An Examination of Final Evaluation Methods Used in Master's Level Counseling Programs

This article reports the findings of a national study examining methods used for final evaluation in master's level counseling programs.     

Reasons, Rules and Virtues in Moral Education

Practical and theoretical shortcomings of an approach to moral education based on the development of moral reasoning are noted and the alternative of promoting the virtues is considered. The identification of appropriate virtues with modes of commitment and conduct supportive of a particular way of life is held to raise the further question of why a particular way of life should be favoured, and how our own way of life should be characterised. This latter, permitting social and geographical mobility, anonymity and value pluralism, is contrasted with that of smaller, more traditional communities paradigmatic of communitarian ethics. An ethic of respect for equal freedom is held to be compatible with the current nature of society and to be favoured by the virtue of appropriate self-assertion. The educational implications of such a conclusion are explored.     

A House Divided: Community Politics and Education Reform in Detroit

This research investigates the inherent dilemma evident in attempts to promote decentralization initiatives in urban public schools. Detroit provides a natural experiment in decentralized education reform given both the collaborative and the competitive reform efforts that were advanced between 1988 and 1994. A collaborative partnership, the Detroit Compact, was created, and schools of empowerment and choice were partially implemented, conceptually designed to enlarge the community role in the operation of the schools. Results indicate that efforts at promoting decentralization, over time may produce counterpressures to recentralize decision making.     

Negotiating the Research Imperative: The Views of UK Academics on their Career Opportunities

This article provides an analysis of the views of UK academic staff, given in response to a postal survey, on their opportunities for career progression through job appointments and promotion. The article investigates academics'opinions on the prominence of research, teaching and administration in determining career progression, and looks in particular at the effect of the Research Assessment Exercise on careers. There is consensus that the emphasis on research in determining careers has gone too far. The article considers the reasons for this, and looks at policy implications of this finding.     

Parent and Student Voices on the First Year of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program

In January 2004 President Bush authorized the DC School Choice Incentive Act, an initiative funded at $14 million that created a scholarship program providing 1,700 low-income Washington, DC, children the opportunity to attend participating K–12 nonpublic schools in the district. In addition to offering opportunities to participating children, the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program opens a door for examining the implications when more families are given the opportunity to select private schools for their children. This article reviews the results of a qualitative assessment aimed at understanding how families experienced their first year in the program. Referencing direct quotes from families that took part in focus groups, we address the following areas of participants' experience: reaction to the choice opportunity, motivation for participation, what was valued in schools, how information was received, selection of final school, reaction to new school environment, parent responses to new challenges, student–school responses to new challenges, financial policies, and overall satisfaction. Each section contains family responses juxtaposed with popular literature on school choice. This report is the first in a series that will monitor the experiences of families during the first 5 years of this program.     

Adolescents’ Friendships,Academic Achievement,and Risk Behaviors: Same-Behavior and Cross-Behavior Selection and Influence Processes

This study examined to what extent adolescents’ and their friends’ risk behaviors (i.e., delinquency and alcohol use) hinder or promote their academic achievement (grade point average [GPA]), and vice versa. Longitudinal data were used (N = 1,219 seventh- to ninth-grade adolescents; M_age = 13.69). Results showed that risk behaviors negatively affected adolescents’ GPA, whereas GPA protected against engaging in risk behaviors. Moreover, adolescents tended to select friends who have similar behaviors and friends’ behaviors became more similar over time (same-behavior selection and influence). Furthermore, although same-behavior effects seemed to dominate, evidence was found for some cross-behavior selection effects and a tendency in seventh grade for cross-behavior influence effects. Concluding, it is important to investigate the interplay between different behaviors with longitudinal social network analysis.     

Temporal integration in second-order conditioning and sensory preconditioning

Lick suppression experiments with rats revealed that the magnitude of both second-order conditioning (Experiment 1) and sensory preconditioning (Experiment 2) was superior when that conditioning was based on backward (US→CS) relative to forward (CS→US) first-order pairings of a CS and US. The superiority of backward relative to forward first-order conditioning on suppression to the higher order cues can be understood by assuming that the magnitude of higher order conditioning was determined by a memory representation of the higher order cues that provided information about the expected temporal location of the US. The results suggest that temporal information such as order between paired CSs and USs was encoded, preserved, and integrated with memory for the higher order stimuli. The relevance of these findings to memory integration in Pavlovian learning, the temporal coding hypothesis (Barnet, Arnold, & Miller, 1991; Matzel, Held, & Miller, 1988), backward excitatory conditioning, and the associative structure that underlies second-order Pavlovian fear conditioning are discussed.