From climate change victims to climate change actors: The role of eco-parenting in building mitigation and adaptation capacities in children

Studies have acknowledged children not as climate change victims only, but also as climate change actors. However, only a few have addressed the preparatory stages of children as climate change actors. However, the few studies that addressed these preparatory stages gave attention only to the roles of schools and government agencies without adequate attention to that of parents. This article therefore attempts to discuss the role of eco-parenting in building mitigation and adaptation capacities in children. Relying on the authoritative parenting model, the article avers that eco-parenting can have significant effects on children's ability to protect the environment, mitigate, and adapt to climate change impacts.     

Examining Intermediate Omitted Levels in Hierarchical Designs via Latent Variable Modeling

This article outlines an interval estimation procedure that can be used in a 3-level setting to evaluate the proportion of outcome variance attributable to the second level of clustering. The method is useful for examining the necessity of including a possibly omitted intermediate level of nesting in analyses of data from a multilevel study, and represents an informative addendum to current statistical tests of second-level variance. The approach is developed within the framework of latent variable modeling and can be used as an aid in the process of choosing between 2-level and 3-level models in a hierarchical design. The discussed procedure is illustrated with an empirical example.     

Career maturity of Lebanese students in higher education

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which Lebanese Baccalaureate II students' (Freshmen in american colleges) perceptions of their academic abilities match their actual achievements in both school and government examinations. A population sample of 2999 students were selected from a representative school sample (n = 122) throughout Lebanon. Students' demographic data, occupational choices and perceptions of their achievement were collected by a three-part questionnaire. Their cumulative grade averages in school and in government examinations were standardized and used to assess their career maturity. Findings indicated that most students wanted to become engineers or physicians while their actual achievement scores in school was average and in the government examination below average. Most correlational values between perceptions and actual achievement scores were either negative or insignificant. Students were found to make immature career decisions mainly because of the lack of any formal guidance programs in schools.     

UNIVERSITY‐BASED INITIATIVES IN FAVOUR OF ECOSYSTEM REHABILITATION FOR THE NORTH AMERICAN GREAT LAKES

On‐going attempts by governments to implement measures intended to eliminate environmental degradation in the nearshore waters of the Great Lakes have revealed a critical need for integrative understanding that transcends disciplinary and professional specialisms. Academics from universities in the United States and Canada began, ten years ago, to meet with government officials and with people from nongovernmental organizations to find solutions to the problems in question. Groups of academics followed up these meetings with policy oriented studies using systems and transdisciplinary perspectives. Results have been readily disseminated into a wider constituency of interests because of the participation of nonacademics in the guiding of the studies. Similar collaborative approaches have been used to design role playing exercises for students in environmental studies courses at universities, using various Great Lakes situations as examples. An action learning/research mode lies at the core of environmental education at university level which also has considerable potential for addressing other global issues at universities.     

Does prior mathematics knowledge really lead to variation in elementary statistics performance? Evidence from a developing country

A model incorporating prerequisite mathematics performance and other variables deemed to be associated with learning elementary statistics (ES) is developed. The relationship between ES performance and the explanatory variables is well represented by the logistics form. Aptitude, effort and motivation are the only significant explanatory variables of ES performance. Since prerequisite mathematics is not significant, statistical thinking at the tertiary level may be mostly intuitive and non-mathematical. Students with low aptitude experience increasing returns to effort over the first half of the feasible effort interval, while high-aptitude students experience diminishing returns at all levels of effort. The levels of effort required to achieve a minimum pass are interpreted.     

Toward Developing a Behavioral Counselor Education Model

Counselor education currently does not have a training model that is systematically employed and contains provisions for individual differences or promotes the development of programs for facilitating transfer of training. In the proposed model, counselor educators must decide which of the counseling student's thinking, feeling, and acting behaviors will become the focus of training efforts. The staff creatively implements its conceptualized behavioral curriculum goals through the application of learning principles to specified counseling student behaviors that are assessed to determine if whether or not the desired behavior changes are occurring.     

Validity of self-reported reading disability by parents of reading-disabled and control children

Composite reading scores obtained from parents of 125 reading-disabled children and 125 matched control children who participated in the Colorado Family Reading Study were used to test the validity of self-reported reading problems. Parents who reported that they encountered serious difficulty learning to read had significantly lower reading scores than did those who reported no positive history of reading problems. Moreover, this difference was larger for parents of reading-disabled children than for those of controls. Thus, parental self-reports provide a valid index of reading problems.     

Scaffolding learning of language structures with visual-syntactic text formatting

The current study examines the effects of digital scaffolding on the English literacy of fourth- and sixth-grade students. A total of 1085 native English-speaking and language minority students from 25 treatment classes and 20 control classes across three school districts participated in this study for one school year. Treatment students read their English language arts and social studies text in visual-syntactic text format (VSTF) on their laptops and control students read the regular block format of the textbook either on their laptops or in print. Observations and interviews revealed that VSTF reading facilitated instruction processes and student learning in reading activities. The results of California Standard Tests (CST) before and after the treatment revealed that sixth-graders who received syntactic scaffolding outperformed control students on the composite CST score. In particular, reading in VSTF benefited the treatment students in three CST sub-categories: word analysis, written conventions and writing strategies. This study suggests that future research should investigate instructional strategies that support reading and writing development of adolescents, including at-risk students, using syntactic scaffolding.