Benefits of Required Counseling for Counseling Students

Graduate students experience mental health distress. The authors investigated the benefits of required counseling services at a training clinic for students enrolled in counseling courses. Results indicated that after receiving services, students (N = 55) reported decreases in overall problems, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms. Implications for counselor educators are discussed.     

The seeds of discontent: examining youth perceptions of higher education in Syria

This article examines young Syrians' perceptions of higher education after the 2001 reforms, which expanded access to higher education and permitted the establishment of private universities. Data come from in-depth interviews conducted with 22 Syrians residing in Damascus, aged 18–32 in 2009. Analysis indicates youth are critical of the higher education system broadly, and that their discontent stems from two sources: (1) the high level of state involvement in determining youth life paths when uncoupled from labour market security; and (2) the perceived unfairness in university admissions stemming from connections and new forms of privatisation. This youth discontent reflects a larger rejection of the state's role in the higher education admissions process. Given Syria's long-term commitment to a model of state-led development in the post-independence era, the failure of the Syrian state to successfully link expanded higher education to secure employment in the neo-liberal era has contributed to a de-legitimisation of the Syrian state as a whole in the eyes of its youth.     

Equality and Education: Fact and Fiction

This paper reports on a series of statistical analyses carried out on some of the National Curriculum tests in mathematics for 11-year-olds in England. In England all 7-, 11- and 14-year-olds are tested in English, mathematics and science (11- and 14-year-olds only). The tests for 11-year-olds are very high stakes, in that the results are published in a school-by-school basis in newspapers etc. The analyses were prompted by the suggestion (from governmental organisations) that the balance of the curriculum content in the mathematics tests should be changed to accommodate better the require ments of the government-initiated National Numeracy Strategy. The analyses were carried out on two datasets, involving nationally representative samples of 11-year-old pupils. The analyses reveal some interesting patterns of change in the overall outcomes when Handling Data questions were statistically replaced by Number items of various kinds and also some interesting changes at the individual level, which could potentially affect the Level outcomes of a significant number of children nationally. However, the final conclusion reached is that, given an appropriately sized and structured pool of items across the curriculum content areas, tests can be constructed which are of an appropriate level of difficulty and discrimination power and which still allow year-on-year calibration of the national standards in mathematics.