Self-instruction training: A potential tool for school psychologists

Self-instruction training is a cognitive-behavioral approach to self-control in which children are taught to use covert speech to modify their own behavior. The potential effectiveness of self-instruction training as an intervention technique for school psychologists to enhance student academic and/or social behavior in the classroom is the focus of this review. Research results addressing the practical issues of how, when, and with whom to use this strategy, its generalizability, and its long-term and comparative effectiveness are presented. Implications for further research in the schools are discussed.     

Education as Part of the Migratory Project of Latin American Migrant Women Traveling to the United States in Undocumented Conditions

Education is an indispensable element for the development of society. In Latin America, the point of origin of most of the undocumented immigrants to the United States, equal opportunity in access to education and educational achievement is still pending. The study presented here focuses on the analysis of the expectations of female migrants via Mexico’s northern border, focusing attention on educational attainment as an important aspect of the “American Dream” of the migrant women interviewed and their dependents.     

Experiential learning of management principles via online student-manager discussions

This teaching brief describes an experiential project used in a graduate Principles of Management course for nonbusiness undergraduate students. Groups of four to six first-year MBA students interviewed a seasoned manager online twice over the 8-week course and discussed the applications of course material. Project subtopics included an introduction to management, strategic management, ethics and social responsibility, innovation and change management, international business, organizational structure, authority and job design, human resource management, leadership, and communication, operations management, and business analytics. Students completed a group report and an individual reflection on their experience. Over 92% of graduate students in the class indicated that the project was a positive learning activity.     

Library Media Specialists: Premier Information Specialists for the Information Age

The information age has given library media specialists an unprecedented opportunity to play a leading role in helping teachers, administrators, and especially students access and use information intelligently. As the school??s premier information specialist; the library media specialist has a unique role to play in helping everyone in the school develop a true twenty-first century habit of mind: a habit of thinking about information itself as a basic and powerful tool for learning deeply and living well in the information age. This article explores this role in the ??brave new?? digital age and offers a number of collaborative strategies that can help the library media specialist work with the entire school community.     

Analysing the professional development of teaching and learning from a political ethics of care perspective

This paper uses Tronto's political ethics of care as a normative framework to evaluate a model of teaching and learning professional development. This framework identifies five integrated moral elements of care – attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust. This paper explicates on each of these elements to evaluate the piloting and implementation of a teaching and learning professional development model at a South African higher education institution. The political ethics of care was found to be a useful normative framework for a group of higher educators to reflect on the process of engaging in teaching and learning professional development in that it revealed the importance of differential power relations, the importance of working collaboratively and being attentive to the needs of both caregivers and care receivers.     

Integrating on-line technology into teaching activities to enhance student and teacher learning in a New Zealand primary school

Continuing emphasis given to computer technology resourcing in schools presents potential for web-based initiatives which focus on quality arts teaching and learning, as ways to improve arts outcomes for all students. An arts e-learning collaborative research project between specialist on-line teacher/researchers and generalist primary teachers was designed to investigate student learning, quality teaching, and implementation factors. Constructionist-based teaching activities using on-line technology were designed to engage students in a learner-centred e-learning environment where students and teachers collaborated to produce a media and learning artefact. A case study highlights the outcomes for four students who transferred learnt drama skills to other classroom contexts. This model has potential to provide drama learning for students and professional development for primary generalist teachers, contingent on the availability of rigorously planned and well-resourced programmes.     

The Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation: A Quarter Century of Contribution,A Future of Challenge and Optimism

The Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation (JEPC) is beginning its second quarter century of publication. Given the challenges education faced in 1990, when the journal began publishing, and the evolving challenges of 2015, it became important to answer two questions: (1) Has JEPC successfully contributed to the facilitation of service delivery leading to improved outcomes? (2) What major challenges should JEPC consider—in an era of diminishing school budgets, professional autonomy, and social safety nets—to ensure that it can help to meet the needs of struggling learners, their fellow students, and the people and organizations who work on their behalf? To help answer these questions, this article discusses JEPC's contributions to consultation, current and future challenges, and possible directions for meeting the current and future needs of struggling learners, their peers, and all other stakeholders to which JEPC has dedicated itself.     

Linking Employment to Attachment: The Mediating Effects of Maternal Separation Anxiety and Interactive Behavior

This study examined the effects of maternal employment and separation anxiety on maternal interactive behavior and infant attachment. 73 mother-infant pairs participated in a laboratory free-play session when infants were 5 and 10 months of age and in the Strange Situation when the infants were 18 months of age. Maternal feelings about being separated from her infant were assessed by questionnaire at 5 months. Employed mothers returned to work before the infants' fifth month, and nonemployed mothers did not work outside the home through their infants' tenth month. Employed mothers who reported high levels of separation anxiety were more likely to exhibit intrusive behaviors at 10 months. While employment was not directly related to attachment, we found infants of high-anxiety employed mothers to develop anxious-avoidant attachments. The results suggest that maternal separation anxiety and interactive style may be important mediators between employment and later infant outcome.     

Predicting who will major in a science discipline: Expectancy–value theory as part of an ecological model for studying academic communities

Research on factors that shape recruitment and retention in undergraduate science majors currently is highly fragmented and in need of an integrative research framework. Such a framework should incorporate analyses of the various levels of organization that characterize academic communities (i.e., the broad institutional level, the departmental level, and the student level), and should also provide ways to study the interactions occurring within and between these structural levels. We propose that academic communities are analogous to ecosystems, and that the research paradigms of modern community ecology can provide the necessary framework, as well as new and innovative approaches to a very complex area. This article also presents the results of a pilot study that demonstrates the promise of this approach at the student level. We administered a questionnaire based on expectancy-value theory to undergraduates enrolled in introductory biology courses. Itself an integrative approach, expectancy-value theory views achievement-related behavior as a joint function of the person's expectancy of success in the behavior and the subjective value placed on such success. Our results indicated: (a) significant gender differences in the underlying factor structures of expectations and values related to the discipline of biology, (b) expectancy-value factors significantly distinguished biology majors from nonmajors, and (c) expectancy-value factors significantly predicted students' intent to enroll in future biology courses. We explore the expectancy-value framework as an operationally integrative framework in our ecological model for studying academic communities, especially in the context of assessing the underrepresentation of women and minorities in the sciences. Future research directions as well as practical implications are also discussed.