Preparing Professionals to Face Ethical Challenges in Today's Workplace: Review of the Literature,Implications for PI,and a Proposed Research Agenda

Ethics is very much in the news today and on the minds of those who teach and/or train current and future professionals to work successfully in today's workplaces. While there seems to be agreement that organizations need to address the topic of ethics, there is also a concern about how best to proceed. Ethics and compliance offices, professional codes, ethics conferences, institutes, and centers, formal and informal ethics courses, and ethics hotlines are only some of the ways in which organizations have responded to the need for ethics preparedness. The diversity of our organizations and the global nature of our economy demands attention to multicultural/international issues as well. In this review, we examine the diverse body of literature research that explores teaching and training practices used to address ethical issues in corporations and institutions of higher education and include a special focus on multicultural environments. We discuss implications for PI professionals and propose a research agenda.     

Going Public: Teaching Students to Speak Out in Public Contexts

Many students find speaking in large group, whole class or ‘public’ contexts intimidating. Over the last 30 years, a model of collaborative talk in small groups has been favoured within English teaching in British education but, with the new generation of GCSE syllabuses, students are required to speak effectively to larger audiences. This article explores what constitutes an effective ‘public’ speaker at GCSE level, and suggests various teaching strategies as starting points.     

The Design of Learning Software: Principles Learned from the Computer as Learning Partner Project

This paper describes general curriculum design principles and specific software design implementations resulting from an ongoing collaboration between software designers and programmers, researchers, and a classroom teacher and his students. Research and observations in the classroom setting led to both the emergence of useful learning principles as well as the design of a specific piece of software, E-LabBook. The paper traces the development of the software in the context of the principles that emerged during the design process.     

Inclusion of children with special needs in school-age child care programs

From an ecological perspective, the inclusion of children in school-age child care (SACC) requires collaboration among policy makers, educators, parents, and child care providers. Both typically and atypically developing children benefit from inclusive programs, yet they pose challenges for care-givers primarily due to lack of training, resources, and identification of successful inclusive program components. The process of successful SACC inclusion should be at the forefront of human service and research agendas.     

Decreasing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms utilizing an automated classroom reinforcement device

Psychologists and physicians are frequently approached by parents and, indirectly, by classroom teachers to diagnose and treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Requests are also frequently made for psychostimulant medication to control ADHD behavioral symptoms. One reason for such requests is that alternative classroom approaches to treating ADHD have focused on positive reinforcement, response cost, and token reinforcement programs, all of which can require extensive teacher involvement. One of the major problems with such behavioral approaches is the fact that teachers have limited time to reinforce positive, attentive behaviors, and/or alternative behaviors to ADHD symptoms. This study examined the efficacy of an automated reinforcement device, the Attention Training System (ATS), in decreasing off-task behavior in an 11-year-old, fifth-grade student who had been diagnosed as being affected with ADHD and had been placed in Special Education Resource Room programming. The Attention Training System provides automated token reinforcement in the form of points on a fixed interval schedule when the youngster is on-task. When distractible, impulsive, or hyperactive behavior occurs, the Attention Training device can be activated by a teacher to provide a response-cost consequence of loss of points. The device in this study was coupled with a token reinforcement program whereby points could be exchanged for selected reinforcers at the end of each day. Results indicated that the ATS plus token reinforcement was successful in reducing off-task behavior across classes of three subject areas: Science, Reading, and Social Studies. Results have implications for psychologists and physicians in their attempts to assist families and schools in their management of youngsters with ADHD.     

The entanglement of trust and knowledge on the Web

In this paper I use philosophical accounts on the relationship between trust and knowledge in science to apprehend this relationship on the Web. I argue that trust and knowledge are fundamentally entangled in our epistemic practices. Yet despite this fundamental entanglement, we do not trust blindly. Instead we make use of knowledge to rationally place or withdraw trust. We use knowledge about the sources of epistemic content as well as general background knowledge to assess epistemic claims. Hence, although we may have a default to trust, we remain and should remain epistemically vigilant; we look out and need to look out for signs of insincerity and dishonesty in our attempts to know. A fundamental requirement for such vigilance is transparency: in order to critically assess epistemic agents, content and processes, we need to be able to access and address them. On the Web, this request for transparency becomes particularly pressing if (a) trust is placed in unknown human epistemic agents and (b) if it is placed in non-human agents, such as algorithms. I give examples of the entanglement between knowledge and trust on the Web and draw conclusions about the forms of transparency needed in such systems to support epistemically vigilant behaviour, which empowers users to become responsible and accountable knowers.     

Necessary but not Sufficient: reconceptualizing primary teacher education

Initial primary teacher education should be designed to cater for the socially, culturally and linguistically diverse populations found in schools. They rarely are. As a result they tend to promote social reproduction rather than social transformation. Using vignettes drawn from our work on the New South Wales Ministerial Advisory Council for the Quality of Teaching we demonstrate the need to re‐explore the fundamental purposes and goals of preparing teachers to meet the needs of all children in our primary schools. We propose a reconceptualization of teacher education around a cultural studies perspective as a productive way forward which would allow integration rather than compartmentalization of knowledge and which encourages a search for truth in which tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty feature such that knowledge is understood as relative and fallible.     

Do anti-immigrant sentiments track into Danish classrooms? Ethnicity,ethnicity salience,and bias in children's peer preferences

Denmark's commitment to childhood characterized by equality, democracy, and social cooperation stands in stark contrast to public discourse about immigrant children, who are sometimes branded with negative stereotypes and cast as the cause of school problems. This study examined ethnic-group membership, ethnicity salience, and peer preferences of 399 children in 21 classrooms in two Danish cities to explore whether anti-immigrant sentiments tracked into classrooms, socially marginalizing minority children, and whether any such disadvantages derived from ethnicity salience, in-group favouritism and/or out-group bias. Researchers introduced an index to control for class differences in the relative number of ethnic minority and majority children and analyzed both child as chooser and child as chosen dynamics. They found that minority/majority status was associated with in-group preference, social preference, and social status, disadvantaging minority children, especially in the smaller city. Salience was associated with minority status only. In-group preference did not correlate with out-group bias. Findings revealed potential risks and protective factors for minority children. Evidence contradicted stereotypic characterizations of minority children.