Software Engineering as a Professional Discipline

In this paper we discuss some of the aspects of software engineering as a professional discipline. After a brief discussion of software engineering as a profession, we focus on accreditation, licensing, and certification. We examine historic trends, current status, and the future outlook in each of these areas. We anticipate that this will continue to be an area that sparks professional interest and debate, as the field of software engineering matures.     

The impact of Every Child Matters on trainee secondary teachers' understanding of professional knowledge

This study is concerned with the way in which the introduction in England of Every Child Matters (ECM), a mandatory framework for the well‐being of all pupils, has created new intraprofessional and interprofessional expectations about the development of professional knowledge for pre‐service secondary school teachers. In the light of current literature, the paper seeks to establish whether ECM for secondary teachers provides a simple reconciliation between subject expertise and the facilitation of human learning or a much more profound challenge to the development of values‐based autonomous professional knowledge. The research undertaken using questionnaires and interviews with cohorts of trainee secondary teachers between 2005 and 2008 aims to identify the impact of ECM on the development of their pre‐service professional knowledge. The data demonstrate a degree of movement in emphasis from an organic, values‐based understanding to a propositional, skills‐based understanding of professional knowledge. It is argued that this movement in emphasis is, to some degree, related to the instrumental implementation of a social justice policy that may have contributed to the weakening of the intrinsic relationship between teachers' values, ownership of professional knowledge and pupil well‐being. The study concludes that the challenge for teacher educators is to find the critical questions and pedagogies to counter the view that professional knowledge is simply the acquisition of strategies, skills and safeguarding knowledge that ensures accountability and legality in the classroom.     

Assessing the Effectiveness of the Cognitive Interview for Children with Severe Intellectual Disabilities

We examined whether the cognitive interview (CI) procedure increased event recall in children with severe intellectual disabilities (ID) compared with children with no ID. Forty-six children with and without ID watched a videotaped event; they were aged between eight and 11 years. The next day they were individually interviewed using the CI or a structured interview (SI). Interviews consisted of free recall and specific questions, some of which contained leading or misleading information. The leading and misleading questions determined children’s susceptibility to information presented after the event. Overall, children without ID reported more correct information than children with ID. For all children, the CI led to more correct recall than the SI without increases in incorrect details or confabulations. Although the CI did not decrease children’s susceptibility to the misleading questions compared with the SI, children without ID disagreed with more of the misleading suggestions than children with ID. These results suggest that the CI may indeed be a valuable tool to elicit information from very vulnerable witnesses.     

Dollars to Discriminate: The (Un)intended Consequences of School Vouchers

Some private, religious schools that accept vouchers have been accused of discriminating against certain populations of students through their admissions processes. Discriminating against disfavored groups (e.g., racial minorities, LGBT students, students with disabilities, religious minorities) in voucher programs raises both legal and policy concerns that have not been extensively examined in recent research. Employing legal research methods, this article examines state voucher statutes and discusses the potential for voucher programs to discriminate against marginalized groups. We argue that each state has an obligation to ensure that any benefit it creates must be available to all students on a nondiscriminatory basis—including the benefit of a publicly funded voucher for attendance at a private school. As this review of existing voucher statutes will demonstrate, legislators appear to have neglected to construct policies that safeguard student access and ensure that public funds do not support discriminatory practices. Without additional safeguards, states risk providing public money that can be used to promote discriminatory policies and practices.     

Auditory Sensory Processing and Phonological Development in High IQ and Exceptional Readers,Typically Developing Readers,and Children With Dyslexia: A Longitudinal Study

Phonological difficulties characterize children with developmental dyslexia across languages, but whether impaired auditory processing underlies these phonological difficulties is debated. Here the causal question is addressed by exploring whether individual differences in sensory processing predict the development of phonological awareness in 86 English-speaking lower- and middle-class children aged 8 years in 2005 who had dyslexia, or were age-matched typically developing children, some with exceptional reading/high IQ. The predictive relations between auditory processing and phonological development are robust for this sample even when phonological awareness at Time 1 (the autoregressor) is controlled. High reading/IQ does not much impact these relations. The data suggest that basic sensory abilities are significant longitudinal predictors of growth in phonological awareness in children.