Employees as customers: Exploring service climate,employee patronage,and turnover

The role of retail employees as customers was explored by quantitatively examining the influence of service climate and employee patronage on employee turnover intentions. Employees representing all shifts in two stores of a national retailer participated. Results indicated that employee patronage partially mediates the effects of service climate on employee turnover intentions. The findings suggest that employee patronage is a highly relevant organizational concept that warrants additional study. Practitioners may apply these findings in developing management and supervision training programs and designing employee selection and retention programs. Researchers may incorporate the variable of patronage when studying populations where employees can be external customers. Future research is necessary because the concept of employee patronage has not been adequately studied.     

Changes in college students' perceptions of use of web-based resources for academic tasks with Wikipedia projects: a preliminary exploration

Motivated by the need to facilitate Net Generation students' information literacy (IL), or more specifically, to promote student understanding of legitimate, effective use of Web-based resources, this exploratory study investigated how analyzing, writing, posting, and monitoring Wikipedia entries might help students develop critical perspectives related to the legitimacy of Wikipedia and other publicly accessible Web-based resources for academic tasks. Results of survey and interview data analyses from two undergraduate courses indicated that undergraduate students typically prefer using publicly accessible Web-based resources to traditional academic resources, such as scholarly journal articles and books both in print and digital form; furthermore, they view the former as helpful academic tools with various utilities. Results also suggest that the Wikipedia activity, integrated into regular course curriculum, led students to gain knowledge about processes of Web-based information creation, become more critical of information on the Web, and evaluate the use of publicly accessible Web-based resources for academic purposes. Such changes appear more conspicuous with first year than with upper division students. The findings suggest that experiential opportunities to grapple with the validity of publicly accessible Web-based resources may prepare students better for their college and professional careers. The study results also indicate the need for integrating multiple existing frameworks for IL into one comprehensive framework to better understand various aspects of students' knowledge, use, and production of information from cognitive and technical perspectives and for a variety of purposes.     

Validating racism and cultural respect: testing the psychometric properties and educational impact of perceived discrimination and multiculturation for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students

Within the field of quantitative research, the diverse and negative effects of racial discrimination have become increasingly documented across a number of outcome variables (including physical, mental, and social wellbeing); however, research on the direct effects of racism is less evident within educational settings. The present investigation explored the negative impact of perceived racial discrimination, in addition to perceptions of cultural respect (Multiculturation) on both objective (e.g., student grades) and subjective (e.g., importance of school) schooling outcomes for a sample of Indigenous Australian and non-Indigenous Australian high school students. Perceived racial discrimination was found to be one of the strongest negative predictors of a number of outcomes for Indigenous Australian students, and Multiculturation was also found to have substantial positive relations with the subjective schooling outcomes for the same group of students. That the results were also generalisable to the non-Indigenous students suggests that attempts to combat racism and promote respect may benefit all members of society.     

Understanding the psychometric properties of the humor assessment instrument through an analysis of the relationships between teacher humor assessment and instructional communication variables in the college classroom

The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the newly developed Humor Assessment (HA) instrument. Previous research (Wrench & McCroskey, 2001) noted a construct validity problem with the Humor Orientation (HO) scale created by M. Booth‐Butterfield and S. Booth‐Butterfield (1991). This study examined the relationships between the HA, which corrects the construct validity problem seen in the HO, and affective learning, nonverbal immediacy, cognitive learning, learning loss, student motivation, and teacher credibility.     

Amount of communication as a symptom of distressed marriages based on reports of divorced individuals

Recent research on married couples has indicated that dramatically reduced communication between married partners may be an indication of a marriage under stress and may indicate an increased likelihood of divorce. The present study compared amount of communication in marriage reported by divorced individuals with that reported by married individuals who reported low to moderate levels of marital satisfaction. The results indicate these reports are highly similar. It is recommended that reduced communication be considered as a marker variable for marriages under stress and future research seek to identify the cause(s) of the observed relationships.     

Training Paraprofessionals to Support Students with Disabilities: A Literature Review

The purpose of this literature review is to describe intervention research studies in which paraprofessionals received training applicable to student with disabilities. Thirty studies were systematically reviewed to identify (a) characteristics of study participants and settings, (b) characteristics of paraprofessional training and paraprofessional-implemented intervention evaluated within these studies, (c) quality of the studies, and (d) implications for practice and areas for future research. Overall, paraprofessional training and subsequent intervention with students yielded positive outcomes. Training sessions typically were delivered by workshops, lectures, or classes and classroom-based training. However, numerous studies failed to demonstrate characteristics of study quality.     

Managing the primary curriculum: policy into practice in England

This paper reports on research into how effective non‐statutory guidance has been in managing the primary science curriculum in England. A small‐scale qualitative study was used to elicit the views of teachers, local education authority advisors, an Ofsted inspector and a policy‐maker. The findings indicate that the guidance is influencing the management of primary science teaching at both national and local level. The use of this guidance has been supported nationally and individual schools have found it supportive. The effect of this policy on pupil learning has still to be investigated by further classroom observational studies. It is also hypothesised that the long‐term effect of this guidance could be stagnation and a lack of creativity and this needs further study. Has this guidance reached the end of its useful life? Does it need replacing or are primary science teachers now in a position of not needing such support?     

It’s very different here: practice-based academic staff induction and retention

The sociologist, Max Weber (1864–1920), suggested that few could withstand the frustrations of academic life. As the strategic management of human resources begins to differentiate higher education institutions (HEIs) in league tables, the costs of voluntary staff turnover (attrition) become more significant. In this paper, we consider links between induction (orientation) and retention for academic staff. We report on a qualitative study of thirty academic staff in five United Kingdom HEIs who were recruited on the basis of their professional experience. Their practice-based knowledge lends our participants particular insight into their HEI induction experience which, where found wanting, led in several cases to resignation. We analyse the induction experiences of our participants to glean explanations for these perceived shortcomings. Since induction interventions are thought to lead to improved retention, we recommend policy and practice changes to induction, which may benefit all academic staff.     

Speech development patterns and phonological awareness in preschool children

To examine the association between speech production and early literacy skills, this study of 102 preschool children looked at phonological awareness in relation to whether children were delayed, typical, or advanced in their articulation of consonants. Using a developmental typology inspired by some of the literature on speech development (Kahn and Lewis, The Kahn-Lewis phonological analysis, 1986; Shriberg, Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 36(1):105-140, 1993a), we found that failure to master the early-8 consonants and a greater prevalence of certain types of production errors were associated with deficient phonological awareness. We also found that children who made no consonant errors had advanced phonological awareness relative to other children in the sample. In all cases, both productive speech patterns and speech errors were more closely linked with rhyme awareness than with phoneme awareness. The association between speech production and rhyme awareness may provide some new directions for the early preschool assessment of risk for reading problems.     

Effects of mother-son incest and positive perceptions of sexual abuse experiences on the psychosocial adjustment of clinic-referred men

OBJECTIVE: The primary objective was to examine the long-term impact of mother-son incest and positive initial perceptions of sexual abuse experiences on adult male psychosocial functioning. METHOD: Sixty-seven clinic-referred men with a history of sexual abuse participated. The participants completed self-report measures regarding their current psychosocial functioning and described the nature of their sexual and physical abuse experiences during childhood. RESULTS: Seventeen men reported mother-son incest, and these men endorsed more trauma symptoms than did other sexually abused men, even after controlling for a history of multiple perpetrators and physical abuse. Mother-son incest was likely to be subtle, involving behaviors that may be difficult to distinguish from normal caregiving (e.g., genital touching), despite the potentially serious long-term consequences. Twenty-seven men recalled positive or mixed initial perceptions of the abuse, including about half of the men who had been abused by their mothers. These men reported more adjustment problems than did men who recalled purely negative initial perceptions. CONCLUSIONS: Mother-son incest and positive initial perceptions of sexual abuse experiences both appear to be risk factors for more severe psychosocial adjustment problems among clinic-referred men.