Childhood environment of adult psychiatric outpatients in Norway having been bullied in school

OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study was to contrast the childhood environment of adult psychiatric outpatients reporting to have been bullied at school with those who were not. METHOD: One-hundred-sixty consecutive adult outpatients from a psychiatric clinic in Norway completed self-administered questionnaires about their psychosocial environment during childhood and adolescence. The frequency of being bullied was measured with an inventory used in schools. Also, the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI) and the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) were used. RESULTS: Men who were bullied in childhood tended to grow up without biological fathers. Women who were bullied scored significantly lower on Father Care on the PBI and significantly higher on Emotional Neglect, Emotional and Physical Abuse and Physical Neglect on CTQ than those who weren't. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that to be bullied in school years is associated with characteristic psychosocial features in the environment of early childhood and adolescence.     

A framework for implementing and teaching the social and ethical impact of computing

This article describes the work of Project ImpactCS, which was initiated to define the core content and pedagogical objectives for integrating social impact and ethics into the computer science (CS) curriculum. Over a three year period the project will address three major problems that hamper the implementation of across-the-board curriculum change: the lack of a well-specified definition of what the core content and learning objectives should include, the lack of a strategy for adapting and adopting existing materials that address the core topics into the existing CS curriculum, and the lack of awareness and expertise on the part of most CS faculties regarding the need and methodology for presenting such material in their courses. This report provides the conceptual frame-work and describes the learning objectives, called knowledge units, for defining a new content area in the computer science curriculum. It also discusses strategies and innovative pedagogical techniques for implementing the knowledge units into the curriculum.     

Assessing community college transfer performance

Transfer education is one of the most important, most criticized, and most difficult to measure of the functions performed by community colleges. If the performance of community colleges is to be properly assessed, problems of measuring and analyzing the transfer function must be solved. This paper seeks to answer several basic questions about community colleges' transfer performance, using California as a case example, and to show that useful conclusions may be reached even in the absence of perfect information. Many criticisms of the transfer function focus on the decline in numbers of students transferring from community colleges to four-year institutions that began in the late 1970s. This paper suggests that criticism about the transfer function, insofar as it stems from the number or rate of students transferring (as most of the criticism does), is unfounded. Until there is more precise information on students, research on particular problems like minority underrepresentation, students' course selection and outside employment, and the reverse transfer should prove more fruitful than looking simply at transfer numbers.     

Telling and Retelling Our Stories on the Professional Knowledge Landscape

Drawing on a 3-year study focusing on the shaping influences of the professional knowledge landscape on the personal practical knowledge of experienced teachers, we first explore how stories are shaped as they are told and responded to in different places and, second, explore whether or not this sharing leads to imagining new possibilities for retelling and reliving stories. By sharing and exploring a story of a disagreement between a parent and a teacher, we focus on what we do when we tell stories in schools and what we do when we tell stories off the school landscape. In making meaning from this story, we show that both in the teacher's living of the story with the parent and in her numerous recountings of the story to others on the school landscape, she did not have opportunities to figure out new ways to relive the story. In our research group, she shared her story again. In this telling, we asked her to focus on who she, the mother, and the principal are in the story, and we inquire into what plotlines each were living. We ask questions about how they were positioned as characters in relation to one another. Re-searching the story in this way enabled us to understand the embodied nature of the teacher's knowing and how this knowledge shaped the events of the story as they were lived out, particularly how the teacher's living of a relational story countered the story of teacher and principal as positioned above parent. By drawing on Nelson's work on 'found' and 'chosen' communities, we imagine ways in which schools could become chosen communities where the story of school might be one of fostering the living out of multiple stories. We imagine the stories emerging from such communities might significantly shape the landscape of schools by opening up new possibilities for living in relation with others.     

70 Candles! Women thriving in their 8th decade

A sample of 141 predominately working class middle age (X = 53.03 years; SD = 6.92) and young adult (X = 21.34 years; SD = 3.65) university students responded to a survey instrument that assessed motives for enrolling in university classes and reactions to instructional strategies commonly used in the classroom. Results indicated that middle age and younger students’ motives for enrolling in university classes were intrinsic in nature and based on needs for intellectual growth and self‐development. In addition, findings revealed that younger students viewed learning life adjustment skills as a more powerful motivator for pursuing advanced education than did middle age students (p < .01). Both age groups of students were found to have similar attitudes about the effectiveness of teaching techniques presently used in the university classroom. Middle age and younger students reported positive reactions to the use of hands‐on‐experiences, lectures with discussions, and the lecture‐only format and negative reactions to the use of student presentations and role playing. It was concluded that the findings of this study supported the design of age‐integrated university programs and suggested that much of the present curricula satisfies the educational goals and needs of middle age and younger students.