Creating Cultural Competence: An Outreach Immersion Experience in Southern Africa

With disasters on the rise, counselors need to increase their cultural awareness, knowledge, and skills to work with affected communities. This study reports outcomes of a four-week immersion experience in southern Africa with six counselor-trainees. Data sources for this qualitative study were: daily journals and demographic forms. Outcomes suggest that sustained contact with community residents and daily supervision experiences served to improve cultural awareness. Recommendations include pushing through students?? resistance using a non-linear dynamic model of transformation.     

Autism-Related Variation in Reciprocal Social Behavior: A Longitudinal Study

Deficits in reciprocal social behavior are a characterizing feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Autism-related variation in reciprocal social behavior (AVR) in the general population is continuously distributed and highly heritable—a function of additive genetic influences that overlap substantially with those which engender clinical autistic syndromes. This is the first long-term prospective study of the stability of AVR from childhood through early adulthood, conducted via serial ratings using the Social Responsiveness Scale, in a cohort-sequential study involving children with ASD, other psychiatric conditions, and their siblings (N = 602, ages = 2.5–29). AVR exhibits marked stability throughout childhood in individuals with and without ASD.     

Aspirations and actions: early childhood from policy to practice in Scotland

This paper explores early childhood experience in Scotland in terms of how readily the aspirations of policy convert to day-to-day practices. Ambitions to improve the lives of children and families have been high on the political agenda. Policy may be understood as a tool that aims to influence childhood experience in positive ways. If this is to be so, then the processes that effect change and their limitations need to be understood better, as do the underpinning values and assumptions. The workforce is at the heart of the endeavour to put policy aspirations into action: they are considered to be agents of change. In exploring such issues this paper draws on a policy-based functional analysis of the children's workforce [Dunlop, A.-W., L. Seagraves, S. Henderson, J. Henry, J. Martlew, and J. Fee. 2011. A Policy-Based Functional Analysis of the Children's Workforce. For Scottish Government: Children and Young People Social Care Directorate, Workforce and Capacity Issues Division] and on policy developments since. The paper therefore discusses Scottish policy aspirations for young children and their families, the contribution of the workforce to achieving those aspirations and asks if staff competence in itself is sufficient to ensure policy delivery for all in a climate where child poverty continues to contribute to unequal lives.     

Correction to: An analysis of the ecological components within a text structure intervention

Reading and Writing - In the original publication of the article the funding information was missed to be published.     

Parental Perspectives on Children’s School Readiness: An Ethnographic Study

Early Childhood Education Journal - School readiness is a construct used by educators and policy makers to describe a range of abilities that are beneficial for children transitioning to school....     

An Analysis of Metaphors Used by Students to Describe Energy in an Interdisciplinary General Science Course

The meaning of the term energy varies widely in scientific and colloquial discourse. Teasing apart the different connotations of the term can be especially challenging for non-science majors. In this study, undergraduate students taking an interdisciplinary, general science course (n?=?49) were asked to explain the role of energy in five contexts: radiation, transportation, generating electricity, earthquakes, and the big bang theory. The responses were qualitatively analyzed under the framework of conceptual metaphor theory. This study presents evidence that non-science major students spontaneously use metaphorical language that is consistent with the conceptual metaphors of energy previously identified in the discourse of students in introductory physics, biology, and chemistry courses. Furthermore, most students used multiple coherent metaphors to explain the role of energy in these complex topics. This demonstrates that these conceptual metaphors for energy have broader applicability than just traditional scientific contexts. Implications for this work as a formative assessment tool in instruction will also be discussed.