The Impact of First‐year Education Practicum and Study on Preservice Teachers: a West Australian perspective

The pressure to improve preparation programs for teachers increasingly is evident in Australia, UK and the US. At Curtin University, the Faculty of Education is interested in the way in which preservice students perceive the teaching role and how these perceptions alter during their undergraduate experiences. First year undergraduates in the Faculty of Education were asked early in the year to give short written comments, in an informal situation, to the question “What is teaching?” At the end of their first year the same students were then asked “How have your ideas about teaching changed, and what influenced those changes?” An analysis of students’ responses showed considerable changes in their views of the profession with the single most important factor in the change being the first practicum. Also many of the student teachers’ views were expressed in strongly emotional terms. This paper reports the findings of the first year of a three year project planned to continue mapping students’ conceptions of teaching.     

Predicting Adolescents’ Bullying Participation from Developmental Trajectories of Social Status and Behavior

The aim of this study was to determine how trajectory clusters of social status (social preference and perceived popularity) and behavior (direct aggression and prosocial behavior) from age 9 to age 14 predicted adolescents’ bullying participant roles at age 16 and 17 (n = 266). Clusters were identified with multivariate growth mixture modeling (GMM). The findings showed that participants’ developmental trajectories of social status and social behavior across childhood and early adolescence predicted their bullying participant role involvement in adolescence. Practical implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.     

Does More Intensive Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Follow-Up Service Result in Better Outcomes? A Cost-Effective Analysis

Little is known about the relative cost-effectiveness of the many different types of early intervention services provided to medically fragile infants and their families. This study compared two intensities of services for such infants and their families: (a) a coordinated and comprehensive system of early intervention services initiated prior to discharge from the NICU and designed to transition infants to community-based services were compared with the effects of services (high intensity); and (b) a more traditional hospital follow-up consisting of medical checkups and referrals following discharge (low intensity). High-intensity services resulted in five times more community-based early intervention hours for families and infants when compared with low-intensity services. Annual costs of the high-intensity group were approximately triple the costs of the low-intensity group ($10,814 versus $3,032 per child per year), but there were only a few statistically significant differences on measures of child and family functioning between the groups at 6-, 12-, 18-, and 24months' corrected age. Implications of these findings for research and practice are given.     

Transforming support for students with disabilities in UK Higher Education

Intended UK government changes to the Disabled Students’ Allowance will have a significant impact on the support that UK universities provide for students with disabilities. In this article we examine the types of transformation that may be needed to support for university students with disabilities, from a socio‐technical perspective. The research reported in this article involved a year‐long case study in a UK university. The potential changes required to support for students with disabilities within the university studied, to cater for the proposed UK government changes to the Disabled Students’ Allowance, include: providing non‐medical helpers through external agencies; developing a dyslexia screening process; providing enhanced library services, including access to printers and scanners and assistance with assistive software; providing laptops with assistive software; making assistive software available in a limited form in computing laboratories; and more co‐ordinated special examination provision.     

Developmental Pathways to Preference and Popularity in Middle Childhood

This study examined the associations between children's early life experiences with parents, ego resiliency and ego undercontrol, and peer group social status in a longitudinal, multimethod study from infancy to middle childhood. Participants were 129 children (52% boys) who were followed from 15 months of age to 9 years and their primary caregivers from the Nijmegen Longitudinal Study on Infant and Child Development. The measurements included observations of parent–child interaction, teacher ratings of ego resiliency and ego undercontrol, and peer‐reported social status. Quality of parental interactive behavior was associated with ego resiliency and ego undercontrol. Ego resiliency and ego undercontrol were uniquely related to preference and popularity. The findings provide insight into the developmental pathways leading to the two distinct types of social status.     

Comparing two types of model progression in an inquiry learning environment with modelling facilities

The educational advantages of inquiry learning environments that incorporate modelling facilities are often challenged by students’ poor inquiry skills. This study examined two types of model progression as means to compensate for these skill deficiencies. Model order progression (MOP), the predicted optimal variant, gradually increases the specificity of the relations between variables, whereas model elaboration progression (MEP) gradually expands the number of variables in the task. The study utilized a between-subject design with three conditions: a MOP condition (n = 28), a MEP condition (n = 26), and a control condition without model progression (n = 30). Consistent with expectations, model progression enhanced students’ task performance; a comparison among the two model progression conditions confirmed the predicted superiority of the MOP condition. These results are discussed in relation to the inconsistent findings from prior research. Based on this discussion ways to optimize model order progression are advanced.