Does war contribute to family violence against children? Findings from a two-generational multi-informant study in Northern Uganda

After 20 years of civil war in Northern Uganda, the continuity of violence within the family constitutes a major challenge to children's healthy development in the post-conflict era. Previous exposure to trauma and ongoing psychopathology in guardians potentially contribute to parental perpetration against children and dysfunctional interactions in the child's family ecology that increase children's risk of maltreatment. In order to investigate distal and proximal risk factors of child victimization, we first aimed to identify factors leading to more self-reported perpetration in guardians. Second, we examined factors in the child's family environment that promote child-reported experiences of maltreatment. Using a two-generational design we interviewed 368 children, 365 female guardians, and 304 male guardians from seven war-affected rural communities in Northern Uganda on the basis of standardized questionnaires. We found that the strongest predictors of self-reported aggressive parenting behaviors toward the child were guardians’ own experiences of childhood maltreatment, followed by female guardians’ victimization experiences in their intimate relationship and male guardians’ posttrautmatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and alcohol-related problems. Regarding children's self-report of victimization in the family, proximal factors including violence between adults in the household and male guardians’ PTSD symptom severity level predicted higher levels of maltreatment. Distal variables such as female guardians’ history of childhood victimization and female guardians’ exposure to traumatic war events also increased children's report of maltreatment. The current findings suggest that in the context of organized violence, an intergenerational cycle of violence persists that is exacerbated by female guardians’ re-victimization experiences and male guardians’ psychopathological symptoms.     

Adolescents’ cheating and delinquent behavior from a justice-psychological perspective: the role of teacher justice

The more people believe in a just world (BJW) in which they get what they deserve, the more they are motivated to preserve a just world by ones’ just behavior. Consequently, we expected school students with a strong BJW to show less deviant behavior as cheating or delinquency. The mediating role of teacher justice was also examined. Questionnaire data were obtained from a total of N?=?382 German and Indian high school students. Regression analyses revealed that the stronger students’ BJW was, the less cheating and delinquent behavior they reported. Moreover, the more the students believed in a just world, the more they evaluated their teachers’ behavior toward them personally to be just, and the experience of teacher justice fully mediated the relation between BJW and cheating and delinquency, respectively. This pattern of results was in line with our hypotheses and consistent across different cultural contexts. It persisted when neuroticism and sex were controlled. The adaptive functions of BJW and implications for future school research are discussed.     

Fostering Upper Secondary Students’ Ability to Engage in Practices of Scientific Investigation: a Comparative Analysis of an Explicit and an Implicit Instructional Approach

Research in Science Education - Inquiry-based teaching is considered as contributing to content-related, procedural, and epistemic learning goals of science education. In this study, a...     

Measuring child maltreatment risk in communities: a life table approach

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this article is to: (1) illustrate the application of life table methodology to child abuse and neglect report data and (2) demonstrate the use of indicators derived from the life tables for monitoring the risk of child maltreatment within a community. METHOD: Computerized records of child maltreatment reports from a large, urban county in Ohio are cumulated for 11 years and linked for each child. Life table methods are used to estimate the probability that children from birth to age 10 will be reported victims of maltreatment by age, race, and urban or suburban residence. RESULTS: Using life tables, the estimates in the county of this study are that 33.4% of African American children and 11.8% of White children will appear in substantiated or indicated child abuse or neglect report(s) by their 10th birthday. The age-specific probability of a maltreatment report is highest in the first year of life for both groups. The probability of a child being reported for a substantiated or indicated incident of maltreatment before his or her 10th birthday is more than three times higher for city dwellers than for suburbanites in the urban county studied here. CONCLUSIONS: Life table methodology is useful for creating child well-being indicators for communities. Such indicators reveal that a larger portion of the child population is affected by maltreatment reports than would be concluded from examining cross-sectional rates and can be used to identify racial or geographic disparities.     

A comparison of non-verbal and verbal indicators of young children’s metacognition

Metacognition and Learning - In the past decade, research increasingly uncovers emerging metacognitive skills in young children by using child-friendly, creative, and non-verbal measures of...     

International Approaches in Human Rights Education

This paper was presented at a working group on Human Rights Education (HRE), organised by Volker Lenhart and Christel Adick, as part of the biennial conference of the German Society for Educational Research (DGfE), held in 2000 in Göttingen. In the spirit of the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education (1995–2004) it contributes to the global discourse about HRE by summarising its foundations in international declarations and conventions, by discussing some examples for diverse approaches and conceptions of HRE and, finally by introducing some major obstacles or problems. The paper is part of the author's PhD project in the field of HRE and presents only an interim résumé of her recent work.     

The Impact of Race,Gender, and Socioeconomic Status on School Counselors’ Alternative Learning Program Placement Decisions: An Experimental Study

As a form of exclusionary discipline, student placement into an alternative learning program (ALP) may lead to negative outcomes for students (e.g., lower academic achievement, attrition, involvement in the juvenile justice system; Anderson and Ritter in Educ Policy Anal Arch 25(49):1–33, 2017). School counselors are called to address inequitable policies, procedures, and conditions that may limit students’ personal/social and academic development, college access, and career readiness (ASCA, The ASCA national model: a framework for school counseling programs, 3rd edn. American School Counselor Association, Alexandria, VA, 2012). Additionally, school counselors should be unbiased in their decision-making (ASCA, Ethical standards for school counselors. American School Counselor Association, Alexandria, VA, 2016). The researchers utilized a true experimental design to examine the impact of student race (African American or White), gender (male or female), and socioeconomic status (SES; economically advantaged or disadvantaged) on practicing school counselors’ (N?=?334) decisions to place students in ALPs for disciplinary reasons. A factorial analysis of variance revealed no statistically significant differences in school counselors’ likelihood of placing students in ALPs for disciplinary reasons based these student demographic factors. The study also revealed a statistically significant positive relationship between school counselors’ belief in a just world, as measured by the Global Belief in a Just World Scale (GBJWS; Lipkus in Personal Individ Differ, 12(11): 1171–1178. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(91)90081-L, 1991), and likelihood of referring students to ALPs for disciplinary reasons. Implications for school counselors and educational stakeholders are discussed.

     

Make a drawing. Effects of strategic knowledge,drawing accuracy,and type of drawing on students’ mathematical modelling performance

Drawing strategies are widely used as a powerful tool for promoting students’ learning and problem solving. In this article, we report the results of an inferential mediation analysis that was applied to investigate the roles that strategic knowledge about drawing and the accuracy of different types of drawings play in mathematical modelling performance. Sixty-one students were asked to create a drawing of the situation described in a task (situational drawing) and a drawing of the mathematical model described in the task (mathematical drawing) before solving modelling problems. A path analysis showed that strategic knowledge about drawing was positively related to students’ modelling performance. This relation was mediated by the type and accuracy of the drawings that were generated. The accuracy of situational drawing was related only indirectly to performance. The accuracy of mathematical drawings, however, was strongly related to students’ performance. We complemented the quantitative approach with a qualitative in-depth analysis of students’ drawings in order to explain the relations found in our study. Implications for teaching practices and future research are discussed.     

International Approaches in Human Rights Education

This paper was presented at a working group on Human Rights Education (HRE), organised by Volker Lenhart and Christel Adick, as part of the biennial conference of the German Society for Educational Research (DGfE), held in 2000 in Göttingen. In the spirit of the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education (1995–2004) it contributes to the global discourse about HRE by summarising its foundations in international declarations and conventions, by discussing some examples for diverse approaches and conceptions of HRE and, finally by introducing some major obstacles or problems. The paper is part of the author's PhD project in the field of HRE and presents only an interim résumé of her recent work.