Moral reasoning about school bullying in involved adolescents

The aim of the present study was to investigate how bullying incident participant roles and moral reasoning relate to each other in adolescents. To do so, we examined sociomoral judgments about hypothetical bullying incidents and moral disengagement in adolescents identified as bullies, defenders of the victim and passive bystanders. Six-hundred and twenty-six high school students (13- to 15-years-old) took part in this study and 131 were assigned a specific bullying incident participant role through peer nomination. Findings reveal that defenders of the victim show greater and more uniform moral sensibility than did both bullies and passive bystanders. Sociomoral reasoning helped differentiate between both bully subtypes (bully-leaders and bully-followers) and passive bystander beyond displaying greater moral disengagement than defenders did.     

Effectiveness of computerised spelling training in children with language impairments: a comparison of modified and unmodified speech input

This study evaluated a computerised program for training spelling in 8‐ to 13‐year‐olds with receptive language impairments. The training program involved children typing words corresponding to pictured items whose names were spoken. If the child made an error or requested help, the program gave phonological and orthographic cues to build up the word's spelling. Eleven children received this training with ordinary speech, and eleven had the same program but with speech modified to lengthen and amplify dynamic portions of the signal. Nine children were in an untrained control group. Trained children completed between 6 and 29 training sessions each of 15 minutes, at a rate of 3 to 5 sessions per week, with an average of over 1000 trials. Children were assessed before and after training. Trained children learned an average of 1.4 novel spellings per session. The trend was for children presented with modified speech to do less well than those trained with ordinary speech, regardless of whether they had auditory temporal processing impairments. Trained groups did not differ from the untrained control group in terms of gains made on standardised tests of spelling or word and nonword reading. This study confirms the difficulty of training literacy skills in children with severe language impairments. Individual words may be learned, but more general knowledge of rule‐based phonological skills is harder to acquire.     

The development of intruder attack in colonies of laboratory rats

Most attacks by rat colony members on strange intruders are made by a single dominant male. Such dominance, and the attack behaviors themselves, develop in a relatively fixed sequence over sessions with strange intruders. The entire sequence of attack on intruders occurs earlier in the intruder sessions for older rat colonies than in those for newly established colonies: conversely, more attack is seen in colonies with prior intruder experience than for intruder-naive colonies of equivalent age. Thus both experience within the colony and specific experience with strange intruders influence the rate of development of attack on intruders by dominant colony rats.     

Reimagining student employability: a case study of policy and practice transformation

ABSTRACT

Within Australian higher education, there has been an evolving of employability policy, realised in curriculum, at an intersection of the constructs of employment, work-readiness, life-long learning, and career development. The enactment of employability policy has driven an evolution in the practices of higher education in both curriculum and student support. This paper presents a case study of an Australian university which has reimagined the delivery of career and student support services through a framework that envisions preparing students for future worlds of work. The emergent policy framework has transformed organisational structures, human resources, and connections between student support practices and curriculum design. This transformation has generated new intersections of practice and is challenging institutional constructs of expertise. This case study provides transferrable learnings for broader considerations of higher education policy and practice as employability becomes the core driver of student success, and explores layered discourses of policymaking across an institution.     

Strong, Weak, and Latent Ties and the Impact of New Media

This article argues that consideration of the strength of ties between communicators can help reconcile disparate results on the impact of new media on social relations. It is argued from the research literature and studies by the author that where ties are strong, communicators can influence each other to adapt and expand their use of media to support the exchanges important to their tie, but where ties are weak, communicators are dependent on common, organizationally established means of communication and protocols established by others. Due to this differential use of media, a new medium that adds means and opportunities for previously unconnected others to communicate will have positive effects on weak ties and weak-tie networks, in particular by laying an infrastructure of latent ties (ones that exist technically but have not yet been activated), and providing an opportunity for weak ties to develop and strengthen. A new medium may also have positive effects on strongly tied pairs where it adds another means of communicating and supports the communication needs and tasks of the pair. However, where a new medium replaces a former, common means of communication, the dependence of weak ties on a common medium makes weak-tie networks highly susceptible to dissolution. In contrast, strong-tie networks, with their connections via multiple relations and multiple media, can be expected to be more robust under conditions of change.     

French nursery schools and German kindergartens: effects of individual and contextual variables on early learning

The present article investigates the effects of individual and contextual variables on children’s early learning in French nursery schools and German kindergartens. Our study of 552 children at preschools in France (299 children from French nursery schools) and Germany (253 children from German kindergartens) measured skills that facilitate the learning of reading, writing and arithmetic at primary school. We also evaluated educational family practices and parents’ expectations of their children’s pre-school education. In order to take into account the hierarchical structure of our data, multilevel models were used in the analysis, which was carried out using MLwiN software version 2.02 (Rasbash et al. 2005). Although French nursery schools emphasise academic learning, we did not find any significant differences in overall performances between the French and German samples. However, significant differences were obtained for some subscale results. In addition, our results indicate that individual and contextual variables have an impact on the differences observed between children from the two countries.     

Supporting children with motor skills difficulties: an initial evaluation of the Manchester Motor Skills Programme

Children with motor difficulties are a very varied group. In order to target interventions more effectively researchers have attempted to identify specific sub‐groups; however, attempts to identify sub‐groups and provide interventions accordingly have met with limited success. Currently interventions can be classified into two main types, namely, general abilities and normative functional approaches. The current study outlines the Manchester Motor Skills Programme (MMSP), which adopts a normative functional approach and has been developed jointly by educational psychologists (EPs), specialist teachers and schools. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the MMSP a quasi‐experimental repeated measures study was undertaken involving 24 children. The quasi‐experimental study yielded a medium effect size, which is a promising result for a naturalistic intervention. Methodological limitations and areas of future research are considered and identified.     

The Development of a Service-Learning Program for First-Year Students Based on the Hallmarks of High Quality Service-learning and Rigorous Program Evaluation

We describe six hallmarks of high quality service-learning and explain how these considerations guided the development of a Transitional Coaching Program (TCP) during the first three years of implementation. We have demonstrated that the TCP is acceptable, feasible, and sustainable. Improvements have been seen in the degree of impact on learning objectives, but statistically significant change has not yet been achieved. This project highlights the importance of looking beyond satisfaction and engaging in rigorous assessment of learning objectives and ongoing quality improvement through attention to best practices and evidence-based, continuous quality improvement.     

Development and validation of the meaning of work inventory among French workers

The purpose of this study was to validate a psychometric instrument among French workers for assessing the meaning of work. Following an empirical framework, a two-step procedure consisted of exploring and then validating the scale among distinctive samples. The consequent Meaning of Work Inventory is a 15-item scale based on a four-factor model, and assesses the importance, understanding, direction, and purpose of work. The results indicate that this instrument is reliable for assessing the meaning of work in the French context. Implications for career counseling practices are discussed.