Patterns of Social Interaction of Mainstreamed Preschool Children: Hopeful News from the Field

Much of the research on social interaction in mainstreamed settings has focused on “reverse mainstreamed” or special environments in contrast, the present study observed 600 social interactions in 19 regular preschools. Three findings emerged: a) retarded children are substantially integrated into the emotional and social life of the peer group, but not fully integrated into peer group verbal life; b) there is an inverse relationship between teachers’ initiation of social interaction with retarded children and the degree to which the latter are integrated into peer group life; and c) teachers provide retarded children with more verbal enrichment and emotional protection than these children receive from their peer group. On balance, these findings are fairly encouraging, suggesting that to a considerable extent mainstreaming is working in preschool classrooms.     

Connectedness among taiwanese middle school students: a validation study of the hemingway measure of adolescent connectedness

Theories of adolescent connectedness suggest that adolescents strive to become connected by engaging with and valuing the people, activities, and worlds in their social ecology. The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of a measure designed to assess these worlds of connectedness among 320 junior high school students in Taiwan. The subscales and composite scales evidenced satisfactory reliability and concurrent validity. A hypothesized three-factor, higher order structural model of connectedness was cross-validated. Girls were generally more connected than boys. Both connectedness to school and to friends explained more variance in connectedness to self than did family connectedness. There was mixed support for separation-individuation processes. The measure appears promising in terms of future research on adolescent social development in the Asia Pacific.     

全球化是否有助于教育公平？

自20世纪末迄今,全球化在资本主义沃土的滋润下,已经蔚为世界的潮流。全球化一方面有现代性的特质,另一方面,也呈现后现代思潮的特征。教育在此全球化的不同样貌中,必须认清现代与后现代思潮的利弊得失,并批判地融合两者,方能确保教育公平和社会正义。从现代和后现代思维,厘清与批判全球化的趋势和内涵,并透过分析、诠释与批判方法,为教育在全球化趋势下,找到一条有助于促进教育迈向公平和正义的方向。     

The relationship between parental bonding and peer victimization: examining child stress and hopelessness as mediators

The purpose of the current study was to investigate a two-stage model in which parent-related stress and hopelessness each served as mediators of the relationship between perceived parental bonding and South Korean adolescent peer victimization. This study also examined whether the mediating relationships differed by the gender of parents and adolescents. A casual chain with three links and four sets of variables were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Data were collected from 800 adolescents attending 10 middle schools in the Busan region of South Korea. Results indicated that both maternal and paternal parental bonding were negatively associated with stress, stress was positively associated with hopelessness, and hopelessness was positively associated with South Korean adolescent peer victimization. Most importantly, the significant negative associations between both maternal and paternal parental bonding and peer victimization were mediated by both stress and hopelessness. Furthermore, gender differences in these relationships existed for both parents and adolescents. Limitations and implications to practice were discussed.     

Mapping teacher status and career-long professional learning: the Place Model

This paper engages with key contemporary debates about teaching and teacher education through proposing an innovative, interdisciplinary model, the Place Model, which uses two senses of ‘place’ to provide comparative lenses for a timely, a-priori examination of the place of the teacher: place in the humanistic geography tradition as a process – a cumulative, career-long professional learning journey – and, also, place in the sociological sense of teacher status. This article considers a range of international literature before speculatively ‘populating’ the model with a range of examples in a way which raises important questions about conceptions of teachers across the globe, and provides an alternative and original vision of the profession.     

Unsupervised word sense disambiguation for Korean through the acyclic weighted digraph using corpus and dictionary

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is meant to assign the most appropriate sense to a polysemous word according to its context. We present a method for automatic WSD using only two resources: a raw text corpus and a machine-readable dictionary (MRD). The system learns the similarity matrix between word pairs from the unlabeled corpus, and it uses the vector representations of sense definitions from MRD, which are derived based on the similarity matrix. In order to disambiguate all occurrences of polysemous words in a sentence, the system separately constructs the acyclic weighted digraph (AWD) for every occurrence of polysemous words in a sentence. The AWD is structured based on consideration of the senses of context words which occur with a target word in a sentence. After building the AWD per each polysemous word, we can search the optimal path of the AWD using the Viterbi algorithm. We assign the most appropriate sense to the target word in sentences with the sense on the optimal path in the AWD. By experiments, our system shows 76.4% accuracy for the semantically ambiguous Korean words.     

Optimization of some factors affecting the performance of query expansion

This paper examines the factors affecting the performance of global query expansion based on term co-occurrence data and suggests a way to maximize the retrieval effectiveness. Major parameters to be optimized through experiments are term similarity measure and the weighting scheme of additional terms. The evaluation of four similarity measures tested in query expansion reveal that mutual information and Yule's Y, which emphasize low frequency terms, achieve better performance than cosine and Jaccard coefficients that have the reverse tendency. In the evaluation of three weighting schemes, similarity weight performs well only with short queries, whereas fixed weights of approximately 0.5 and similarity rank weights were effective with queries of any length. Furthermore, the optimal similarity rank weight achieving the best overall performance seems to be the least affected by test collections and the number of additional terms. For the efficiency of retrieval, the number of additional terms needs not exceed 70 in our test collections, but the optimal number may vary according to the characteristics of the similarity measure employed.     

Religious Development in African American Adolescents: Growth Patterns That Offer Protection

Although religiosity promotes resilient outcomes in African American (AA) adolescents, there is a lack of research that examines the protective role of religious development in the context of stressful life events (SLEs). In 1,595 AA adolescents, a cohort-sequential design was used from ages 12 to 18 to examine subtypes of religiosity, as well as distinct developmental patterns within subtypes. The protective role of religious development was also examined in the context of SLEs. The study findings indicated two subtypes of religiosity—extrinsic and intrinsic religiosity—as well as low and high developmental patterns in the identified subtypes. Furthermore, the protective influence of extrinsic and intrinsic religiosity gradually diminished from age 12 to 18 in the context of SLEs.