Profiles of ability, effort, and difficulty: Relationships with worldviews, motivation and adjustment

Adopting a person-centered approach, we profiled 5th and 6th grade children's (152 boys and 161 girls) school-related beliefs about perceived task difficulty and agency beliefs in ability and effort. Five clusters were compared across key learning-related dimensions encompassing underlying worldviews (means–ends beliefs, normative difficulty, nature of ability), motivation (intrinsic, identified, introjected, and extrinsic), and adjustment (achievement and well-being): Agentic (high ability, high effort, low difficulty), Strivers (above average ability, high effort, high difficulty), Normative (average ability, effort and difficulty), Disengaged (low ability, low effort, average difficulty) and Challenged (low ability, low effort, high difficulty). The findings suggest that difficulty, perceived either as challenge or obstacle, plays an important role for the belief profiles, and that relationships with worldviews and motivation are indicative of adaptation and maladaptation.     

Are all part-time faculty underemployed? The influence of faculty status preference on satisfaction and commitment

Utilizing a person–job fit perspective, we examined the job satisfaction and affective commitment of three groups of college faculty (N = 167): full-time faculty, part-time faculty preferring a part-time position (voluntary part-time), and part-time faculty preferring a full-time position (involuntary part-time). Involuntary part-time faculty were least satisfied with salient facets of satisfaction (advancement, compensation, and job security), whereas voluntary part-time faculty and full-time faculty reported similar levels of satisfaction on these facets. No consistent differences in satisfaction by faculty status were found for the majority of the other, less salient facets. The three groups of faculty also reported similar levels of perceived overqualification and affective commitment to the organization. Future directions for research and practice are discussed.     

Increasing state public health professionals' proficiency in using PubMed

Objective: The paper provides an overview of a strategy to increase utilization of online bibliographic databases by public health workers.Methods: A web-based survey of professional staff in the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services was conducted to assess their use of and interest in training in online bibliographic databases. Based on the findings from the assessment, the department, in collaboration with the state university, provided brief ninety-minute training sessions for interested staff on the use of PubMed.Results: Seventy of 115 (61%) of staff completed the survey. Only 39% of staff reported using an online bibliographic database to conduct a literature search in the past year, and only 10% (n=7) reported having ever received any training in their use. Perceived proficiency with the use of PubMed was higher upon completion of the brief training. The majority of training participants (n=27) indicated that they were very likely to use PubMed in the next year to search the literature.Conclusions: A collaboratively designed training can increase public health workers'' proficiency in and intentions of using online bibliographic databases.

Highlights

• A web-based assessment of Montana public health workers identified a lack of training in and use of online bibliographic databases and an interest in receiving training in their use.
• Brief training in the use of online bibliographic databases increased state public health workers'' self-assessed proficiency in and intentions of using these resources.

Implications

• Low-cost strategies, such as inexpensive web-survey tools, to assess staff needs and brief training sessions for public health workers were effective in increasing public health workers'' self-assessed proficiency in using online bibliographic databases.
• Collaboration between state health departments and universities to design and provide relevant training in the use of online bibliographic databases is an effective approach to addressing public health workers'' skills in using these resources.

     

The Psychometric Evaluation of a Three-Dimension Elementary Science Attitude Survey

This study describes the development of an instrument to investigate elementary students attitudes toward science. As a result of the instrument development process employed, the finalized instrument consisted of 28-items separated into three dimensions. The instrument was found to exhibit acceptable ranges of internal consistency. Confirmatory Factor Analysis showed three factors that clustered into the three dimensions of attitude identified and concurrent validity was evidenced as correlations were found when comparing attitude measures with the instrument to students?? perceptions of their science classrooms. Based on the analyses completed, the instrument appears to be useful for assessing student attitude toward science.     

Renewal after the extinction of free operant behavior

Four experiments were performed to explore the role of context in operant extinction. In all experiments, leverpressing in rats was first reinforced with food pellets on a variable interval 30-s schedule, then extinguished, and finally tested in the same and a different physical context. The experiments demonstrated a clear ABA renewal effect, a recovery of extinguished responding when conditioning, extinction, and testing occurred in contexts A, B, and A, respectively. They also demonstrated ABC renewal (where conditioning extinction and testing occurred in contexts A, B, and C) and, for the first time in operant conditioning, AAB renewal (where conditioning, extinction, and testing occurred in contexts A, A, and B). The latter two phenomena indicate that tests outside the extinction context are sufficient to cause a recovery of extinguished operant behavior and, thus, that operant extinction, like Pavlovian extinction, is relatively specific to the context in which it is learned. AAB renewal was not weakened by tripling the amount of extinction training. ABA renewal was stronger than AAB, but not merely because of context A’s direct association with the reinforcer.     

Strengthening the Signature Pedagogy of Social Work: Conceptualizing Field Coordination as a Negotiated Social Work Pedagogy

ABSTRACT

Although field education is considered the signature pedagogy of social work, the work of field coordinators appear to remain peripheral to other aspects of social work education, such as coursework and research. In this article, we suggest that field coordination requires a far more complex set of knowledge and skills than merely matching students with placements based on availability and interest. Using critical and relational theories, this article conceptualizes field coordination as a negotiated pedagogy in which the coordinators navigate complex and often competing needs among students, field agencies, and social work practice. In making visible its nuances and intricacies, we suggest that field coordination is a critical relational pedagogy essential to advancing social work education.     

Mentoring Promotion/Tenure‐Seeking Faculty: Principles of Good Practice Within a Counselor Education Program

Approaches to mentoring junior faculty in counselor education departments have received minimal attention in the counseling literature. In this article, the authors describe a successful program based on the 10 principles for good mentoring recommended by Sorcinelli (2000). Application of the principles within a combined formal and informal mentoring approach is described, as are the experiences of junior faculty whose careers have been shaped within this system.     

Energy literacy and agency of New Zealand children

The development of energy literacy (knowledge, attitudes, and intended behaviour) and agency of New Zealand children (age 9–10) were investigated through thematic and exploratory statistical analyses of interviews (October 2011–April 2012) with 26 children, their parents and teachers, focus groups and photo elicitation. The children knew that electricity costs money and saw it as a finite resource. Half could name an energy source but few knew of any associated environmental issues. Most of the children had a positive attitude towards saving electricity, but did not intend to save energy to a further extent (low intended behaviour) and were not influencing their families to conserve energy (low agency). The children were learning about energy informally from a variety of sources, and acquired their attitudes mostly from talking to their parents. The results highlight the need for energy education for citizenship at school and conversations about energy both there and at home.