in Programming Language subject is problem solving. During the practical programming project, various problems may occur and learners usually need consultation from the senior programmers (i.e. the experts) to assist them in solving the problems. Thus, the inquiry-based learning with learning forum is applied to assist the programming problem solving. However, even if the learning community of the forum is provided, the finding of trustworthy and available experts for improving the quality of social interactions is still difficult for students. Therefore, the idea of applying the social network service of Web 2.0 with the trustworthy experts finding service is proposed to actively consult the experts based on their topic of interest, trustworthiness, and availability. The experts' topic interest and trustworthy degree are obtained from the experts' posting documents on the forum. To maintain the dynamic discussion topics and avoid the synonym problem on the forum, the Programming Capability Ontology is constructed as the consensus taxonomy by the distributed clustering algorithm. The self-organized ontology maintenance scheme is also proposed to maintain and update the new topic keywords in the ontology. The availability of experts can be approximately calculated from their online presence log. Moreover, the updating of the experts' presence value is modeled by the fading probability function of the Ant Colony Algorithm. Finally, the quality of the expert finding service and learners' satisfaction with the expert finding service has been evaluated. The experimental result shows that the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach are satisfactory.     

From Log Files to Assessment Metrics: Measuring Students' Science Inquiry Skills Using Educational Data Mining

We present a method for assessing science inquiry performance, specifically for the inquiry skill of designing and conducting experiments, using educational data mining on students' log data from online microworlds in the Inq-ITS system (Inquiry Intelligent Tutoring System; www.inq-its.org). In our approach, we use a 2-step process: First we use text replay tagging, a type of rapid protocol analysis in which categories are developed and, in turn, used to hand-score students' log data. In the second step, educational data mining is conducted using a combination of the text replay data and machine-distilled features of student interactions in order to produce an automated means of assessing the inquiry skill in question; this is referred to as a detector. Once this detector is appropriately validated, it can be applied to students' log files for auto-assessment and, in the future, to drive scaffolding in real time. Furthermore, we present evidence that this detector developed in 1 scientific domain, phase change, can be used—with no modification or retraining—to effectively detect science inquiry skill in another scientific domain, density.     

Standards-Based Grading: History Adjusted True Score

There has been much research and discussion on the principles of standards-based grading, and there is a growing consensus of best practice. Even so, the actual process of implementing standards-based grading at a school or district level can be a significant challenge. There are very practical questions that remain unclear, such as how the grades should be calculated. Common methods include a simple average, averaging only the more recent scores, mathematical models of growth over time, and basic teacher judgment. It is difficult to choose a single method that is justifiable in all circumstances. This article proposes a new method, the history-adjusted true score, that can be applied in a wide variety of situations. A rigorous method of evaluating each grading method is also described.     

Online Professional Development for K–12 Educators: Benefits for School Districts with Applications for Community College Faculty Professional Development

Hillsborough Community College's IT3-Professional Development Services makes available to educators in the school district of Hillsborough County a series of online courses focused on professional development. The program boasts a retention rate exceeding 78%, with over 500 educators served. The program is self funded and pays for itself and an instructor.     

Prediction from Latent Classes: A Demonstration of Different Approaches to Include Distal Outcomes in Mixture Models

Including auxiliary variables such as antecedent and consequent variables in mixture models provides valuable insight in understanding the population heterogeneity embodied by a latent class variable. The model building process regarding how to include predictors/correlates and outcomes of the latent class variables into mixture models is an area of active research. As such, new methods of including these variables continue to emerge and best practices for the application of these methods in real data settings (including simple guidelines for choosing amongst them) are still not well established. This paper focuses on one type of auxiliary variable—distal outcomes—providing an overview of the methods currently available for estimating the effects of latent class membership on subsequent distal outcomes. We illustrate the recommended methods in the software packages Mplus and Latent Gold using a latent class model to capture population heterogeneity in students’ mathematics attitudes, linking latent class membership to two distal outcomes.