Children with reported histories of sexual abuse: utilizing multiple perspectives to understand clinical and psychosocial profiles

OBJECTIVE: The current study examines multiple empirically based perspectives (i.e., child, caregiver, and clinician) of behavior and functioning as they contribute to the clinical and psychosocial profile of children (aged 5 to 17.5 years) with reported histories of sexual abuse.METHOD: A large, multi-site data set of children referred into Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services both with and without reported histories of sexual abuse, was examined. Seven hundred and fifty-nine children with a reported history of sexual abuse were compared to 2722 without such a history on caregiver and child reported behavior, clinician rated functioning, diagnosis, demographic variables, and life challenges.RESULTS: The multiple perspectives contributed unique and specific information to regression models: caregiver-reported behavior contributed information about externalizing behavior while child-reported behavior added information about internalizing behavior and clinician ratings about self-harmful behavior. Children with reported histories of sexual abuse were also more likely to be female, Caucasian, and have reported histories of life challenges (e.g., physical abuse, substance use, running away). Child sexual abuse was associated with higher rates of depression and anxiety diagnoses, and lower rates of substance abuse, conduct, and attention deficit disorder diagnoses.CONCLUSIONS: The findings indicate that the profile of children entering into Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services with reported histories of sexual abuse, as compared to those without such histories, is complex and best understood via multiple perspectives. Caregiver, child and clinician rated information, when taken together, provide a comprehensive clinical and psychosocial profile around which to plan and implement individualized service plans.     

Children''s Use of Anatomically Detailed Dolls to Recount an Event

The use of anatomically detailed dolls in child sexual abuse investigations has raised several controversial issues related to important theoretical questions in developmental psychology. The present study was designed to examine some of these issues in a methodologically sound experiment. 80 3- and 5-year-old children experienced a social interaction with a male confederate and were later tested under 1 of 4 recall conditions: reenactment with anatomically detailed dolls, reenactment with regular dolls, free recall with visual cues, or free recall without visual cues. The children were also asked a variety of specific and misleading questions, some of them dealing with acts associated with abuse ("He took your clothes off, didn't he?"). Both anatomically detailed and regular dolls along with other props aided 5-year-olds more than 3-year-olds in recounting the event. To use increased rather than decreased age differences. Anatomically detailed dolls did not foster false reports of abuse. Overall, 3-year-olds were more suggestible than 5-year-olds. The findings have implications for children's testimony in child abuse cases and for psychological theories concerning the effects of stimulus support on children's memory.     

Bottling fog? The quest for instructional management

Elsewhere, the authors have unpacked instructional leadership and have documented that such leadership is associated with more effective schools. Indeed, there has been for a considerable time nearly universal acceptance that learning-centered leadership should provide the central platform on which leadership is enacted. In this paper, a less sanguine narrative is provided on instructional management. Specifically, it documents that for all the evidence and recognition of importance, learning-focused leadership remains a small domain of action for leaders at the school and district levels. It then focuses on both the culture of the profession of school administration and the nature of schooling to explain why in the face of considerable energy and effort only marginal improvements have been realized in deepening instructional leadership. It closes with an analysis of possible paths going forward.     

Environmental dystopias: Margaret Atwood and the monstrous child

ABSTRACT

The future of childhood is often described in terms of utopian thinking. Here, the turn is towards dystopia as a fertile source of wild imaginings about the future. The dystopian literary fictions featured here act as a message and are projections of an uneasy future requiring a reader to see the present differently. Such projections make reading dangerous as they create an alternative world often disorderly and dismissive of contexts that are familiar and safe. In these scenarios, the child is often a key figure. In the work by Atwood (Oryx and Crake; The Year of the Flood; MaddAddam), the world is an environmental nightmare. The focus is on MaddAddam, in which the child is an object of desire and both monstrous and redemptive. A reading of MaddAddam as a posthuman text is undertaken and it is argued that Atwood's dystopia creates a discourse of monstrosity (both weird and beautiful) that contaminates thoughts about the child/children/childhood and the future.     

Driving change from ‘the middle’: middle leading for site based educational development

ABSTRACT

Educational researchers have invested much in isolating the specific ‘drivers’ that influence school change and teacher professional development. In this vein, this article draws attention to necessarily situated understandings of practice development through research into the nature of ‘middle leading’ for site based education development in one primary school district in regional Australia. Drawing on practice theory, the analysis reveals how developing and sustaining change in schools is contingent on middle leaders’ insider knowledge, shared responsibility and capacity to sustain and ‘drive’ teachers’ learning. The article argues more situated understandings of middle leading practices are essential for sustainable educational reform.     

Auditory and reading comprehension in hyperlexia: Semantic and syntactic skills

In contrast to dyslexia, in hyperlexia, there is precocious development of reading in the absence of other precocious skills, thus reading is significantly above expectation on the basis of prediction from age and intelligence. A psycholinguistic investigation is reported, of a 10 year old, non-autistic hyperlexic, on tasks of both written and auditory presentation of single words, sentences and text. M.S. shows good development of both phonological and lexical reading mechanisms. He does not display a pattern of reading performance which resembles any selective reading disorder and there is no evidence that the nature of his reading development, in relation to accuracy, is abnormal in style. However, reading accuracy is significantly better than both reading comprehension and auditory comprehension. The comprehension deficit does not affect language in an undifferentiated way. Semantic comprehension is normal for age but syntactic comprehension is significantly impaired. Thus, although there are no unusual dissociations in relation to reading accuracy, there is a significant dissociation between reading accuracy and reading comprehension, and also between semantic and syntactic comprehension of both written and auditory material which argues for modularity in the development of these subsystems.     

Long-term habituation is produced by distributed training at long ISIs and not by massed training or short ISIs inCaenorhabditis elegans

To begin an investigation of the cellular processes that underlie long-term memory in the nematodeCaenorhabditis elegans, it is first necessary to determine thatC. elegans is capable of retention over 24 h, and to investigate the factors that may influence the expression of long-term memory. In the present study, the effects of stimuli number, interstimulus interval (ISI), and training procedure on long-term retention of habituation were tested inC. elegans. At a long (60-sec) ISI, distributed training sessions produced long-term habituation retained for 24 h, whereas massed training sessions or training with few stimuli did not. When training was performed at a short (10-sec) ISI, long-term habituation was not detectable with testing at either a 10- or a 60-sec ISI. The long-term habituation observed after distributed training sessions at a 60-sec ISI was consistently expressed when the training procedures were varied. Thus it is clear thatC. elegans can reliably express long-term retention for distributed training sessions at a 60-sec ISI, making the system a candidate for further investigations into the cellular processes supporting memory.     

Breaking the Line: New Literacies,Postmodernism and the Teaching of Printed Texts

In many contemporary texts boundaries are broken down. Words and image convey multiple meanings, lending themselves to postmodern readings, in the sense that they encourage readings that reject a single interpretation and instead hold in suspense the possibility of multiple readings co‐existing. This article explores how these texts allow the consumer/reader the opportunity to actively engage, and in a sense therefore to produce, the cultural event rather than being merely the passive receiver of it. It raises implications for the way that such texts are considered in schools.     

Teacher expectations in a university setting: the perspectives of teachers

ABSTRACT

This study was designed to investigate the bases of teacher expectations in higher education. The first author interviewed 20 university teachers from an English-as-a-foreign-language course, exploring their expectations for the first-year undergraduates in their classes. The grounded theory method was adopted to analyse the data that had been collected. The results showed that for this sample of 20 teachers, student characteristics were important contributing factors to their expectations in the teachers’ university settings. The factors the teachers considered important included students’ (a) prior academic achievement, (b) motivation, (c) study skills, and (d) academic discipline. Also, teacher characteristics were found to be another major source of these university teachers’ expectations, including teachers’ (a) past teaching and learning experience and (b) teaching self-efficacy. The findings suggested that the bases of teacher expectations in higher education may differ from those at the elementary or secondary school level.