The relationship between parental substance abuse and child maltreatment: findings from the Ontario Health Supplement

OBJECTIVE: This study examined the relationship between reported exposure to child abuse and a history of parental substance abuse (alcohol and drugs) in a community sample in Ontario, Canada. METHOD: The sample consisted of 8472 respondents to the Ontario Mental Health Supplement (OHSUP), a comprehensive population survey of mental health. The association of self-reported retrospective childhood physical and sexual abuse and parental histories of drug or alcohol abuse was examined. RESULTS: Rates of physical and sexual abuse were significantly higher, with a more than twofold increased risk among those reporting parental substance abuse histories. The rates were not significantly different between type or severity of abuse. Successively increasing rates of abuse were found for those respondents who reported that their fathers, mothers or both parents had substance abuse problems; this risk was significantly elevated for both parents compared to father only with substance abuse problem. CONCLUSIONS: Parental substance abuse is associated with a more than twofold increase in the risk of exposure to both childhood physical and sexual abuse. While the mechanism for this association remains unclear, agencies involved in child protection or in treatment of parents with substance abuse problems must be cognizant of this relationship and focus on the development of interventions to serve these families.     

Exploring first-time online undergraduate and graduate students’ growth mindsets and flexible thinking and their relations to online learning engagement

The present study was an attempt to help us reveal the characteristics and complexity of today’s first-time online students in a higher education setting. Data were collected from undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in fully online courses for the first time during spring semester in the 2016–2017 academic year at a Southern university in the United States. Primarily, path analysis was conducted to investigate the impacts of flexible thinking, mindsets, and self-efficacy on the 254 first-time online students’ online learning engagement. The results of the path analysis supported six out of the eight hypotheses and all standardized path coefficients have values between 0.14 and 0.31. In conclusion, growth mindset and learning self-efficacy appear to be important variables for first-time online students and have a positive relation to online engagement. The practical implications and future research are discussed.

     

Extending the Discourse on Developmental Appropriateness: A Developmental Perspective

This article makes the argument that the present discourse on developmental appropriateness needs to be expanded. Four points are made: First, the present discourse assumes a consensus about child development that is more apparent than real; second, it is premised on a suspect notion of broad, universal stages; third, it ignores an important alternative perspective to the dominant individualist perspective on learning and development; and fourth, it ignores an important alternative perspective to the dominant view of the relationship between learning and development. Critiques are made and alternative perspectives presented.     

Worlds have collided and modes have merged: classroom evidence of changed literacy practices

Debates continue in public and in educational policy forums about the ‘basics’ of literacy while many have not recognised that these basics may never be the same again. Rapid changes in digital communication provide facilities for reading and writing to be combined with various and often quite complex aspects of music, photography and film. At the same time, educational policy and national testing requirements are still principally focused on the reading and writing of print‐based texts. This paper examines evidence from classroom research to analyse the nature of multimodal literacy, the literacy that is needed in contemporary times for reading, viewing, responding to and producing multimodal and digital texts. Examples of students' engagement in multimodal literacy are presented to demonstrate how classroom literacy practices can incorporate the practices of talking, listening, reading and writing together with processing the modes of written text, image, sound and movement in print and digital texts.     

Student performance in off-campus programs

The quality of degree programs offered off-campus, particularly on military bases, has become an issue affecting many institutions of higher education. This study asked the question: Do students in off-campus programs perform as well as students in on-campus programs? As a basis for comparison, only courses taught on- and off-campus by the same instructor were chosen. Six courses, taught 37 times, by ten instructors, met these criteria. The subjects included the 649 undergraduate students from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale who received letter grades in these courses between 1975 and 1977. As a measure of performance, the grades of on- and off-campus students were compared by means of at-test. The mean grade of off-campus students (3.34) was not significantly different (at the .01 level) from that of on-campus students (3.29). As a control, faculty were interviewed to determine the equivalence in content and rigor of courses they taught in both settings. Faculty generally responded that their on- and off-campus courses were equivalent in content and rigor, supporting the use of grades as a measure of student performance. These results indicate that not only do faculty maintain their standards while teaching off-campus, but that the academic performance of off-campus students equals that of on-campus students.     

Identifying and evaluating teachers’ knowledge in relation to child abuse and neglect: A qualitative study with Australian early childhood teachers

Child abuse and neglect are serious social problems that make extraordinary demands on teachers’ knowledge and professionalism. Yet the field of education has been slow to develop a discipline-specific knowledge base about child abuse and neglect for teachers and teacher education programmes and there is a paucity empirical research into teachers’ knowledge in relation to child abuse and neglect. This paper describes a qualitative study of eight purposively selected early childhood teachers. To identify and evaluate their child abuse and neglect knowledge, Grossman's [(1990). The making of a teacher: Teacher knowledge and teacher education. New York: Teachers College Press; (1995). Teachers’ knowledge. In L. W. Anderson (Ed.), International encyclopedia of teaching and teacher education (2nd ed., pp. 20–24). Tarrytown, NY: Pergamon] typology of teachers’ knowledge is used as an analytic framework on which to map the teachers’ interview data. Findings reveal that, in the absence of preservice and inservice education specifically about child abuse and neglect, early childhood teachers held and deployed knowledge in resourceful ways. They used, as a basis, their existing early childhood knowledge and adapted this knowledge by augmenting it with a range of personal and professional knowledge resources to fit their particular challenges and situations. This approach, however competent and innovative, also reveals shortfalls in knowledge. Implications of this research are drawn for child abuse and neglect curriculum development in initial and continuing teacher education including the case for specialist knowledge needed to establish teachers’ professional reputation for dealing capably with cases of child abuse and neglect.     

What can evidence-use in practice learn from evidence-use in policy?

Abstract

Background: This paper approaches evidence-informed practice from the perspective of evidence-informed policy-making. Using the findings of a recent study of evidence-use by educational policy-makers to raise questions about evidence-use by educational practitioners, it seeks to explore what such a study might tell us about how to understand and improve evidence-use by educational practitioners.

Purpose: The paper aims, therefore, to identify potential connections, shared insights and common issues between evidence-use in policy and evidence-use in practice. It does this by focusing on two specific areas: the nature of the evidence (i.e. what evidence is used) and the nature of the use (i.e. how evidence is used). The paper outlines what was found about each of these aspects of evidence-use in policy, and then considers what questions and issues these findings might raise for evidence-use in educational practice.

Sample: The empirical study on which this paper is based was an in-depth study of the use of evidence within educational policy development in Australia. It focused on the development of three specific education policies within one Australian state education department and involved interviews with 25 policy-makers who were actively involved in the development of these policies.

Design and methods: The policy-based study involved the following data collection processes: (i) in-depth semi-structured interviews with 25 policy-makers who were involved in the development of the selected policies; (ii) documentary analysis of policy documents, background research reports and other relevant papers relating to the selected policies; (iii) unstructured observation (where possible) of meetings and events connected with the development of the selected policies; and (iv) feedback from 40 wider policy staff who took part in a verification workshop to discuss the project’s emerging findings.

Findings: Drawing on the findings from the original policy study, two areas of potential connection to evidence-use in practice are explored. First, in relation to ‘varieties of evidence and uses’, the negotiation of diverse evidence types and the potential for using evidence in multiple and varied ways appear to be features of evidence-use that are common to educational policy-makers as well as educational practitioners. Secondly, in relation to ‘narrowness of evidence sources’, there is potential for both policy-makers and practitioners to use a narrow (rather than broad) selection of evidence, due to a tendency to work with certain evidence types as a starting point (e.g. performance data) and a tendency to draw on certain evidence sources more frequently (e.g. well-known, familiar research sources).

Conclusions: This paper emphasises: (i) the need for more integrated (or joined-up) understandings of evidence-use across contexts of practice and contexts of policy; (ii) the importance of continued efforts to understand and represent evidence-use more effectively within educational practices; and (iii) the value of paying careful attention to the quality and qualities of evidence-use within and across the different settings of educational practice and policy.     

Textbook treatments and students' understanding of acceleration

This paper has been accepted for publication in theJournal of Research in Science Teaching. Copies are available from Gloria Dall'Alba, ERADU, RMIT, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne. Vic. 3001.