Childhood Adversity and Self-Care Education for Undergraduate Social Work and Human Services Students

Many students pursuing social work and human services courses have experienced adverse childhoods. This article focuses on their learning about self-care, an important skill for future practice. Interviews with 20 undergraduate students with a history of childhood adversity found unmet needs both for conceptualizing self-care and developing strategies to implement self-care in their day-to-day lives. Many cited limited role modeling and little importance placed on self-care during childhood. Teaching self-care is conceptualized as not only a core skill for practice but also an equity issue for students with a history of childhood adversity.     

Leveraging critical literacies for social change: questioning the culture of compliance at an ‘F’ school

This article traces the experiences of two veteran elementary school teachers in the urban Southwest, who are positioned by district and state policy ‘texts’ as insubordinate and failing, and who employ critical literacy practices to reconstruct and redesign these texts as they seek to create more equitable and humane conditions in schools. Stemming from a larger phenomenological study, this article explores how teachers in a ‘failing’ elementary school in the Southwestern US understand and negotiate district, state, and federal policies and examines how these policies shape and inform their identities as professionals. This research has important implications concerning the potential of critical literacy as a mode of resistance, the promise inherent in school/university partnerships for promoting change, and the ways in which the practice of deconstructing/reconstructing dehumanizing texts can foster a re-professionalization of teaching.     

A Conceptual Framework for Emergent Digital Literacy

As we progress in the 21st century, children learn to become proficient readers and writers of both digital and non-digital texts. Knowledge, skills, and understandings of literacy emerge through sociocultural interactions with non-digital tools (e.g., paper-printed books) and digital tools (e.g., touch screen tablets). However, debate is ongoing over the role that digital experiences play in emergent literacy development. Researchers have voiced the need to conceptualise a common framework for literacy development that considers the emergence of digital literacy skills alongside conventional literacy skills and how these skills might interact during development. This is particularly important in light of the increasing use of digital texts used by young children, such as E-books and digital games. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework that might guide research and practice by examining the relationships between emergent literacy skills, emergent digital literacy skills, and proficiency in reading and writing.     

Head injury secondary to suspected child maltreatment: results of a prospective Canadian national surveillance program

Objective

We sought to determine the incidence, clinical features, and demographic profile of head injury secondary to suspected child maltreatment (abuse or neglect) in Canada to help inform the development and evaluation of prevention programs for abusive head injuries.

Methods

From March 1, 2005 to February 28, 2008, an average of 2,545 paediatricians and paediatric subspecialists were surveyed monthly through the established network of the Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program. We calculated incidence rates using the number of confirmed cases over the product of the duration of the study (3 years) and population estimates by age group.

Results

There were 220 confirmed cases of head injury from suspected child maltreatment. The annual incidence rate was 14.1 per 100,000 for children less than 1 year of age and 1.4 per 100,000 for those less than 15 years. Seventy three percent (141) of cases involved infants less than 12 months of age and 52% (100) of cases involved infants less than 6 months of age. Seventy-five percent (165) of cases presented to the emergency room. With regard to outcome, 12% (27) of cases resulted in death and 45% (75) of survivors had neurological sequelae at discharge. Thirty percent (67) of all cases, as well as 30% (8) of deaths were previously known to child welfare authorities.

Conclusion

This study provides an estimate of the rate of head injury secondary to suspected child maltreatment in Canada. The young age and poor medical outcomes of those involved highlights the need for prevention efforts that are implemented early in life. Given that a significant percentage of injured infants and children were already known to child welfare authorities, the study also highlights the need to establish and evaluate additional preventive efforts for parents and caregivers already in the child welfare system.     

Educational gaps in medical care and health behavior: Evidence from US Natality data

The US Natality files provide information on medical procedures and health related behavior during pregnancy and childbirth. The data set represents nearly the universe of mothers who give birth in the US, providing the most complete coverage possible of medical care and health behavior among a specific patient population. We document gaps in outcomes by education of the mother and the changes in these educational gaps during 1989-2002.     

Profiling teachers’ sense of professional identity

This study shows that professional identity should not be viewed as a composed variable with a uniform structure. Based on the literature and previous research, we view teachers’ job satisfaction, self‐efficacy, occupational commitment and change in the level of motivation as indicators of teachers’ professional identity. Using two‐step cluster analysis, three distinct professional identity profiles have empirically been identified, based on data of 1214 teachers working in secondary education in the Netherlands. These profiles differed significantly regarding the indicators of teachers’ professional identity. Teachers belonging to the found profiles did not significantly differ in their amount of experience.     

Using digital images of the zebra finch song system as a tool to teach organizational effects of steroid hormones: a free downloadable module

Zebra finch song behavior is sexually dimorphic: males sing and females do not. The neural system underlying this behavior is sexually dimorphic, and this sex difference is easy to quantify. During development, the zebra finch song system can be altered by steroid hormones, specifically estradiol, which actually masculinizes it. Because of the ease of quantification and experimental manipulation, the zebra finch song system has great potential for use in undergraduate labs. Unfortunately, the underlying costs prohibit use of this system in undergraduate labs. Further, the time required to perform a developmental study renders such undertakings unrealistic within a single academic term. We have overcome these barriers by creating digital tools, including an image library of song nuclei from zebra finch brains. Students using this library replicate and extend a published experiment examining the dose of estradiol required to masculinize the female zebra finch brain. We have used this library for several terms, and students not only obtain significant experimental results but also make gains in understanding content, experimental controls, and inferential statistics (analysis of variance and post hoc tests). We have provided free access to these digital tools at the following website: http://mdcune.psych.ucla.edu/modules/birdsong.     

Harnessing technology to improve formative assessment of student conceptions in STEM: forging a national network

Concept inventories, consisting of multiple-choice questions designed around common student misconceptions, are designed to reveal student thinking. However, students often have complex, heterogeneous ideas about scientific concepts. Constructed-response assessments, in which students must create their own answer, may better reveal students' thinking, but are time- and resource-intensive to evaluate. This report describes the initial meeting of a National Science Foundation-funded cross-institutional collaboration of interdisciplinary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education researchers interested in exploring the use of automated text analysis to evaluate constructed-response assessments. Participants at the meeting shared existing work on lexical analysis and concept inventories, participated in technology demonstrations and workshops, and discussed research goals. We are seeking interested collaborators to join our research community.     

The trust continuum in the information age: a Canadian perspective

This paper examines the role of trust in the information continuum. It argues that in the context of Canadian federal government records, an analogous ??trust continuum?? is a useful model for analysing the relationships that exist between creator, archives and user in the information-abundant environment. The paper borrows from sociological theory to posit that creator, archives and user are bound together in a complex expert system that facilitates trust and mitigates risk in a broad societal context and contends that these interactions are shaped at the macro level by a dominant public discourse of accountability. These points are illustrated through three recent examples at Library and Archives Canada. First, the relationship between Canadian society and the archives is explored by interrogating the concept of relevance and assessing the feasibility of managing a pan-Canadian collection via a national network of knowledge institutions. Then, the role of trust between the archives and the creator in the management of government digital information resources is examined in light of the recently issued Directive on Recordkeeping, and in the context of LAC??s Trusted Digital Repository. Finally, Commissions of Inquiry??and the Indian Specific Claims Commission in particular??demonstrate both the power of archival records in repairing trust between a society and its government and the iterative nature of the relationship between the user and the archives.     

Shrink-film microfluidic education modules: Complete devices within minutes

As advances in microfluidics continue to make contributions to diagnostics and life sciences, broader awareness of this expanding field becomes necessary. By leveraging low-cost microfabrication techniques that require no capital equipment or infrastructure, simple, accessible, and effective educational modules can be made available for a broad range of educational needs from middle school demonstrations to college laboratory classes. These modules demonstrate key microfluidic concepts such as diffusion and separation as well as "laboratory on-chip" applications including chemical reactions and biological assays. These modules are intended to provide an interdisciplinary hands-on experience, including chip design, fabrication of functional devices, and experiments at the microscale. Consequently, students will be able to conceptualize physics at small scales, gain experience in computer-aided design and microfabrication, and perform experiments-all in the context of addressing real-world challenges by making their own lab-on-chip devices.