Puberty,health and sexual education in Australian regional primary schools: Year 5 and 6 teacher perceptions

The research reported in this paper investigates why teachers in regional primary schools in the Ballarat region of Victoria, Australia, are choosing to outsource the teaching of sexuality education. A survey was conducted of 29 Year 5 and Year 6 teachers from local primary schools. The teachers provided information about: their confidence in delivering sexuality-related topics; their perceptions of the relevance of given sexuality topics to their students; the teachers' own professional development preferences; and what they saw as their personal limitations in teaching sexuality education. Teachers tended to report low confidence in teaching topics that are considered ‘sensitive’, such as menstruation, wet dreams and sexual intercourse. Furthermore, they indicated a need for professional development in teaching sexuality education. The greatest hurdle identified lies in identifying how to motivate, engage and support teachers to take a professional interest in teaching sexuality education.     

Manufacturing Authenticity: The Rhetoric of “Real” in Women's Magazines

Discourses of authenticity are symptomatic of an era of destabilized communication hierarchies, participatory media, and reality television programming. Women's magazines are an apt site to examine articulations of authenticity given the genre's traditional emphases on aspirational consumption and “making up” the external self. This study explores constructions of authenticity in the advertising and editorial content of two top-ranked publications, Glamour and Cosmopolitan. Drawing on a qualitative textual analysis of these magazines, the author conceptualizes three overlapping tropes of authenticity: (a) promoting natural, organic products; (b) the celebration of ordinary-looking women; and (c) the encouragement of inner-directed self-discovery. These striations of real products, real external beauty, and real internal beauty, respectively, allow authenticity to seep throughout the texts without fundamentally disrupting their traditional commercial function.     

In Search of the Loci for Sex Differences in Throwing

Contemporary accounts of sex differences in perceptual-motor performance differ in their emphasis on nature and nurture. Study 1 examined the effect of extensive training on one of the largest sex differences, namely accuracy in dart throwing, and found that physical differences in height and reach could not explain sex differences in regional/national level dart players. Study 2 rejected accounts of sex differences based on participation rates by showing that male players recruited from a relatively small pool of club players were superior to the best female players selected from a much larger pool at the international level. Alternative accounts of the source of sex differences in darts, based on male and female players' differential development and practice histories, are discussed.     

Education,democracy and social change: Venezuela’s education missions in theory and practice

The ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ in Venezuela is conceptualised as a pedagogical project that aims to develop ‘twenty-first century Socialism’ through state-grassroots collaboration in the reorganisation of political space in order to develop participatory, democratic institutions and processes. The cornerstones of this project to deepen and expand democracy in and through education are the adult Education Missions, set up in parallel to existing educational structures, and with an explicit focus on socio-political education and community projects aimed at promoting a new hegemony based on active grassroots citizenship. While the struggle to extend democracy in and through education is not unique to Venezuela, the conceptualisation of democracy as protagonist and participatory, and the explicit links made between education and democratic social change within the broader framework of twenty-first century socialism, makes Venezuela a dynamic site to revisit and reinvigorate classical debates as to the role of education in promoting democratic social change. Based on 15 months of empirical research, this paper examines the extent to which adult education in Venezuela is contributing to the development of a counter-hegemonic movement to build socialism for the twenty-first century.     

Connecting online learners with diverse local practices: the design of effective common reference points for conversation

This mixed‐methods study probed the effectiveness of three kinds of objects (video, theory, metaphor) as common reference points for conversations between online learners (student teachers). Individuals’ degree of detail‐focus was examined as a potentially interacting covariate and the outcome measure was learners’ level of tacit knowledge related to their practice (teaching). Analysis was conducted using hierarchical linear modeling and significant results were followed up with a qualitative theme analysis. An interaction between reference point type and detail‐focus was found, demonstrating a positive effect of detail‐focus within the metaphor condition. Unexpectedly, some participants interpreted the metaphors in ways other than those intended, leading to differences in the kinds of understandings developed. The study indicated that a conceptual frame is an important characteristic of a reference point that will be truly taken in common, and that metaphors need additional framing to be viable in this role. Implications for online learning conversation design are discussed.     

Linguistic profiles of dyslexic and good readers

Linguistic profiles of 60 boys with average intelligence were examined at kindergarten, grade 2, and grade 4. The subjects were 7 dyslexic, 7 mildly dyslexic, 30 average, and 16 good readers, defined in terms of the discrepancy between standardized reading and intelligence scores. Across the three ages, reader groups did not differ in language comprehension, but did differ in confrontation and rapid automatized naming (RAN), three syntactic measures, and verbal memory. Group strengths and weaknesses were, with few exceptions apparent in kindergarten and maintained throughout. The kindergarten tasks which most effectively predicted reading group membership at grade 4 were giving letter sounds, and rapid naming; these predicted 4th grade reading group at close to 100 percent accuracy. The study, together with a further comparison of average and high IQ good readers, provides an interesting contrast between the role of RAN and Confrontation naming in reading. This work was supported in part by NIHCD grants RO1HD18761 to F. H. Duffy, RO1HD18654 to H. Als, and the Mental Retardation Grant P30HD18655 to C. F. Barlow.     

开发统一的领导体系——乔治亚州与俄勒冈州执行的领导政策框架

在美国，州与学区的政策都有效影响了学校领导的发展。这些政策大致可以归为三类：1．标准类：教育领导者应该知道并能做什么？2．培训类：我们如何培训领导者了解并能够履行这些标准？3．环境类：影响教育领导者如何以及是否能够最好地履行自己能力的工作环境与政策是什么？     

Does Thoughtfully Adaptive Teaching Actually Exist? A Challenge to Teacher Educators

In this article, we explore the roots of thoughtfully adaptive teaching in reflection. Drawing on the conceptual work of Dewey and Schon, we examine reflective practice in teaching as a tool for resistance against institutional pressures to standardize teaching practices. We describe 2 programs of research related to this topic. One program of research is focused on teacher adaptations to practice in the classroom. The second program of research is focused on coaching teachers to develop strategies for thoughtfully adaptive teaching. We draw on the work of Janks around deconstruction and reconstruction for critical teaching practices.     

Psychopathology in the schools: Multicultural factors that impact assessment and intervention

All cultures promote specific norms of behavior that can influence the assessment and intervention process with members of racially/ethnically diverse groups who are diagnosed with various forms of psychopathology. The purpose of this article is to highlight literature on the prevalence of psychological disorders with respect to children and adolescents from different racial/ethnic groups and present variables that may impact assessment and intervention within these diverse populations (e.g., contextual factors, racial and ethnic identity, religious/spiritual beliefs, parenting factors, student attitudes). In addition, cultural issues related to the assessment process and culturally sensitive recommendations for intervention are addressed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 43: 429–438, 2006.     

Accessing elaborations on core information in a hypermedia environment

Strategies for managing information in a hypermedia learning environment require the text to carry indicators that describe the presence and type of additional information available from a specific point on a computer text screen. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of link display strategy and link density on ease of use and measures of interaction. Independent variables were link strategy (three levels) and link density (two levels), yielding six treatment groups (n = 108). Within-subjects variables were time interval and type of elaboration accessed. Dependent measures were time spent on elaborations, number of elaborations accessed, and ease of use. Primary findings were that indicating all elaborations by common link indicators in the text reduced readability and led to more extensive and random browsing behavior in users; that indicating elaborations by destination-specific link indicators in the text reduced readability and increased users' tendency to target specific elaborations; and that locating link indicators in submenus increased ratings on ease of use but drastically reduced the number of elaborations accessed and time spent reading elaborations. These findings lead to the conclusion that hypermedia designers will have to make choices between promoting exploration and reducing screen readability.