Social Acceptance of Children with Intellectual Disabilities in an Integrated School Setting in Zambia: a pilot study

The social acceptance of a group of Zambian primary school children with intellectual disabilities by two groups of nondisabled children was examined. One group were in direct contact with the children with disabilities over a period of six months while the other was not. Nondisabled boys who had been in contact with children with disabilities had more positive attitudes than boys who had no direct contact, while no exposure effects were observed amongst girls. Gender differences amongst nondisabled children who had contact with peers with disabilities were not significant. Amongst the nondisabled children who had no contact with children with disabilities, girls had more positive attitudes than boys. The findings are preliminary, but offer directions for further research and have some implications for integrating children with disabilities into mainstream schools.     

Intensification of punishment effects through exposure to prolonged, fixed-duration shocks: The role of shock cues as a stimulus for fear

Three experiments tested the hypotheses that (1) the onsets of prolonged, fixed-duration treatment shocks (shock treatment, or ST) serve as cues for fear conditioning to the ongoing painful effects of these stimuli, and (2) this acquired fear transfers to and influences shock-motivated test performances in predictable ways. Experiments 1 and 2 involved spaced post-ST presentations of very brief shocks (a presumed analogue of the onsets of treatment shocks) as a means of extinguishing the fear putatively associated with shock cues. This procedure reduced defecation by ST subjects over blocks of extinction sessions and nullified the punishment intensification effect that was otherwise shown to be a consequence of ST. As a further test of the shock-cue hypothesis, Experiment 3 involved relatively massed presentations of these brief shocks prior to ST in a latent-inhibition procedure (Lubow, 1973). This briefshock regimen also nullified the ST punishment intensification effect but did not impair the transituational transfer of contextual fear. In contrast, the group that was given the same brief shock regimen following ST showed enhancement of the punishment effect. With respect to current theoretical accounts of ST effects, these data were most consistent with notions that rely on an acquired-fear construct.     

Ask the Children

Actively canvassing the views of pupils on aspects of their learning is rapidly becoming accepted as an important part of a teacher’s planning and evaluation. In this article, John Beresford shows how the views of nursery, reception and infant children in a Barking infants’ school helped inform staff about the effectiveness of the school’s reading policy.     

Redefining Student Success: Applying Different Multinomial Regression Techniques for the Study of Student Graduation Across Institutions of Higher Education

Current definitions of retention and graduation rates distort the picture of student success by limiting it to completion of a degree at the institution of entry. By incorporating data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a clearer picture emerges. The NSC data captures retention and graduation at both entry and transfer institutions. To accommodate this polychotomous definition of success, more sophisticated methods of modeling limited dependent variables are needed. Though multinomial logit is often considered the most accessible method, the strict assumptions it imposes may be inappropriate. We therefore compare multinomial regression techniques to assess their utility in modeling multi-institutional student success.     

The Value of Education: A Reply to Andrew Reid

Andrew Reid's essay on the value of education in this journal distinguished the intrinsic features of education from what education is for, the latter being ultimately located in the promotion of personal well-being. At a meta-ethical level, this response accepts Reid's claim about ultimate location, but challenges his view that prudential goods are desire-independent, arguing for a desire-dependent conception based on supra-individual, but not always universal-human, preferences. It also questions his claim that the source of educational value lies in the intrinsic features of education, rejecting the suggestion that epistemological rather ethical considerations should be the starting-point.     

Managing Change in Higher Education: Assessing Staff Perceptions of the Impact of Semesterization

The background to the radical reform of higher education in the United Kingdom since the mid-1980s is given with stress on the idea that a motivating factor has been a misunderstanding of classical economics on the part of neo-liberal higher education administrators. Among the reforms that have been imposed, for the most part, from above have been modularization of the course structure and the semesterization of the academic year. Using a Likert-scale format, the authors have polled a sampling of faculty members at a given UK university. Their preliminary set of results, based on what they admit is a small sampling, indicates widespread faculty disapproval at the way modularization and semesterization were imposed at this university.