Community College Counseling: Why Are Research Outcomes So Elusive?

This article focuses on counseling research in the community college context. The article suggests the need for a robust community college knowledge base, describes some limitations of the current community college literature, and suggests a framework for more effective work in this area. The authors’ own experiences and selected examples of published studies are used as illustrations of the hurdles encountered and solutions available when examining counseling theories, practices, and outcomes in 2‐year settings.     

Unconscious and unnoticed professional practice within an outstanding school for children and young people with complex learning difficulties and disabilities

This article describes a three‐year project undertaken at Pear Tree School for children and young people with severe and multiple and profound learning difficulties. Lesley Sullivan, the school's head teacher, believed that much of the value within the work of this outstanding school went unidentified by existing approaches to planning, monitoring and evaluation. Richard Crombie, educational psychologist, was engaged to work on the project. Also involved were Kate Walker and Rebecca Warnock, deputy head teachers, as well as the whole staff, children and some parents. The project takes as its starting point that essential, but very often unnoticed and unconscious, professional practice is rooted in implicit processes learnt experientially. We set ourselves the task of finding meaningful frameworks for identifying and developing that practice. This meant close observation within and outside school coupled with feeding back to staff, and their subsequent engagement with and use of explanatory frameworks.     

Counseling With HEART: A Relationship Violence Prevention Program for College Students

Relationship violence is a salient concern on college campuses today, and psychoeducational groups may be an appropriate prevention format. This article describes a study measuring the impact of college student participation in the HEART (Help End Abusive Relationships Today) program, a series of group sessions designed to increase knowledge and awareness of relationship violence. Findings indicated significant changes for group participants postintervention. Implications and recommendations for college counselors are discussed.     

Back to the future: (re)turning from peer review to peer engagement

Key points

• Scholarly communication – with the exception of traditional (e.g. blind and double‐blind) peer review – prizes the open exchange of ideas.
• The aim of peer review should be engagement, not judgement.
• Reviews that improve the quality of a work and thus advance the field are not merely service to the community, but contributions to existing scholarship, and need to be rewarded accordingly; an open and transparent review process is the first step in enabling such reviews to be properly recognized.

     

Do Individual Perceptions Matter in Pornography Effects? How Perceived General Acceptance and Influence of Pornography May Impact Agreement With Sex-Role Attitudes

Pornography use is often associated with less-progressive sex-role attitudes, such as endorsement of a sexual double standard between heterosexual partners, but the process by which this relationship occurs is still largely unexamined. The present study was conducted to examine how perceptions about pornography may play a role in the relationship between pornography use and sex-role attitudes. Perceived general acceptance and perceived influence of pornography on most people partially mediated the relationship between pornography use and sex-role attitudes. The more participants reported using pornography, the more they believed pornography was generally accepted and had a positive influence; however, conversely to what was hypothesized, the more positive they perceived pornography’s influence, the less likely they were to report sex-role attitudes that endorse a sexual double standard.     

How We Used to Build the Future: 30 Years of Collection Development Trends

This session highlighted trends in continuing resource collections and collection management throughout the 30-year period from 1985 through 2015. Electronic resources became available in the 1990s and grew in prevalence from the 2000s through the present, changing the make-up of library collections and also how libraries measure collections and collection usage. Two librarians and two vendors shared their perspectives on these changes in collection development, describing how library collections now contain a combination of older formats and older ways of collecting data, and new, electronic content and automated ways of collecting and disseminating data about collections.     

Multiple components of fitness improved among overweight and obese adolescents following a community-based lifestyle intervention

Fitness is an important component of health, and obese adolescents regularly have poor fitness. Unfortunately, few have assessed the impact of community-based lifestyle interventions on multiple components of fitness. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of participation in a community-based intervention involving adolescents and parents on multiple components of fitness of obese adolescents. In a within-subject, waitlist controlled clinical trial with 12 months follow-up in Western Australia, participants (n = 56) completed multiple fitness measures at baseline, immediately prior to beginning an 8-week intervention and at 3, 6 and 12 months during a maintenance period. Performance on the shuttle walk was improved immediately post-intervention (increase of 42.8 m, 95% CI: 7.5, 78.2) and at 12 months post-intervention (increase of 44.6 m, 95% CI: 1.3, 87.8) compared with pre-intervention. Muscle performance of quadriceps and deltoids were improved post-intervention (increase of 1.1 (95% CI: 0.1, 2.1) kg · F and 1.0 (0.02, 2.1) kg · F, respectively) and all muscle performance measures were improved at 12 months following the intervention. There were no changes in waist circumference. A community-based lifestyle programme such as Curtin University’s Activity, Food and Attitudes Program (CAFAP) may be a viable strategy for improving fitness in overweight adolescents.