Being a teacher: altruistic and narcissistic expectations of pre-service teachers

The article focuses on investigating pre-service teachers’ expectations of their future teaching career, in particular concerning teacher–student interrelations. In an attempt to comprehend why people choose teaching as a professional career, a conceptual model titled ‘Teachers’ altruistic-narcissistic classroom expectations’ was designed and tested. The model puts forward for consideration the idea that pre-service teachers view their future relations with students as being based on four basic psychological foundations: genuine altruism, paternalistic altruism, benevolent narcissism, and genuine narcissism. A study to test for the validity of this model, using Facet Theory and smallest space analysis as the methodological approach is reported. One hundred and sixty student–teachers participated in the study. The findings provided evidence in support of the model’s validity. It is argued that altruism and narcissism conjointly may be regarded as factors motivating people to opt for teaching as a career, and that altruistic and narcissistic expectations can predict teachers’ classroom behavior.     

Teachers as Secondary Players: Involvement in Field Trips to Natural Environments

This study focused on field trips to natural environments where the teacher plays a secondary role alongside a professional guide. We investigated teachers’ and field trip guides’ views of the teacher’s role, the teacher’s actual function on the field trip, and the relationship between them. We observed field trips, interviewed teachers and guides, and administered questionnaires. We found different levels of teacher involvement, ranging from mainly supervising and giving technical help, to high involvement especially in the cognitive domain and sometimes in the social domain. Analysis of students’ self-reported outcomes showed that the more students believe their teachers are involved, the higher the self-reported learning outcomes.     

Factors affecting adoption of instructional innovations: An example from medical education

This study sets forth an eight-variable causal model describing the spread of instructional innovations among individual faculty members. The model is tested by examining the diffusion of a particular innovation—self-instructional materials—among the faculty of sixteen medical schools, with data provided by faculty survey. The causal model as initially posited is found not to fit the data well; modifications of the model are found to conform more closely. The primary measure accounting for observed variance in faculty innovation behavior is frequency of communication with colleagues about the instructional process.     

The Comprehensive Mental Health Treatment of Chinese International Students: A Case Report

Chinese international students make up the largest number of international students in the United States. They face many stressors that may impact their mental health, such as language barriers, social isolation, academic and financial pressures, and acculturation stress. Yet, there is limited guidance on case conceptualization and treatment models for Chinese international students in university counseling center settings. We present a case report of a 19-year-old, first-year, female undergraduate student from China to illustrate a comprehensive approach for the mental health treatment of Chinese international students. Based on our understanding of the interaction between the student and her influencing environment from a multicultural and ecological vantage point, we intervened on a systems level to achieve a favorable outcome. Our interventions included a multidisciplinary team approach with a student-centered perspective, and advocacy on an individual and organizational level. We conclude with suggested guidelines for the treatment of Chinese international students.     

Testing a core emotion-regulation prediction: does early attentional persistence moderate the effect of infant negative emotionality on later development?

To test the hypothesis that early attentional persistence will moderate the effect of infant negative emotionality on social competence, problem behavior, and school readiness at age 3, data collected as part of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care were subject to structural equation modeling analyses (N = 1,038). Consistent with Eisenberg et al.'s data on older children, high levels of negative emotionality were associated with low levels of social competence only when attentional persistence was poor. No such moderating effects of attentional persistence emerged in the case of behavior problems. And in the case of school readiness, findings indicated that high levels of negative emotionality predicted high levels of school readiness when attentional persistence was high, a result opposite to that found with respect to the prediction of social competence.     

Children's emotions and behaviors in response to infants' cries

Infant crying can elicit in others both a range of emotions and contrasting behavioral reactions, such as altruistic caregiving versus aggression. Variations in reactions to young infants' cries were examined in 60 children ranging in age from late preschool to preadolescence. Each child over-heard either a preterm or a full-term tape-recorded cry from an adjacent room. Then a mother, carrying her infant, came looking for her (previously) "crying" infant's bottle. Later each child was interviewed after hearing a tape recording of a preterm and a full-term cry. Children's emotions and behaviors thus were assessed in response to simulated, real distresses and hypothetical representations of distress. Children's self-reports of empathy, their verbalized intentions to help, their actual helping responses, and observers' ratings of negative emotion were common responses to cries at all ages. In addition there were significant increases with age in prosocial, behavioral interventions. Expressions of negative emotion were inversely related to subsequent forms of prosocial behavior that required direct interaction with the infant. The emotions and behaviors of most children were not influenced by whether they heard preterm or full-term cries. They were, however, able to discriminate between such cries and some articulated "theories" about the impact of the cries on the listener.     

Optimal Controls that Maximize the Expectation of First Passage Time

This paper deals with optimal controls that maximize the expectation of first passage time of the state, of a stochastic non-linear system, to the complement of an open and bounded domain. The performance index includes a penalty on the magnitude of the deviation of the first passage time from its expectation. The nonlinear system considered here is subjected to two different kinds of perturbations. The first kind of perturbation is represented by a vector of independent standard Wiener processes and the second kind by a vector of a generalized type of Poisson process.By using a variational approach, necessary conditions on the optimal controls are derived. These conditions are given by a set of four coupled nonlinear partial integro- differential equations. A nonlinear stochastic third-order system is given as a test case, and a numerical method for the computation of its optimal controls, is suggested. The efficiency and applicability of this method are demonstrated with examples.