The Effects of a Teaching Perspective of Guided Internality on Intellectually Disabled Students,Locus of Control Orientation

The locus of control construct (LOC) and its implications for students’ behaviour are discussed. The effects of a teaching perspective designed to modify 110 intellectually disabled students’ LOC orientation was evaluated by analysing the data from a pre‐test, post‐test, follow‐up design study using: (1) an established LOC measure of students’ control of reinforcements for academic intellectual situations (MIARQ); (2) a new LOC measure of students’ expectancies of control of reinforcement for adaptive behaviour situations (KABLOC); and (3) a measure of students’ behaviour displayed in the classroom (BRS). The results for the students aged from 12 to 14 years indicated that the teaching perspective was effective in the longer‐term in modifying students’ LOC expectancies and overt behaviours. The results have positive implications for the education of intellectually disabled students.     

Culture and information manipulation theory: The effects of self‐construal and locus of benefit on information manipulation

This paper offers a preliminary exploration into how culture and cultural orientation influence the perception of deceptive messages. Information manipulation theory (IMF) posits that covert violations of Grice's four conversational maxims give rise to messages that are functionally deceptive. This study (N = 323) attempted to replicate previous IMT results regarding the perceptions of information manipulation in an academic situation, and with a culturally diverse sample. Locus of benefit (self and other) was manipulated, and the respondents’ self‐construal was assessed. Previous IMT findings were replicated, and the effects for self‐construal on honesty ratings varied considerably by manipulation type. Explanations for these findings are provided, as are suggestions for future research.     

Corporate federalism and the reform of teacher education in Australia

Current Australian commitments to competency‐based teacher reforms have wide acceptance. The key to this has been the affirmative stance adopted by the peak education unions and by ‘progressive’ educationalists, the nominal guarantors of recent professional advances in teaching. Since Australian approaches to ‘competencies’ are part of a more general agenda of industrialization of education, what is clearly indicated are radical changes in the way that nominally independent/critical language of education is currently being interpreted and applied: this is now being used to support an overall restructuring in which substantive (professional) forms of teacher authority are being uncompromisingly targeted. The transformations identified in this paper as having special strategic significance involve the themes of ‘school as community’ and ‘critical practice’. These have been detached from their traditional (robustly anti‐industrial) reference points and redeployed to authorize a more active (because supposedly conflict‐free) regulatory role by newly empowered managers and to advance the claim that ‘the practical’, on its own, can now be revalorized to allow real scope for creative and contextualized interventions by teachers. A strictly managerialist/technicist perspective upon schooling is thus represented as occupying the highest moral and cognitive ground. Correspondingly ruled out is the case for any real measure of educational pluralism or leamercentredness, no matter the sociocultural complexities, thereby licensing the extension to the school site itself of direct (educationally unmediated) political controls over education. As its counterpoint to the new agenda, this paper stresses the need for a robust decision‐making role by educators at all levels of policy formation, and for learner‐centred interventions which are much more than technical, whatever the processes of revalorization supposedly at work.     

Social Workers' Attitudes toward Peer-Reviewed Literature: The Evidence Base

Social workers from one state chapter of the National Association of Social Workers were surveyed to assess their use of and attitudes toward the peer-reviewed literature and their engagement in evidence-based practice. Results reveal that, in general, the practitioners in this study did not read the peer-reviewed literature, particularly articles describing research. One-half of the social workers reported feeling prepared by their social work education to read and critically evaluate the theoretical and empirical literature. Yet, they typically did not believe that the literature, particularly the empirical literature, was relevant for their practice, nor did they feel they were able to understand the implications of what they read for their practice. Further, the respondents generally did not engage in activities associated with evidence-based practice including using the results of research to guide practice, evaluating their practice, and using practice techniques for which there is empirical support.     

On Becoming a Qualitative Researcher: A View Through the Lens of Transformative Learning

This article describes a graduate-level qualitative research course informed by transformational learning theory. It presents strategies an interdisciplinary team of instructors used to engage and support students as they entered and moved through the course. The strategies focused on creating a safe, supportive, learner-centered environment, fostering critical reflection, engaging in ongoing discourse, and focusing on the centrality of experience by situating cognition in the personal context of students' lives and the research process itself.