那一天

When 1,000 words is worth a picture (or story) Every dog has his day.And evidently, so does every minuscule detail of modern society, including the cliché.Not to beat around the bush about it; we’ll just come right out and tell you that, as hard as this fact may be to swallow, today is National Cliché Day.     

Searching for the public: school funding and shifting meanings of ‘the public’ in Australian education

School funding is a principal site of policy reform and contestation in the context of broad global shifts towards private- and market-based funding models. These shifts are transforming not only how schools are funded but also the meanings and practices of public education: that is, shifts in what is ‘public’ about schooling. In this paper, we examine the ways in which different articulations of ‘the public’ are brought to bear in contemporary debates surrounding school funding. Taking the Australian Review of Funding for Schooling (the Gonski Report) as our case, we analyse the policy report and its subsequent media coverage to consider what meanings are made concerning the ‘publicness’ of schooling. Our analysis reveals three broad themes of debate in the report and related media coverage: (1) the primacy of ‘procedural politics’ (i.e. the political imperatives and processes associated with public policy negotiations in the Australian federation); (2) changing relations between what is considered public and private; and (3) a connection of government schooling to concerns surrounding equity and a ‘public in need’. We suggest these three themes contour the debates and understandings that surround the ‘publicness’ of education generally, and school funding more specifically.     

Earned-secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect

Past research with the Berkeley Adult Attachment Interview demonstrates that retrospectively defined earned-secures (who coherently describe negative childhood experiences) parent as effectively as do continuous-secures (who coherently describe positive childhood experiences), but manifest liabilities in the form of depressive symptomatology. This article presents data from a 23-year longitudinal study that replicate and extend prior research, testing a key premise that earned-secures so defined actually have a history of insecure attachments that change over time and/or endure consistently harsh or ineffective parenting in their youth. Discrepant with assumptions, retrospective earned-secures were not more likely than continuous-secures to have been anxiously attached in infancy and were observed in childhood and adolescence to have encountered among the most supportive and structured maternal parenting in a high-risk sample. Prospectively defined earned-secures (operationalized using participants' infant attachment classifications) did indeed go on to have success in their close relationships, many without reporting relatively high levels of internalizing distress in adulthood.     

Certainty of Punishment and Criminal Thinking: Do the Rational and Non-rational Parameters of a Student’s Decision to Cheat on an Exam Interact?

The purpose of this study was to determine whether criminal thinking interacts with the rational requirements of human decision-making in a group of college students. A convenience sample of 315 undergraduates (114 males, 201 females) completed self-report measures of criminal thinking and estimated their likelihood of cheating on an exam given different levels of certainty of apprehension. A repeated-measures analysis of covariance revealed that students were significantly more likely to seize on the opportunity to cheat when the certainty of getting caught was 10% than when it was 50% and that students with higher levels of criminal thinking were more likely to take the opportunity to cheat than students with lower levels of criminal thinking. In addition, students exhibiting moderate proactive criminal thinking and moderate to high reactive criminal thinking were significantly less likely to be deterred from cheating when the odds of getting caught were low.     

THE CONTRIBUTION OF SCHOOL COUNSELORS’ SELF‐EFFICACY TO THEIR PROGRAMMATIC SERVICE DELIVERY

Self‐efficacy pertains to individuals’ belief about their capability to accomplish a task; consequently, school counselors’ positive self‐efficacy is a theoretically based prerequisite for their facilitation of school‐based interventions. In addition, school counselor‐led interventions and comprehensive, developmenta l guidance programs benefit students’ personal social, academic, and career development. Therefore, this investigation examined the contribution of practicing school counselors’ (N = 693) self‐efficacy in relation to the frequency of their programmatic service delivery. The findings indicate that participants’ self‐efficacy scores contributed to the frequency of their programmatic service delivery (48% of the variance explained). Implications for school counselors, supervisors, and educational researchers are discussed.