Examining the effect of positive behaviour support on academic achievement of students with disabilities

Students who engage in challenging behaviour compromise the fundamental ability of schools to educate children. Consequently, teachers face the daunting task of designing effective strategies to promote positive educational outcomes for their students. Since the 1997 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act amendments, the use of positive behaviour supports (PBS) to address the behavioural needs of children challenged by disabilities has expanded. There is evidence to support the utility of PBS in reducing challenging behaviour among students. However, successful schools are also gauged by the academic achievement of their students. Hence, it is important to examine the extent to which behavioural outcomes are related to academic outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which PBS interventions aimed at reducing challenging behaviour result in corresponding improvement in academic achievement. A meta‐analysis of extant research indicated a positive correlation of 0.40 between improvement in problem behaviour and academic achievement. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: http://youtu.be/c9OUU0GkGrw .     

Family socioeconomic status,parental expectations,and adolescents’ academic achievements: a case of China

This study examines direct and indirect effects of family socioeconomic status (SES) and parental expectations on adolescents’ mathematics and problem-solving achievement in mainland China. SES here is composed of family wealth, home educational resources, and parental education. Over 5,000 ninth-grade students in 5 geographical districts of China participated in the study and were assessed by using the items adapted from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Results from structural equation modelling indicated that 2 components of SES – home educational resources and parental education – positively predicted parental expectations; however, the 3rd component – family wealth – negatively predicted parental expectations. Family wealth, parental education, and parental expectations significantly predicted mathematics achievement, and home educational resources, parental education, and parental expectations significantly predicted problem-solving achievement. The 3 components of SES also had significant indirect effects on both mathematics and problem-solving achievement through parental expectations, and the effect of family wealth was a suppression effect. These results were further discussed from Chinese cultural contexts.     

Ten Years of Entrepreneurship Education at Chinese Universities: Evolution,Problems, and System Building

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education has experienced four stages of development in Chinese universities, shifting from entrepreneurship show to entrepreneurship education, from teacher training to student education, from classroom teaching to multimodal teaching, and from imparting knowledge to cultivating skills. Currently, the weak links in entrepreneurship education in Chinese universities are primarily reflected in four areas: unsound curriculum design, a lack of qualified teachers for entrepreneurship education, a monotonous model for entrepreneurship education, and imperfect supporting mechanisms for entrepreneurship education. Constructive ideas for the entrepreneurship education system in Chinese universities are: to build a scientific curriculum-based educational system, establish a perfected entrepreneurial practicum system, build up a system for an outstanding corps of qualified teachers, construct a perfected educational model system, and perfect the evaluation system for entrepreneurship education.     

高校创业教育的认知与行为导向分析——以中国四所高校为例

创业教育存在认知和行为两种不同的导向,结合学生需求的差异性,可以将创业教育分为普及型、知识型、技能型和综合型四种类型。通过四所高校的案例可以看出,四类创业教育特点和效果各有不同,总体发展路径呈现认知导向和行为导向融合的取向,据此形成的立体化教育体系和网络化教育环境对我国创业教育实践具有重要借鉴意义。     

吕叔湘对中国修辞学的贡献

语言学宗师吕叔湘不仅是语法学家、语文教育家,同时也是一名修辞学家和修辞实践家。吕先生一生十分重视修辞学研究并且始终关注、支持修辞学的健康发展。他对中国修辞学的重要贡献是：开创性研究提供了修辞学研究的新范式;独特修辞观促进了修辞学的科学发展;打造学术平台促进学术交流,发现并培养了杰出的修辞学家。     

Help-seeking tendencies during early adolescence: An examination of motivational correlates and consequences for achievement

The present study examined the motivational correlates and achievement consequences of students’ help-seeking tendencies during sixth grade (N = 217). Students’ grades were collected from school records at the beginning and end of the school year. Midway through the year students reported on their academic self-efficacy and social demonstration goals; teachers reported on students’ help-seeking tendencies. First quarter grades and academic self-efficacy were positively related to adaptive help seeking and negatively related to avoidant help seeking. In addition, a social demonstration-approach goal was negatively related to adaptive help seeking. Help-seeking tendencies predicted 3rd quarter grades, controlling for 1st quarter grades.     

Principles of evolutionary educational psychology

Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of the relation between evolved systems of folk knowledge and inferential and attributional biases as these relate to academic learning in modern society. Following discussion and illustration of the mechanisms of natural selection and their application to human motivational, cognitive, and behavioral evolution, the basic premises and principles of evolutionary educational psychology are outlined. The gist is that the evolved cognitive systems and inferential biases that define folk knowledge are not sufficient for academic learning, but, at the same time, are the foundation from which academic competencies are built. A theoretical frame outlining the relation between folk knowledge and academic development is proposed and implications for motivational issues and instructional practices are detailed.     

加强挫折教育在大学生创业教育中的实践作用的思考

大学生自主创业正成为我国大学生就业的重要途径,各高校积极实施＂以创业带动就业＂战略,创业教育逐渐受到重视和完善。加强挫折教育在创业教育中的实践作用,进一步提高自主创业大学生的心理素质,可在一定程度上提高大学生创业的成功率。     

A heuristic hierarchical scheme for academic search and retrieval

We present PubSearch, a hybrid heuristic scheme for re-ranking academic papers retrieved from standard digital libraries such as the ACM Portal. The scheme is based on the hierarchical combination of a custom implementation of the term frequency heuristic, a time-depreciated citation score and a graph-theoretic computed score that relates the paper’s index terms with each other. We designed and developed a meta-search engine that submits user queries to standard digital repositories of academic publications and re-ranks the repository results using the hierarchical heuristic scheme. We evaluate our proposed re-ranking scheme via user feedback against the results of ACM Portal on a total of 58 different user queries specified from 15 different users. The results show that our proposed scheme significantly outperforms ACM Portal in terms of retrieval precision as measured by most common metrics in Information Retrieval including Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), Expected Reciprocal Rank (ERR) as well as a newly introduced lexicographic rule (LEX) of ranking search results. In particular, PubSearch outperforms ACM Portal by more than 77% in terms of ERR, by more than 11% in terms of NDCG, and by more than 907.5% in terms of LEX. We also re-rank the top-10 results of a subset of the original 58 user queries produced by Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, and ArnetMiner; the results show that PubSearch compares very well against these search engines as well. The proposed scheme can be easily plugged in any existing search engine for retrieval of academic publications.     

Breaking the Ivory Tower: Academic Entrepreneurship in the Life Sciences in UK and Germany

We examine engagement in commercial activities (consulting, patenting, and founding) among more than 2200 German and UK life scientists. We test hypotheses that include attributes of individuals, their material and social resources, and perceptions about values and reputation. We find that characteristics reflecting professional security, advantage and productivity are strong predictors for a greater breadth of participation in academic entrepreneurship, but not for all forms of technology transfer that we are able to test. For such academics, science and commerce go hand in hand, as they are best poised to straddle the boundary between industry and academy. We find strong support, however, that scientists perceive the value of patenting differently, and the level of reputational importance placed on scientific compared to commercial achievements matters in shaping commercial involvement.