Teaching as a 'research-based profession': encouraging practitioner research in special education

Richard Rose is head of the Centre for Special Needs Education and Research at University College Northampton as well as being Research Section Editor for BJSE. In this article, he reviews aspects of the relationship between teaching, special education and research. He argues that 'educational research, and consequently policy making, has too often taken insufficient account of teachers' professional credibility and expertise'. He proposes that teachers should be encouraged to become more involved in research activities and that practitioners and researchers should work together 'in determining the agenda for a research-based profession'.
Richard Rose and I hope that the Research Section in BJSE will have a key role to play in promoting this kind of partnership. It is our shared intention to publish a series of examples of practitioner or partnership research, showing the influence that systematic, practice-focused enquiry can have on the evaluation, review and development of practice and the formulation of improved policy. We hope that many practitioner researchers will wish to put forward their work for publication in this series. Contact Richard Rose to discuss this possibility and watch for further guidance in future issues of BJSE.     

Reality Therapy: A Global Perspective

Based on universal principles, reality therapy is practiced and taught in many cultures and countries. The underlying theoretical basis, choice theory, states that all human beings are motivated by five current genetic instructions: survival or self-preservation, belonging, power or achievement, freedom or independence, fun or enjoyment. The effective reality therapist learns to adapt the methodology to individuals and groups from many cultures. The delivery system employs specific tools for helping clients identify and clarify their wants and desires, their hopes and their dreams. Clients are led to examine specific actions, cognition, and feelings which are seen in reality therapy as behaviors chosen to impact the external world of clients for the purpose of satisfying their needs. The cornerstone in the practice of reality therapy is the self-evaluation by clients. Counselors ask clients to examine the effectiveness of their choices especially as they impact their relationships with people important to them. Clients also examine the attainability of their wants, as well as their degree of commitment in attaining their wants. Included in the process is realistic planning for need satisfaction especially for enhancing the clients' interpersonal relationships. Multiethnic research has shown the multicultural efficacy of reality therapy.     

Spillover in the Academy: Marriage Stability and Faculty Evaluations

The literature on the relationship between work and family has shown that there is a spillover effect between both domains. In particular, research that has investigated the influence of home environment on work has shown that family instability affects work satisfaction and performance. This study investigates the spillover between family and work by examining the link between marital status and work performance across the three phases of marriage, divorce, and remarriage. Specifically, this article links marital status and work performance through a longitudinal analysis of a set of university teaching evaluations. A polynomial regression model was fit to the data and a cubic curve through the three periods of marriage, divorce, and remarriage was statistically significant. Implications of the study and areas for future research are discussed.     

Memory and Processing Speed in Preterm Children at Eleven Years: A Comparison with Full-Terms

This study examined the effects of prematurity on 11-year-olds' performance on 2 specific aspects of cognition—memory and processing speed, using a new computer-administered battery, the Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT: Detterman). Preterms performed more poorly than their full-term controls on all memory tasks; this relative deficit was associated with the presence and severity of neonatal Respiratory Distress Syndrome (RDS). Preterms were also slower on selected aspects of processing speed but not on motor speed. Memory and processing speed, taken together, accounted for much of the 10-point difference in WISC-R IQ between groups.     

Children's strategies and goals in response to help-giving and help-seeking tasks within a friendship

The present research tested whether children's responses to help-giving and help-seeking friendship tasks predicted how many friends they had and the quality of their best friendship. Fifth-grade children (N=511; typically 10 or 11 years old) responded to vignettes in which they could either give help to a friend or seek help from a friend. Children's strategies and goals in both contexts were significantly correlated with the number of friends children had. Responses in the help-giving context but not in the help-seeking context were significantly associated with friendship quality. Although gender differences in strategies and goals were found, strategies and goals were related to the number of friends and friendship quality for both boys and girls.     

Framing gender identity and sexual orientation: media influence on young men who have sex with men’s health

Sex education takes place in a wide range of contexts including through the media. Media use among young men who have sex with men is high and gender identity and sexual orientation are topics often integrated into today’s media. Little is known about young men who have sex with men’s perceptions of how the media frames messages about gender identity and sexual orientation and the implications these messages have on HIV prevention. A greater understanding of young men who have sex with men’s perceptions of media framing about gender identity and sexual orientation is needed to ensure prevention efforts reach those most impacted by HIV. Focus groups were conducted with forty-two African American men who have sex with men, aged 18–21, living in the Southeastern USA. Thematic analysis revealed that participants reported using the Internet and television to access gender identity and sexual orientation information. Participants felt that the media’s framing of gender identity and sexual orientation only worsened HIV-related stigma and discrimination. Findings illustrate the important role that media can play in educating about gender identity and sexual orientation and the implications this framing has for HIV prevention.     

Universal Service in a Ubiquitous Digital Network

Before there was the digital divide there was the analog divide– and universal service was the attempt to close that analogdivide. Universal service is becoming ever more complex in terms ofregulatory design as it becomes the digital divide. In order to evaluatethe promise of the next generation Internet with respect to the digitaldivide this work looks backwards as well as forwards in time. Byevaluating why previous universal service mechanisms failed andsucceeded this work identifies specific characteristics ofcommunications systems – in particular in billing and managinguncertainty – and argues that these characteristics underliesuccess or failure in terms of technological ubiquity. Developing a setof characteristics of services rather than a set of services is afundamental break with the tradition of universal service. In fact, theimplications of our proposal is that basic characteristics in theoffering of the service rather than the absolute price are critical toclose the digital divide: certainty of total charge, ability to avoiddeposits or disconnection via best effort service, and payer-basedcontrol of all charges. While all of these principles sound obvious infact none of these hold in the telephony network. Universal service hasevolved from common carriage (serve all with no discrimination) to aright to basic services (100% penetration). Universal service isnow discussed as the digital divide, as the access to information asopposed to services becomes increasingly critical. However, we arediscussing in this paper access to the bits and the network rather thanaccess to the information (or intellectual property) once connected. Theprovision of universal service is seen as a technical problem only in thatthe technology costs money – universal service debates have longbeen the domain of economists. Yet the design of protocols has been thedomain of engineers, the building of systems the corporate domain, andthe discussion of equity the interest of ethicists. The design ofprotocols can define the parameters of the corporate decision-makers,the variables of the economist, and the questions for the ethicist. Thedesign decisions made at the fundamental levels can make communicationsequity more or less likely. In this work I focus on the design ofprotocols for the next generation Internet, protocols which willfundamentally change the best-effort nature of Internet services.Building on the economic and ethnographic work of others I argue thatthe effects of protocols adoption on universal service can be predictedto some degree. By examination of past and current technologies Iexamine a set of technical mechanisms to determine how such mechanismsmight harm or enhance universal service. I define each mechanism (e.g.denial of entry) and offer observations about each particularmechanism's implicit pricing assumptions. I close with a discussion ofinterest to ethicists and regulators on evaluating communicationsprotocols with respect to universal access. Protocols for developingmultiple qualities of service for packet-switched networks have focusedon economic efficiency (e.g. Mackie-Mason, 1995; Choi, Stahl &Winston, 1997; Shapiro & Varian, 1998), billing to encouragewidespread adoption of network innovations (e.g. Xie & Sirbu, 1985)and billing in a manner consistent with the underlying network (e.g.Clark, 1996). Here we examine a set of protocols which include varyingquality of service mechanisms with respect to the compatibility of theprotocols with universal access.     

Emergent storybook reading revisited (Research Note)

Fifteen children from working-class homes attending two kindergarten classes in one school in a small town in Canada were asked to select their favourite book in October and June to read to a researcher. The storybook re-enactments were tape recorded and transcribed, and then coded according to a developmental scheme developed by Sulzby (1985) and Barnhart (1991). The results were compared with the results of Sulzby’s (1985) study with 24 children from middle-class homes. The mean score of the children in the Sulzby study was found to be significantly higher in October than the mean score of the children in the present study. Furthermore, the difference between the mean scores of the two groups had increased significantly by June. Further analysis revealed that the children in the present study did not show the same developmental progression as the children in the Sulzby study and, in fact, 11 of the 15 children did not progress at all along the developmental continuum. The results are discussed in relation to concepts of emergent literacy and socio-economic factors in early reading development.