The expert witness in child abuse and neglect: An interdisciplinary process

The legal system is an important part of a society's response to child abuse and child neglect. Courts need to be guided in their deliberations by experts from many different professions. Consultation and in-court expert testimony is necessary from medicine, psychology, psychiatry, social work and other professions both to prove child abuse and neglect and establish the power of the court to act on behalf of a child but also to guide the court in the intervention strategy most suited to the needs of the child and his family. Non-lawyers often feel uncomfortable in the legal setting. The adversary process is foreign to their training and professional experience. Collaboration with a lawyer greatly improves their effectiveness in court. Lawyers, on the other hand, need to make maximum use of medical and social-psychological experts in the court process in the interests of their clients; but to do so lawyers need a basic understanding of the other professions. With an emphasis on a process of mutual education, the paper presents a framework for collaboration between lawyers and expert witnesses in child abuse and neglect cases. “Expert witness” is defined; informal consultation is encouraged; suggestions for selecting a collaborator are made; initial contracts between lawyer and expert, case conferencing and preparation for trial are discussed; specific advice on direct and cross examination is provided.     

Unfolding Case‐Based Practicum Curriculum Infusing Crisis,Trauma, and Disaster Preparation

The authors evaluated an unfolding case‐based approach to a practicum in counseling course infusing crisis, trauma, and disaster preparation for changes in students’ crisis self‐efficacy across a semester. The course, informed by constructivist‐developmental pedagogy and centered on the unfolding case, resulted in significant increases in students’ crisis self‐efficacy.     

Preschoolers perceptions of the unfairness of maternal disciplinary practices

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to examine preschoolers' perceptions of maternal discipline's unfairness. The participants' gender, age, SES, family intactness and sibship size were examined for their possible relevance to such perceptions. METHOD: Five vignettes, describing forms of discipline the literature suggests constitute psychological maltreatment, were presented to 57 preschoolers (27 boys and 30 girls). They included excessive withdrawal of privileges, withdrawal of entertainment, differential treatment of siblings, threatening power assertion, and public humiliation. The children had to decide on the fairness or unfairness of each vignette in which a child was disciplined in each of these ways by his/her mother. They were then asked to offer an explanation for each of their choices. RESULTS: Of the five forms of discipline employed in the vignettes, children judged differential treatment of siblings as more unfair than either power assertion (threatening spanking), or public humiliation. No differences were found for withdrawal of privileges or entertainment. Of the various predictor variables employed, preschoolers from smaller families were more likely to judge threatening to spank as unfair. As well, compared to boys, girls and children from larger families were more likely to judge differential treatment as unfair. Age, SES, and family intactness had no effect on discipline judgements likely because of their limited range. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that preschoolers can offer views on the fairness or unfairness of parental disciplinary practices, and can differentiate among them. Further, not all forms of parental discipline were viewed by preschoolers as unfair. Yet it has to be appreciated that the vignettes employed here were adapted for younger children, hence they may not have appeared as negative as in studies involving older children and adults.     

How infants use vision for grasping objects

The role of vision was examined as infants prepared to grasp horizontally and vertically oriented rods. Hand orientation was measured prior to contact to determine if infants differentially oriented their hands relative to the object's orientation. Infants reached for rods under different lighting conditions. Three experiments are reported in which (1) sight of the hand was removed (N = 12), (2) sight of the object was removed near the end of the reach (N = 40, including 10 adults), and (3) sight of the object was removed prior to reach onset (N = 9). Infants differentially oriented their hand to a similar extent regardless of lighting condition and similar to control conditions in which they could see the rod and hand throughout the reach. In preparation for reaching, infants may use the current sight of the object's orientation, or the memory of it, to orient the hand for grasping; sight of the hand had no effect on hand orientation.     

Science diaries: a brief writing intervention to improve motivation to learn science

This study investigated the hypothesis that prompting students to self-assess their interest and understanding of science concepts and activities would increase their motivation in science classes. Students were randomly assigned to an experimental condition that wrote self-assessments of their competence and interest in science lessons or a control condition that wrote summaries of those same lessons. Writing activities were 10?min long and were given approximately once a week for eighteen weeks. Student motivation was assessed via self-report surveys for achievement goals and interest in science before and after the intervention. Students in the experimental condition showed higher endorsement of mastery goals and reported greater situational interest in science topics after the intervention compared to students who summarised the lessons. Increases in situational interest predicted higher individual interest in the domain. Results indicate an instructional practice requiring just 3?hours out of a semester of instruction was sufficient to achieve these effects on motivation in science classes.     

Learning from the Professions: Examining How,Why, and When Engineers Read and Write

With the advent of the Next Generation Science Standards in engineering (NGSS, 2013), teachers of multiple subject areas are being asked to do more than ever before—not only to teach engineering content in the K-12 classroom but also to engage students in authentic disciplinary reading and writing as part of content learning. These standards sound good, but they beg several questions; namely, what do we know about how, why, and when do engineers read and write as they do their work every day? What do teachers charged with engineering education know about the daily practices of engineers, let alone the literacy practices? In short, little is known about the literacy practices of engineers in the course of their daily work. This article draws on participant observation, interviews, and document analysis of one research engineering laboratory to illustrate the literacy practices of one group of engineers and begins to draw implications from this work for teacher practice in achieving the NGSS engineering education standards.     

A review of social interventions for students with learning disabilities

Twenty-two studies are reviewed that report the effects of social skills training and intervention with 572 children identified as learning disabled between 5 and 19 years of age. These studies are reviewed to examine characteristics and components of intervention effectiveness. Age and sex of subjects, grade grouping, group size, intervention duration, intervention procedures, subject selection, and type of interventional model are examined to find patterns that reflect intervention success. Several intervention characteristics and components are associated with social intervention effectiveness: selecting subjects who had social skills difficulties or low peer acceptance, using cognitive-behavioral intervention procedures, providing individual or small group instruction, and applying long-term intervention and training. Discussion focuses on difficulties in comparing studies to determine intervention effectiveness through the examination of outcome measures, a call for revisions in future reporting of social interventions in the literature, and those intervention factors that relate to increases in peer acceptance.     

Sample design for international studies of educational achievement

Author of numerous publications on the use of social indicators to guide decisions concerning resource allocation within education systems. Co-editor of Planning the Quality of Education (IIEP-UNESCO and Pergamon Press). His research interests are focused on indicators of the quality of basic education in developing countries.