Hope communication as a predictor of documented and undocumented Latina/o high school students’ college intentions across an academic year

Drawing from hope theory, we examined whether hope communication predicted undocumented and documented U.S. Latina/o youth’s college intentions across an academic year. With three waves of survey data from 172 documented and 253 undocumented Latina/o high school students, auto-regressive cross-lagged analyses revealed that parent, teacher, and friend hope communication at the beginning of the year indirectly increased students’ college intentions by the end of the year. A trend emerged whereby undocumented students reported significantly less hope communication and weaker college intentions than documented students within most of the waves. Our findings suggest that hope communication has the potential to increase the educational, economic, and social mobility of Latina/o immigrant students by increasing their intentions to attend college.     

Internationalising higher education: comparing the challenges of different higher education institutions in Malaysia

Internationalisation of higher education in Malaysia is seen as a means for improving and empowering higher education so that the higher education institutions in the country can become comparable to the best in the world. While the government has spelt out the directions as well as some of the targets for internationalisation, higher education institutions in the country have been internationalising for different reasons and with different levels of priority and intensity. Public universities, especially the older ones, have been engaged in internationalisation as part of their academic growth and development. Concurrently, a variety of private institutions of higher learning has evolved since the opening up of private higher education from the 1980s. These include private universities that have been established by large corporations, smaller private colleges that have been elevated to the status of degree-conferring institutions as well as branch campuses of foreign universities. The objective of this paper is to examine the different concepts and challenges of internationalisation faced by the different types of higher education institutions in the country, using the case study approach. It was found that in each of these cases, the concept of internationalisation and the challenges faced are different, although funding is raised as a problem in three of the four cases. These different challenges imply that current policies may have to be fine-tuned in order to address the different needs of these institutions in their respective efforts to internationalise.     

The Child Abuse Potential Inventory and pregnancy outcome in expectant adolescent mothers.

OBJECTIVE: The study explores the prenatal Child Abuse Potential (pCAP) scores derived from the Child Abuse Potential Inventory administered to expectant adolescent mothers. The aim of the study was to assess the association of the pCAP scores with maternal negative prenatal behaviors, and evaluate the contribution of the pCAP scores to neonatal morbidity. METHOD: The pCAP scores, demographic data, and self-report on prenatal behaviors were obtained during the second half of the pregnancy in a sample of 45 poor single adolescent mothers. A pediatrician blind to the prenatal data reviewed the neonatal records to assess neonatal morbidity. Maternal prenatal records were reviewed for obstetric risk assessment by an obstetrician who was blind to the rest of the data. The relations among the pCAP scores, prenatal behaviors, and neonatal morbidity were analyzed. RESULTS: In the prenatal period, the pCAP scores were positively correlated with self-reported prenatal smoking and substance use. The multiple linear regression analysis showed that the pCAP scores significantly contributed to neonatal morbidity independently of obstetric risk factors. CONCLUSIONS: The Child Abuse Potential scores obtained during pregnancy in poor single adolescent mothers reflect domains of maternal functioning that are associated with negative prenatal behaviors and appear to be important for predicting neonatal morbidity. Further studies are warranted to validate the prenatal use of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory.