Multi‐disciplinary approaches to pupil behaviour in school – the role of evaluation in service delivery

This study evaluates the work of a multi‐disciplinary Behaviour Support Team developed to support schools in managing problematic behaviour. An evidence base to inform future service delivery is developed, using a model of evaluation which incorporates both quantitative, outcome data and more explanatory qualitative data, incorporating the views of service users.

Focusing on the first year of service delivery, interventions are evaluated as effective by client schools and positive changes in pupil behaviour are demonstrated. The mechanisms contributing to successful interventions are analysed, including the importance of maintaining a collaborative and systemic approach to problem resolution. The evaluation suggests ways in which educational psychologists working in multi‐disciplinary teams can enhance schools’ capacity to manage challenging behaviour.     

DEGREE OF ALIGNMENT BETWEEN BEGINNING TEACHERS' PRACTICES AND BELIEFS ABOUT EFFECTIVE CLASSROOM PRACTICES

Six beginning teachers were compared to an exemplary, experienced teacher. Teacher beliefs, classroom practices, and student engagement data were coded from theory-driven and data-driven perspectives. The strongest teachers demonstrated alignment between promotive/positive practices, beliefs, and students' engagement. The weakest teachers, whose students were less consistently engaged, demonstrated alignment between undermining practices and beliefs. For beginning teachers, with misaligned practices and beliefs, there may be potential for improving practices with experience. A testable model emerged depicting a metacognitive feedback loop for teachers who are aware of their shortcomings and place responsibility for students' behaviors and learning on themselves.     

What,Where, and How? Special Education in the Climate of Full Inclusion

After the passage of PL 94-142 in 1975 guaranteeing a free, appropriate, public education to all students with disabilities, multiple reauthorizations of IDEA have refined, revised, and renewed the nation's moral and pedagogical commitment to providing well-planned, public, inclusive, and appropriate education to all students with disabilities. But conflicting views of where that education should take place, what that education should consist of, and how that education should be delivered have continued to plague the field of special education. In this article, we provide an historical perspective on the arguments over where, what and how. We open four “windows” on special education service delivery in four different settings in Pennsylvania to illustrate contemporary interpretations and contemporary public policy related to where, what, and how. In the end, we raise questions about whether current, fully inclusive special education practices fulfill the promise of PL-94-142 to provide a special and appropriate education to students with disabilities.     

What Makes a High School a Good High School for Students with Disabilities

This article summarizes the findings and themes from the three high schools we studied. All three schools engaged in five schoolwide strategies for educating students with disabilities. They provided a broad array of academic courses and program options; provided schoolwide support structures that could be combined and customized to the needs and strengths of individual students; worked intentionally to connect students to the school and build their motivation to succeed; created a connected and caring adult community to serve students' academic and social/personal needs; and developed responsive leaders who managed the tensions inherent in the commitment to prepare students with disabilities to be successful in their lives beyond school. The article also reviews the different ways these three school instantiated these strategies. We describe the “theory of action” that integrates the five schoolwide strategies into a synergistic approach in each school and explore implications of the Good High Schools study for practice and for future research.     

Effects of Teacher Lesson Introduction on Second Graders’ Creativity in a Science/Literacy Integrated Unit on Health and Nutrition

The focus on standardized testing in the areas of reading and mathematics in early elementary education often minimalizes science and the arts in the curriculum. The science topics of health and nutrition were integrated into the reading curriculum through read aloud books. Inclusion of creativity skills through figural transformation drawings allowed students to display nutrition comprehension, modeling how these subject areas can fit into a narrowed curriculum. This repeated measures study examined the weekly effect of teacher lesson introduction on 19 second grade students’ (11 female, 8 male) creativity and content knowledge of nutrition under two conditions that alternated every 2 weeks over a 16-week period: a brief, positive, standard lesson introduction (control) compared to a more enhanced introduction promoting originality, risk-taking and persistence (experimental). Students listened to read-aloud books on nutrition and completed figural transformation drawings related to the stories. Findings showed that student work evidenced more creativity during the experimental condition with a very large effect size for breaking perceived boundaries; a large effect size for depicting movement in drawings; medium effect sizes for fluency, originality, storytelling articulateness, humor, wisdom, emotion, and total creative traits; and a small effect size for elaboration. Students also evidenced greater overall knowledge of health/nutrition content during the experimental condition with a small effect size. Small changes in the way a lesson was introduced had a significant impact on student knowledge and creative performance, indicating that early childhood teachers should implement similar lesson introductions to increase student creativity.     

Family,child and location factors and parents’ reasons for multiple concurrent childcare arrangements in the years before school in Australia

Research suggests that multiple non-parental care arrangements may have adverse effects on young children, yet little is known about their prevalence, factors associated with their use, or parents’ reasons for making these care arrangements. This longitudinal study reports on 677 children and their families recruited from government-regulated child care centers and family child care services in urban and rural New South Wales, Australia. Multiple concurrent care arrangements were relatively common, with one third of children attending at least two child care arrangements per week. Multiple child care was found to be more likely for children who were older, with better health, or with employed mothers, and who were living in rural rather than urban areas. Results suggest that parents’ reasons for using multiple care arrangements were based largely based on preferences that were made in the best interests of the child and on convenience. The deliberate choice by parents to use multiple child care arrangements to benefit their child challenges the assumption in previous literature that mixed care is not the parents’ first choice.     

Severe punishment of children by staff in Romanian placement centers for school-aged children: Effects of child and institutional characteristics

The objective of this study was to determine whether children's characteristics and/or institutional characteristics were predictors of severe punishments (including beatings) and/or frequency of punishments that children received from staff in Romanian institutions. The data was hierarchical with institutionalized children (N = 1391) nested within 44 institutions, and the measurement of punishments by the staff and frequency of punishments had a binary distribution. Thus, multilevel logistic regression models were used to examine the effects of individual and institutional level variables on reported punishments and to account for the clustering of the children within institutions. Two general patterns of results emerged. First, regarding individual level variables, it was found that: (1) amount of time spent by children in their current institutions had a significant effect on the probability of being punished by staff and the frequency of this punishment; (2) the probability of being punished was higher for boys than for girls; and (3) having no siblings in the institution increased the odds of being punished several times. Second, regarding institutional level variables: (4) being in placement centers for school-aged children with a traditional type of institutional organization increased the odds of severe punishment compared to a familial/mixed type. The results of the present study highlight the importance of understanding the consequences of institutionalization in a broader way, where children not only experienced early severe psychosocial deprivation as documented in other studies, but also high levels of severe punishments administered by institutional staff.