Improving quality of the child care environment through a consultancy programme for centre directors

This study examined the effects of a newly developed on-site consultancy programme to improve global quality of the child care environment in non-parental child care centres for 0- to 4-year-old children as measured with the ITERS-R/ECERS-R. Using a randomised controlled trial with a pretest, posttest, and follow-up test, we compared 35 experimental group with 33 control group. The consultancy programme comprised three consultations in total. Analysis on the items that were specifically targeted during the consultancy showed a significant improvement on these targeted items between pretest and posttest and between posttest and follow-up. The effect of the consultancy programme on the total scores (including the non-targeted items) was not significant.     

Cooperative research centres: The concept and its implementation

The Cooperative Research Centres Program aims to enhance the effectiveness of the overall Australian R&D effort by drawing together researchers from several institutions to create the concentrations of resources which are needed, in many research fields, to keep pace with the rapid scientific and technological progress which is occurring internationally. The Centres link together outstanding groups of researchers, from both the public and private sectors, with the users of research from appropriate industry sectors and other sectors of the economy and provide opportunities for research users to participate actively in the planning and operation of the research activities. The Program was started in 1990. Fifty-two Centres have now been approved across six major R&D and industry sectors representing, when these Centres are fully established, a commitment by the government of some $100 million per year and, from the participants, of some $200 million per year. This constitutes some six percent of the national R&D effort.     

Understanding autonomous peer feedback practices among postgraduate students: a case study in a Chinese university

Academic writing is a social practice in which the writer interacts with both texts and people and uses the interaction as a learning resource. While academic interaction in the classroom setting has been extensively investigated, student interaction that takes place without teacher supervision remains largely unexplored. Since autonomy is a key component of academic interaction, autonomous peer feedback practices among postgraduate students may be of some interest. This paper reports on an exploratory case study of peer feedback among a small group of postgraduate students in a master’s programme in translation studies in a prestigious Chinese university. The findings offer insights into the role of peer feedback in advancing academic literacy and forming scholarly communities in an emerging discipline. The case study provides an opening into the research area of autonomous peer feedback and suggests avenues for further, more substantial research.     

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.     

Determining the level of inquiry in teachers' questions

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if an instrument, originally designed to classify levels of teachers' questions on the basis of logical operations, could be utilized to measure the level of inquiry present in a classroom discussion and to determine if the inquiry questioning behavior of the teacher influenced student achievement. The results of the study show that the modified classification scheme could accurately and reliably measure the inquiry level of teachers' classroom questions. The data also indicated that teachers who ask a greater proportion of high inquiry questions cause a greater change in students as measured by an achievement examination.     

Child abuse: adolescent records vs. adult recall

In a follow-up study of incarcerated Connecticut youth, 69 subjects were interviewed during young adulthood. On follow-up, 26 gave histories of abuse discrepant with histories obtained from records and interviews conducted in adolescence. Eleven subjects agreed to an additional clarification interview, at which time they were apprised of the discrepancies. Of these, eight had adolescent records indicating that abuse had occurred but denied abuse during the adult follow-up interview. The remaining three had adolescent records indicating no abuse had ever occurred, but, on follow-up, reported having been abused. The additional clarification interviews revealed that all 11 subjects with discrepant histories had, in fact, been abused. Reasons for these discrepant data and strategies to enhance the investigator's ability to obtain accurate data regarding abuse are discussed.     

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.