Interpretations of child compliance in individuals at high- and low-risk for child physical abuse

OBJECTIVE: Our studies compared individuals at high- and low-risk for child physical abuse on measures of social information processing. METHOD: Two studies were conducted using similar methods. Twenty-eight childless women in Study 1 and 36 mothers in Study 2 read vignettes of parent-child interactions in which the child's level of compliance was difficult to interpret. Participants were asked a series of questions about the child's behavior and their own reactions. RESULTS: Accuracy and bias in identifying compliant behavior were assessed using a signal detection paradigm. In both samples, high- and low-risk participants did not differ in their overall accuracy in identifying children's behaviors. However, they used different evaluation standards such that high-risk participants were biased toward seeing more noncompliance and low-risk participants were biased toward seeing more compliance. High- and low-risk participants also made different types of errors in interpreting children's behavior. Low-risk participants were more likely to misinterpret noncompliant behavior as compliant, and there was a trend for high-risk participants to not perceive compliant behavior when it occurred. There were no differences in reported disciplinary responses in either study and the results for affective reactions were mixed. CONCLUSIONS: Specific differences in social information processing between high- and low-risk individuals replicated across samples, suggesting a reliable association between evaluation standards and risk of child physical abuse. However, the absence of differences in reported discipline and inconsistent findings on affective reactions indicate the need to identify the mechanism through which cognition influences parenting behavior.     

Voters' Attention,Perceived Effects,and Voting Preferences: Negative Political Advertising in the 2006 Ohio Governor's Election

A statewide survey (N = 564) before Ohio's 2006 gubernatorial election examined political interest, campaign news and advertising attention, and perceived effects of negative political ads. Interest was related to political and negative political advertising attention, which were in turn related to campaign news attention. Candidate preference predicted attention to political and negative political ads; attention to ads significantly predicted perceived effects on self and on others, whereas attention to negative ads significantly predicted third-person differential (other minus self). In addition, individuals polled in this survey admitted that attention to ads and negative ads was having comparable effects on both themselves and others. This finding may be due to the climate surrounding Ohio's gubernatorial race, which instilled a political importance and social desirability that abated the need to disown an effect of negative advertising on oneself.     

Teacher adaptation to personalized learning spaces

Personalized learning spaces are emerging in schools as a critical reaction to ‘industrial-era’ school models. As the form and function of schools and pedagogy change, this places pressure on teachers to adapt their conventional practice. This paper addresses the question of how teachers can adapt their classroom practice to create personalized learning spaces. Personalized learning spaces draw conceptually from several decades of attempts to personalize learning and open up classrooms, both physically and virtually. They are characterized by deliberate and active interactions between the context, teacher and students. Two case studies are presented of teachers in Australian regional schools reacting to new open plan school buildings by adapting their practice. Key findings discussed are the influence of context on teacher reasoning, and teacher agency when establishing alternative learning environments.     

Personalised learning: lessons to be learnt

Personalised learning is now broadly endorsed as a key strategy to improve student curricular engagement and academic attainment, but there is also strong critique of this construct. We review claims made for this approach, as well as concerns about its conceptual coherence and effects on different learner cohorts. Drawing on literature around differentiation of the curriculum, self‐regulated learning, and ‘relational agency’ we propose a framework for conceptualising and enacting this construct. We then report on an attempt to introduce personalised learning as one strategy, among several, to improve student academic performance and wellbeing in four low SES regional secondary schools in Australia. We report on a survey of 2407 students’ perceptions of the extent to which their school provided a personalised learning environment, and a case study of a programme within one school that aimed to apply a personalised approach to the mathematics curriculum. We found that while there were ongoing challenges in this approach, there was also evidence of success in the mathematics case.     

Phonological skill,lexical decision and letter report performance in good and poor adult spellers

Two groups of undergraduate students, matched for reading skill but differing in spelling ability, participated in three experiments with the aim of exploring the causes of differences in spelling skill in this population. In the first experiment participants were presented with a range of tasks to investigate the possibility that the poor spellers had poorer phonological abilities than the good spellers. No significant differences were observed. In Experiment 2, a lexical decision task was used. The words in the task differed in orthographic neighbourhood size (N) and frequency. Analysis of the latencies revealed effects of frequency and N, but the effect of spelling group was not significant and neither was the interaction with N. Analysis of the errors revealed that the poor spellers made significantly more errors than the good spellers. In Experiment 3 participants were asked to identify the letters in briefly presented words and non‐words. There was a significant effect of stimulus type in favour of words. Poor spellers made more errors in the task than the good spellers, although the difference was restricted to non‐words. Finally, an analysis of the errors made in spelling to dictation by the two groups was carried out. This revealed that the poor spellers were more likely than the good spellers to make errors that were not phonologically plausible and that differed markedly from the target. Overall, the results are interpreted in terms of a partial orthographic representations explanation of poor spelling in good readers.     

Teacher adaptation to flexible learning environments

Learning Environments Research - Teaching practices respond to the prompts, resources and inherent potential of a school’s physical, social and cultural landscape. This study involved how...     

Student perceptions of personalised learning: development and validation of a questionnaire with regional secondary students

This project sought to evaluate regional students’ perceptions of their readiness to learn, assessment processes, engagement, extent to which their learning is personalised and to relate these to academic efficacy, academic achievement, and student well-being. It also examined teachers’ perceptions of students’ readiness to learn, the assessment process, engagement, and the extent to which students’ learning is personalised. The sample involved students in years 7–10 from six Victorian secondary schools. An instrument Personalised Learning Environment Questionnaire (PLQ) was developed to measure students’ perceptions of the factors effecting the implementation of Personalised Learning Plans (PLPs). It employed the latest scales to assess a range of PLP indicator variables, with all scales modified for use in an Australian context, and the total number of items kept to a minimum. Only scales more sensitive to PLPs were used to minimise the length of the instrument. There were three outcome variables: academic efficacy, academic achievement, and student well-being. The PLPs were assessed through scales that assess several contributing, distinct dimensions: selfdirected learning readiness, personal achievement, goal orientation, learning environment, personalised teaching and learning initiatives, curriculum entitlement and choice, and perceptions of assessment for learning. The trail PLQ was administered to 220 students, resulting in a 19 scale questionnaire with three or four items per scale. This paper reveals good data to model fit for the majority of items and each scale had good reliability. The paper describes the analytic techniques and results, how the instrument was refined and identifies common and uncommon student perceptions based on a post hoc analysis. The main study consisted of 2,407 students from four schools in the Bendigo Education Plan. They responded to this refined 19 scale version of the PLQ that was developed from the trial PLQ. All scales had satisfactory internal consistency reliability.