END-OF-LIFE CARE FOR SENIORS: PUBLIC AND PROFESSIONAL AWARENESS

Seniors living with disease or dying should be able to receive competent, comprehensive, and compassionate end-of-life care that offers dignity, self-determination, and relief from pain and suffering. Such care is predicated on an informed public and health and social service providers who are in end-of-life issues and appropriate approaches. There is, however, little evidence that seniors and their families are about end-of-life issues or about their treatment and care options. Furthermore, health and social service providers do not predictably receive the education and training necessary to ensure a high quality of end-of-life care for seniors. This paper discusses public and professional awareness and offers strategies aimed at increasing awareness of end-of-life issues. These strategies also support the development of an approach to end-of-life care for seniors that is caring, compassionate, and ethically, spiritually, and culturally appropriate. The article contributes to an emerging agenda directed at ensuring that all seniors receive end-of-life care that allows a positive conclusion to their lives.     

Place and Space in the Design of New Learning Environments

The development of online and virtual teaching and learning environments to augment formal face-to-face environments raises questions about the way the new communication and information technologies (CITs) are being incorporated into the on-campus environment. More importantly, this development challenges the meaning of the on-campus student learning experience. The new CITs require institutions, teachers and researchers to reconsider the relationship of the physical setting to the student learning experience. This paper highlights examples of recent developments of new learning environments which have been enhanced by the contribution of educational developers at several Australian universities. It also proposes a set of pedagogically informed principles to guide the development of on-campus teaching and learning environments which may feature the use of CITs.     

The Welfare to Work Transition in the United States: Implications for Work-Related Learning

This paper summarizes the legislation upon which the current welfare-to-work transition in the United States is based and describes characteristics of the former welfare population from which various tiers of employment options have emerged: unsubsidized-employed workers, subsidized-employed workers, subsidized-unemployed recipients, and unsubsidized-unemployed individuals. It also discusses current program emphases, and presents a format for directions for future program development which includes academic programs, situated cognition programs, integrated literacy/occupational skills programs, and integrated literacy/soft skills training.     

Attentional learning and flexible induction: how mundane mechanisms give rise to smart behaviors

Young children often exhibit flexible behaviors relying on different kinds of information in different situations. This flexibility has been traditionally attributed to conceptual knowledge. Reported research demonstrates that flexibility can be acquired implicitly and it does not require conceptual knowledge. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-olds successfully learned different context-predictor contingencies and subsequently flexibly relied on different predictors in different contexts. Experiments 2A and 2B indicated that flexible generalization stems from implicit attentional learning rather than from rule discovery, and Experiment 3 pointed to very limited strategic control over generalization behaviors in 4- to 5-year-olds. These findings indicate that mundane mechanisms grounded in associative and attentional learning may give rise to smart flexible behaviors.