Examining the Perspectives of Latino Families of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Towards Advocacy

Rapidly becoming the largest ethnic group of American students, compared to White students with disabilities, Latino students with disabilities receive less services and their parents are more likely to struggle to receive services. Yet, it is unclear how Latino families advocate for their children with disabilities including how cultural values facilitate their advocacy efforts. In this study, four focus groups were conducted with 46 Latino parents of children with autism spectrum disorder. Parents reported advocating by being assertive but not aggressive, being involved in school activities, communicating with the school and documenting the communication, and relying on knowledge and faith. Parents also reported facilitators (i.e., knowledge and resources, increased parent-school communication, and greater peer support) and barriers (i.e., poor school experiences, school related-stress, and stigma and discrimination) to advocacy. Implications for research, policy, and practice are discussed.     

Systemic cognitive-developmental therapy: A counselling model and an integrative classification schema for working with partners and families

Systemic Cognitive-Developmental Therapy (SCDT) represents a holistic, non-pathological, and integrative approach to partner and family counselling. The model directly links developmental constructs to the counselling process and offers specific assessment and treatment strategies that can be easily learned and applied in the immediacy of the counselling encounter. Additionally, it offers a classification schema that clinicians can use to organize familiar counselling and therapy approaches into a developmental framework. This article introduces the theory and practice of SCDT, illustrates the techniques and strategies specific to the model, and provides illustrative partner, family, and client examples for clarification.Paper presented in April, 1994 at the International Conference on Counselling in the Family in München, Germany, sponsored by the International Round Table for the Advancement of Counselling.     

Risk Factors,Resilience, and Psychological Distress Among Holocaust and Nonholocaust Surviviors in the Post-9/11 Environment

Many older adults have experienced or witnessed devastating life events including wars, hurricanes, and explosions. This study examined retraumatization and the relationship between certain risk factors, resilience, and psychological distress in the post-9/11 environment among 120 community-dwelling older adults. Results indicate that Holocaust survivors suffered more posttraumatic symptoms during the ongoing War on Terrorism than a comparison group. A significant contributor to posttraumatic symptomatology was anxiety followed by sense of safety, and survivor status. Clinicians should anticipate that older adults exposed again to trauma may experience posttraumatic symptomatology. Health-care practitioners should focus on distant history of trauma when assessing older adults for posttraumatic stress.     

Use of Generalizability Theory Within K–12 School-Based Assessment: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Empirical Literature

ABSTRACT

Generalizability Theory (GT) offers several advantages relevant to educational contexts, including the fact that it can be used to estimate multiple sources of variance (e.g., raters, forms) simultaneously and to derive coefficients for the purposes of both relative and absolute decision making. Although GT has been increasingly applied in recent years to assessment data in K–12 school settings, analysis and critique of its application has not yet taken place. The goals of the current article were therefore to (1) undertake a systematic review of the school-based assessment literature in order to identify relevant applications of this statistical framework and (2) assess the degree of consistency between methodological recommendations for use of GT and reporting practices within this literature. In addition to describing the current state of this literature, suggestions for strengthening future applications are provided.     

The underachievement of girls in physics: Towards explanations

The recently initiated debate on the relationship between science and health education is discussed. The notions of ‘everyday’, ‘scientific’ and ‘applied’ knowledge are explored through interview material gathered from a sample of 15‐year old pupils. The topic of the interviews was the common cold. The pupils’ levels of biological knowledge, their mode of applying it, and the frameworks of their thinking about infection and related issues were investigated. It is argued that no simple ‘translation’ of scientific to health knowledge is possible. Some of the complexities of the relationship are explored. In particular, the implications of non‐scientific ('lay’ or ‘traditional') knowledge are taken up and it is suggested that scientific knowledge may face considerable obstacles in displacing these.

     

Representing learning designs – making design explicit and shareable

Most teachers’ design practice is implicit and practice based, focusing primarily on discipline content. In recent years, a number of visual design representations have emerged that help guide teachers’ design practice, enabling them to create explicit designs, which can then be shared and discussed with others. These design representations help guide the design process and help teachers to think beyond content to the learning activities the learners will be engaged with and the ultimate learner experience. The paper will describe the representations and draw on empirical evidence of their use in a range of contexts, including the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded OULDI project, the European Union (EU)-funded Design Practice project and the Hewlett-funded OLnet project. It will also report on their use in a number of workshops being undertaken at Leicester University, UK and Wollongong University, Australia.