Do primary students understand how pregnancy can occur? A comparison of students in Jakarta,West Java,West Nusa Tenggara and South Sulawesi,Indonesia

In Indonesian primary schools, sex education is implicitly integrated into various related subjects, such as science, biology, social studies and religion. The technical facts of ovulation and sperm are mentioned in biology, although little or no connection is made between this process and sexual intercourse. By the end of primary school, therefore, children are likely to have a poor understanding of how pregnancy can occur. Given that young girls at this age have already experienced or will soon experience menarche, and given the increasing trend towards delaying the age at marriage in Indonesian society, this lack of knowledge places young people at risk of various negative consequences, including unwanted pregnancy. In this paper, we investigate the level of understanding regarding human reproduction amongst 1762 students attending the last year of primary school, distributed across 32 different schools in Indonesia. Despite the fact that all schools follow a national curriculum, our results reveal widespread variability in the students' comprehension of how pregnancy can occur. In particular, students attending Islamic religious schools and those in less developed provinces of Indonesia appear to have a much poorer understanding of the link between sexual intercourse and conception.     

Action learning as invigoration

The present account of action learning describes its adoption for pragmatic reasons by the University of the Third Age (U3A). The reason for the existence of this movement is the education of retired people. The account seeks to explain why the action learning method spread from one local U3A to another and across it to other local U3As. The case is that the directness of action and its power to involve people brought action learning a following among persons so that they could carry out specific activities even though the persons concerned would never have heard of the term action learning. The successful use of the method fed through into the users' minds and brought about a mode of thought, one which unconsciously was capable of extension into an outlook that could be applied to a variety of situations. Thus two types of learning took place: that between U3As and that within U3As.     

A Report on the Montreux International Audio-Visual Symposium

The first International Audio-Visual Symposium was held in Montreux from 15-20 June 1980. The event will be held biannually.     

Modern Language Teaching in Australian Universities

This paper reports the attitudes of academics teaching languages other than English in Australian universities. The data are derived from a national survey in 1984 which asked a range of questions ranging from background details on students, characteristics of course structures, methods of teaching, and perceptions of the attitudes of students to numerous issues relevant to the teaching of languages. The responses of these language teachers are analysed with respect to theories of language teaching. The matters of major concern to language teachers highlighted by the study are shown to be relevant to current debate about the future of modern, especially Asian, language teaching.     

Islamic morality: Teaching to balance the record

The article proposes that the teaching of Islamic morality presents as an important if not urgent task for moral education. It offers the opportunity to inform a student body about a vital historical development in the formation of moral thought and action; to challenge and offset a blind spot in Western thinking about Islam in general; to challenge the ease with which radical Islamist views of Islam have captured the minds of Muslim and non-Muslim audiences alike; and, because of the contentious nature of the topic, to provide the kind of robust debate that should accompany moral pedagogy in general. The article focusses on select aspects of historical Islamic morality as exemplars of the contribution to morality made by the religious tradition.     

Adolescent maltreatment and its impact on young adult antisocial behavior

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM: Childhood maltreatment is known to be a risk factor for a range of later problems, but much less is known about adolescent maltreatment. The present study aims to investigate the impact of adolescent maltreatment on antisocial behavior, while controlling for prior levels of problem behavior as well as sociodemographic characteristics. METHODS: Data are from the Rochester Youth Development Study, a cohort study of the development of problem behaviors in a sample of 1,000 urban youth followed from age 13 into adulthood. Subjects include 68% African American, 17% Hispanic, and 15% White youth. This analysis includes a maximum of 884 subjects, of whom 9.3% had substantiated maltreatment reports in adolescence. Among the maltreated adolescents, 14 experienced sex abuse, 36 experienced physical abuse, and 32 were neglected or emotionally abused. Outcomes explored in late adolescence (ages 16-18) and young adulthood (ages 20-22) include arrest, self-reported general and violent offending, and illicit drug use. Control variables include prior levels of these outcomes as well as sociodemographic characteristics like poverty, parent education, and caregiver changes. RESULTS: Logistic regression analysis determined that experiencing any substantiated maltreatment during adolescence increases the odds of arrest, general and violent offending, and illicit drug use in young adulthood, even controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and prior levels of problem behavior. Different types of adolescent maltreatment, including neglect, appear to produce similar adverse behavioral consequences. CONCLUSIONS: Adolescent maltreatment necessitates increased attention in view of its enduring and potentially wide-ranging impact on the life span.     

The impact of values education on school ambience and academic diligence

The article will focus on demonstrating the effects of values education on enhancing students’ academic diligence through the more positive ambience it creates in the school. Evidence will be drawn from international studies but principally from the Australian Government's Values Education Program and, especially from the Values Education Good Practice Schools Project Reports (2006, 2008) and the Project to Test and Measure the Impact of Values Education on Student Effects and School Ambience (2009).     

Values education and holistic learning: Updated research perspectives

The article introduces the special issue by exploring international research findings that identify certain forms of values education constituting an effective catalyst for good practice pedagogy and, in turn, contributing to holistic learning. It refers firstly to research that justifies and explains how values education works to enhance positive student effects across the full range of developmental measures, personal, emotional, social, moral, spiritual and intellectual. It then focuses on international evidence that underpins the central theme of the special issue, so providing updated samples of the theoretical and empirical research that both explains and demonstrates the impact of values education on holistic learning.