Impact of the School Environment on Medical Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Population-Wide Register Data Study of School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports

Although attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is among the most heritable psychiatric childhood disorders, social and gene–environment interactions seemingly play an important role in the etiology of ADHD. Consistent with this, this study finds that School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) reduced the likelihood of pharmacotherapeutic treatment for ADHD at age 14–16 by 12%, using population-wide Norwegian register data and a difference-in-difference design (N = 698,364, birth cohorts 1990–2002, 48.7% girls, 5.7% immigrant background). At-risk students in schools with high fidelity of implementation are driving these intervention effects. Overall, the findings indicate that children with a genetic disposition for ADHD are more likely to avoid medical treatment in an organized and predictable school setting with a focus on positive reinforcement.     

Acoustofluidic phase microscopy in a tilted segmentation-free configuration

A low-cost device for registration-free quantitative phase microscopy (QPM) based on the transport of intensity equation of cells in continuous flow is presented. The method uses acoustic focusing to align cells into a single plane where all cells move at a constant speed. The acoustic focusing plane is tilted with respect to the microscope’s focal plane in order to obtain cell images at multiple focal positions. As the cells are displaced at constant speed, phase maps can be generated without the need to segment and register individual objects. The proposed inclined geometry allows for the acquisition of a vertical stack without the need for any moving part, and it enables a cost-effective and robust implementation of QPM. The suitability of the solution for biological imaging is tested on blood samples, demonstrating the ability to recover the phase map of single red blood cells flowing through the microchip.     

The role of peer review in Norwegian quality assurance: potential consequences for excellence and diversity

The article analyses the role of peer review within broader external quality assurance schemes. Based on an analytical framework emphasising that modern quality assurance schemes are designed as a balancing act between standardised guidelines and professional judgement, the article uses data from a recent evaluation of NOKUT, the Norwegian Quality Assurance Agency, to investigate whether and how the peer review process has maintained its central role in quality assurance, not least with respect to promoting excellence and diversity. The findings indicate that what is presented as judgements based on peer expertise, turn out to be a rather technical process in which pre-defined rigid criteria and standards are imperative. In the conclusion, the role of peer review is discussed in relation to developments in European higher education.     

Approaches to school leadership in Scandinavia

In this article I examine approaches to school leadership in Scandinavia by applying a historical lens. I start by drawing attention to some aspects of the ideology and the history of the Scandinavian education systems in order to discuss how these aspects intersect with the globalised policy trends, and where there is likely to be tensions between the global trends and the cultural and historical imperatives of schooling and school leadership in Scandinavia. The devolution of greater responsibilities to schools has contributed to a number of demands upon them, in particular on school principals, but so far, the emerging age of accountability has had only small consequences on classroom practice. My main argument is that even though there is a growing homogenisation of approaches to school leadership due to global forces, local traditions ensure that they are played out differently in national contexts.     

Classifying Amharic webnews

We present work aimed at compiling an Amharic corpus from the Web and automatically categorizing the texts. Amharic is the second most spoken Semitic language in the World (after Arabic) and used for countrywide communication in Ethiopia. It is highly inflectional and quite dialectally diversified. We discuss the issues of compiling and annotating a corpus of Amharic news articles from the Web. This corpus was then used in three sets of text classification experiments. Working with a less-researched language highlights a number of practical issues that might otherwise receive less attention or go unnoticed. The purpose of the experiments has not primarily been to develop a cutting-edge text classification system for Amharic, but rather to put the spotlight on some of these issues. The first two sets of experiments investigated the use of Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) for document classification. Testing on small datasets, we first looked at classifying unseen data into 10 predefined categories of news items, and then at clustering it around query content, when taking 16 queries as class labels. The second set of experiments investigated the effect of operations such as stemming and part-of-speech tagging on text classification performance. We compared three representations while constructing classification models based on bagging of decision trees for the 10 predefined news categories. The best accuracy was achieved using the full text as representation. A representation using only the nouns performed almost equally well, confirming the assumption that most of the information required for distinguishing between various categories actually is contained in the nouns, while stemming did not have much effect on the performance of the classifier.

Wayward Warriors: The Viking Motif in Swedish and English Children’s Literature

In this article the Viking motif in children’s literature is explored—from its roots in (adult) nationalist and antiquarian discourse, over pedagogical and historical texts for children, to the eventual diversification (or dissolution) of the motif into different genres and forms. The focus is on Swedish Viking narratives, but points of comparison are established with Viking children’s literature in the English-speaking world. Differences and similarities are pointed out, but more importantly, patterns of reciprocity and influence are examined. Finally, it is shown how international representations of Vikings to a growing extent have replaced the ones that are nationally and regionally determined. The Viking has ultimately become a deracinated and commodified symbol: a free-floating signifier and a wayward warrior.     

Attention guidance in learning from a complex animation: Seeing is understanding?

To examine how visual attentional resources are allocated when learning from a complex animation about the cardiovascular system, eye movements were registered in the absence and presence of visual cues. Cognitive processing was assessed using cued retrospective reporting, whereas comprehension and transfer tests measured the quality of the constructed representation. Within the framework of Cognitive Load Theory, visual cues highlighting the subsystems of the heart were hypothesized to guide attention, reduce visual search and extraneous cognitive load, and enhance learning. As predicted, learners looked more often and longer at cued parts. However, we found no effects of cueing on visual search and cognitive load. With respect to cognitive processing, performance differences were found on the number of statements in the learners’ verbal reports. These findings suggest that visual cueing can guide attention in an animation, but other factors are also important in determining the effectiveness of visual cues on learning.     

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Box? Children and TV Advertising in four Countries

Abstract

To what extent are children influenced by television and, in particular, by advertising? The study discussed in this article was conducted in four countries with, in some cases, surprising results. Parents think that television influences their children, but children too have views on how adults are affected.