The Comprehensive Childhood Maltreatment Inventory: early development and reliability analyses

OBJECTIVE: Our goal was to develop a reliable measure of childhood maltreatment that could be used to evaluate retrospective memories among adults across a broad range of potentially abusive caregiver behaviors. METHOD: These behaviors were organized into 31 items that query age at onset, frequency across 4 developmental periods, relationship of the perpetrator(s), and respondents' perception of the experience. Additional factors directly relevant to each of the individual 4 categories of childhood maltreatment were also queried. RESULTS: Preliminary data collected from 95 college students, find the measure to have excellent test-retest reliability, and 2 of 4 subscales to possess adequate internal consistency. CONCLUSIONS: Reasons for low internal consistency for the Physical Maltreatment and Physical Neglect categories and the relative importance of test-retest reliability as compared to internal consistency in a questionnaire of this type are discussed.     

IDEA and collaboration: a Bakhtinian perspective on parent and professional discourse

In accordance with the Bakhtinian framework of this article, the text represents a dialogue between practices documented in the literature; the first author's perspective as a teacher, evaluator, and consultant; Bakhtin's theories of language; and the lived experiences of the second author, a parent whose child has been labeled as having a language learning disability. Although the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) grants parents the right to be involved in educational decisions about their children, we argue that the routine disqualification of parents' voices by school professionals is a major obstacle to authentic collaboration. Bakhtin's theories of language serve to illuminate the discourse between parents and professionals in special education committee meetings. We conclude with our vision for a mutual dialogic exchange between parents and professionals.     

A teaching–learning sequence on a socio-scientific issue: analysis and evaluation of its implementation in the classroom*

This study examines the effectiveness of a teaching–learning sequence (TLS) to improve the understanding of the influences and interactions between a technology (mining) and society. The aim of the study is also to show the possibility of both teaching and assessing the most innovative issues and aspects of scientific competence and their impact on the understanding of the nature of science. The methodology used a quasi-experimental, pre–post-test design with a control group, with pre–post-test differences as the empirical indicators of improved understanding. Improvements were modest, as the empirical differences (pre–post and experimental–control group) were not large, but the experimental group scored more highly than the control group. The areas that showed improvement were identified. The paper includes the TLS itself and the standardized assessment tools that are functional and transferable to other researchers and teachers.     

Does students’ heritage matter in their performance on and perceptions of historical reasoning tasks?

This mixed methods study explores how high school students (N = 35) enrolled in a US charter school with a high Latino/a population perform on and perceive (in terms of interest and relevance) document-based type historical reasoning tasks: one about the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the other about the experiences of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1920s. Students wrote essay responses and completed perception inventories about the tasks. We also interviewed 10 focal students to delve more deeply into students’ thinking regarding the tasks and their interest levels in the two topics. We scored students’ responses along the criteria of historical claims, substantiation of claims, use of evidence from documents, sourcing of documents and contextualization. Our hypotheses were that students would perform better on, and be more interested in, tasks that were culturally relevant to them. We found that although students did not perform differently on the two tasks overall, students’ perceptions of the tasks differed, with a significantly greater interest in the task about Mexicans and Mexican Americans. We address the complexity of these findings and discuss implications for curriculum and practise.