(2010). The Use of Restrictive Interventions in Victoria, Australia: Population Data for 2007-2008. Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disability, v35 n3 p199-206 Sep. The once common use of restrictive interventions (the use of restraint and seclusion) for controlling the behaviour of people with an intellectual disability is now coming under greater scrutiny by government and community sector services. Questions are being raised with respect to the clinical efficacy and ethical appropriateness of such interventions. In Victoria, Australia, the Senior Practitioner was established in 2007 by the Disability Act (2006) to protect the rights of people with a disability who are subjected to restrictive interventions or compulsory treatments, and who are in receipt of a disability service funded by the Department of Human Services' Disability Service. Among other functions, the Senior Practitioner is mandated by the Disability Act (2006) to monitor and review the use of restrictive interventions in Victoria. The data included in this paper summarise findings from the first 12 months of operation of the Office of the Senior Practitioner's Restrictive… [Direct]
(2011). Sixteen Trends…Their Profound Impact on Our Future. Educational Research Service Seismic Shifts. Future Forces. Call them whatever you'd like. The Sixteen Trends revealed in this benchmark book will have a profound impact on our future. Noted futurist, educator, communicator, executive and leadership counsel, author, and international speaker Gary Marx makes the case for those trends and speculates on their implications for education and the whole of society. Supported by compelling research and observations, the trends address: aging, diversity, intellectual capital, technology, generations, education, personalization, human ingenuity, continuous improvement, ethics, planetary security, polarization, interdependence, personal meaning, poverty, and careers. \Sixteen Trends\ is essential reading for anyone involved in education, business, government, nonprofits, community groups, and other types of organizations, industries, or professions. The table of contents presents the following: (1) We're not as young as we used to be! (2) Highly diverse and looking good…. [Direct]
(2011). The Professionalization of Independence: New Tensions and Opportunities for Independent School Teachers. Independent School, v70 n4 Sum. In this article, the author suggests that a successful independent school career, especially in an increasingly professionalized environment, follows the model of the best teachers he knew at the start of his career. They did not walk around looking for \either/or\ solutions. Instead, they adopted a \both/and\ stance. They taught students and worked closely with intense parents. They prepared students to think for themselves and helped them credential themselves in order to gain admittance into the college that was truly right for them. The lesson of successful veteran teachers is clear: Teachers need to edge forward in their professional conduct. Passion and knowledge are great, but they will not sustain teachers over time. Today, they also need to hone their communication skills so that their parent correspondences are clear and student centered. They need to manage email accounts, web portals, and RSS feeds. They need to teach their classes while also developing programs to expose… [Direct]
(2011). Breastfeeding, Brain Activation to Own Infant Cry, and Maternal Sensitivity. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, v52 n8 p907-915 Aug. Background: Research points to the importance of breastfeeding for promoting close mother-infant contact and social-emotional development. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have identified brain regions related to maternal behaviors. However, little research has addressed the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the relationship between breastfeeding and maternal behavior in human mothers. We investigated the associations between breastfeeding, maternal brain response to own infant stimuli, and maternal sensitivity in the early postpartum. Methods: Seventeen biological mothers of healthy infants participated in two matched groups according to feeding method–exclusive breastfeeding and exclusive formula-feeding at 2-4 weeks postpartum. fMRI scanning was conducted in the first postpartum month to examine maternal brain activation in response to her own baby's cry versus control baby-cry. Dyadic interactions between mothers and infants at 3-4 months… [Direct]
(2009). Food for Thought: Resourcing Moral Education. Ethics and Education, v4 n1 p31-42 Mar. J.M. Coetzee's "Elizabeth Costello" is an overtly philosophical novel, at the heart of which are questions concerning the relation of human beings to animals and the discussion of animal rights. The nature of its subject matter and the prominence it gives to dialogue, sometimes of an almost Platonic kind, make it a rich potential resource for moral education. This article begins by imagining a course based on extracts from the novel, intended for teenage students or older people. It goes on to make suggestions for further reading. There is now a rich secondary literature that has developed in response to central elements in Coetzee's text, involving the work of Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Cary Wolfe, and Ian Hacking, amongst others. This literature raises questions about the nature of moral philosophy, and it has implications for moral education. (Contains 1 note.)… [Direct]
(2008). The ABCs of Privacy Practices for Educators. Learning & Leading with Technology, v35 n4 p24-27 Dec 2007-Jan. Over the last year, the number of reported cases of confidential information lost because of stolen laptops, lost USB flash drives, misplaced PDAs, and simple human error has significantly increased. These trends have school districts concerned with issues of violating private information. Laws such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Child Online Protection Act are not new, but the proliferation of technology makes managing privacy more complicated than it was in the past. This article addresses essential practices school administrators and teachers should consider for preserving and protecting the information they handle daily. (Contains 2 tables.)… [PDF] [Direct]
(2006). Haptic Tracking Permits Bimanual Independence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, v32 n5 p1266-1275 Oct. This study shows that in a novel task–bimanual haptic tracking–neurologically normal human adults can move their 2 hands independently for extended periods of time with little or no training. Participants lightly touched buttons whose positions were moved either quasi-randomly in the horizontal plane by 1 or 2 human drivers (Experiment 1), in circle and square patterns in the vertical plane by 2 human drivers (Experiment 2), or at different frequencies in the horizontal plane by 2 human drivers (Experiment 3). Bimanual contact was maintained equally well in all conditions even though in Experiment 1 the left-and right-hand motions were uncorrelated (in the 2-driver condition), in Experiment 2 the left and right-hand motions were spatially incongruous when circles and squares were tracked at the same time, and in Experiment 3 the left- and right-hand motions maintained different frequency ratios. Because haptic tracking has revealed that humans can in fact move their 2 hands… [Direct]
(2010). Signature Strengths in Positive Psychology. Communique, v38 n8 p15-16 Jun. Positive psychology can be thought of as the scientific study of what is \right about people\ as opposed to the traditional focus on the healing of psychological pain or trauma. The philosophical roots of positive psychology can be traced back to Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, as well as Islamic and Athenian teaching and other ancient scholars, philosophers, and spiritual leaders. Thus, positive psychology is an integrative framework that draws upon the enduring themes and values across time periods and cultures to test theories using scientific tools designed to discover not only the elements of human well-being, but also the means by which that well-being can be experienced by all individuals. School psychologists can engage in action research to implement the strategies of positive psychology regarding signature strengths (courage, justice, humanity, temperance, wisdom, transcendence) to help children identify and cultivate their own. Encouraging… [Direct]
(2006). Right Hemispheric Dominance in Gaze-Triggered Reflexive Shift of Attention in Humans. Brain and Cognition, v62 n2 p128-133 Nov. Recent findings suggest a right hemispheric dominance in gaze-triggered shifts of attention. The aim of this study was to clarify the dominant hemisphere in the gaze processing that mediates attentional shift. A target localization task, with preceding non-predicative gaze cues presented to each visual field, was undertaken by 44 healthy subjects, measuring reaction time (RT). A face identification task was also given to determine hemispheric dominance in face processing for each subject. RT differences between valid and invalid cues were larger when presented in the left rather than the right visual field. This held true regardless of individual hemispheric dominance in face processing. Together, these results indicate right hemispheric dominance in gaze-triggered reflexive shifts of attention in normal healthy subjects…. [Direct]
(2008). Selection and Interview Procedures at a Multinational Company. Business Communication Quarterly, v71 n1 p100-102. This article presents an interview with Jim Olson, a retired auto industry executive, about his experience with his company's hiring process. The responsibility for establishing and implementing procedures and policies that adhere to government regulations is critical. It makes sense for employers and potential employees to understand laws governing the hiring process and for companies to provide training to ensure that their managers practice these standards. Creating policies and procedures for selecting and interviewing job candidates is usually the responsibility of a company's human resources department, often with the guidance and approval of its legal affairs office. Such requirements are designed in accordance with U.S. federal and state laws related to civil rights, gender and ethnic rights, age discrimination, disabilities, and family leave, among others. These laws govern the conduct for companies during the recruitment process (Andrews & Baird, 2005), and though federal… [Direct]
(2010). Transgender Discrimination and the Law. Contemporary Issues in Education Research, v3 n2 p55-60 Feb. An emerging area of law is developing regarding sex/gender identity discrimination, also referred to as transgender discrimination, as distinguished from discrimination based on sexual orientation. A transgendered individual is defined as "a person who has a gender-identity disorder which is a persistent discomfort about one?s assigned sex or a sense of belonging to the other sex.? While Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or it amendments do not provide protection from discrimination for individuals based on sexual orientation, transgender, or transvestites, there are a growing number of state, cities, and counties with transgender explicit non-discrimination laws. In addition to the above private employers, colleges and universities and collective bargaining agreements prohibit discrimination against transgendered people. While Title VII does not protect transgendered people, some federal courts have broadly interpreted Title VII?s prohibitation against sex… [PDF]
(2010). Derived Relational Responding: A Comparison of Match-to-Sample and the Relational Completion Procedure. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, v94 n1 p37-55 Jul. Previous research suggests that the Relational Completion Procedure may be an effective alternative procedure for studying derived relational responding. However, the parameters that make it effective, relative to traditional match-to-sample, remain to be determined. The present experiment compared the Relational Completion Procedure and match-to-sample protocols for training and testing Same and Opposite derived stimulus relations. Trials to criterion and overall pass rate (i.e., yield) in both procedures were compared across three variables: presence versus absence of a confirmatory response requirement, three versus five comparison stimuli, and top-to-bottom versus left-to-right presentation format. Findings demonstrated a facilitative effect of the confirmatory response requirement in both procedures. Training trials to criterion were nominally but not significantly lower during the nonarbitrary training phase in the Relational Completion Procedure compared to match-to-sample,… [Direct]
(2009). An Investigation of Embodied Language Comprehension from the Perspective of Coordination Dynamics. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Connecticut. In four experiments, participants performed sentence comprehension tasks simultaneously with bimanual coordination. Half of the sentences described events that could not be performed by a human (non-performable) and half described actions that could be performed by a human (performable). Effects of sentence type on coordination were indexed by mean relative phase shift and variability of relative phase as well as movement period. Effects of sentence type on comprehension were indexed by reaction time in judging sentence plausibility. Experiments 1a and 1b showed no differences in coordination between the sentence conditions, but showed a difference in mean relative phase shift when participants performed the sentence judgment task and the coordination task together (dual task) as compared to when participants performed the coordination task alone (single task). This difference also appeared for movement period. Experiment 2 explored the effects of sentence difficulty combined with… [Direct]
(2008). \Academic Freedom\ Used as Basis of Bills to Question Evolution. Education Week, v27 n37 p1, 15 May. In another twist in the decades-long battle over evolution's status in public school science classrooms, state legislators are arguing that teachers have a right to raise doubts about that essential scientific theory as a matter of free speech. Similarly worded bills that attempt to protect the right of educators and students to present critiques of evolution on the basis of \academic freedom\ have emerged in at least five states. Those measures do not call for teaching \intelligent design\ or biblically based creationism. Instead, they generally describe evolution as controversial and seek to bar school administrators from interfering with teachers who describe what they see as flaws in the theory. The overwhelming scientific consensus, however, is that there is no debate about the core principles of evolution, which scientists regard as the only credible, and thoroughly tested, scientific explanation for the development of human and other life on Earth, and for its diversity of… [Direct]
(2009). Say It with Flowers! An fMRI Study of Object Mediated Communication. Brain and Language, v108 n3 p159-166 Mar. Human communicational interaction can be mediated by a host of expressive means from words in a natural language to gestures and material symbols. Given the proper contextual setting even an everyday object can gain a mediating function in a communicational situation. In this study we used event-related fMRI to study the brain activity caused by everyday material objects when they are perceived as signals. We found that comprehension of material signals activates bilaterally areas of the ventral stream and pars triangularis of the inferior frontal cortex, that is, areas traditionally associated with verbal language and semantics. In addition, we found that right-hemisphere inferior frontal cortex is recruited as a function of the increasing unconventionality of communicative objects. Together these findings support an interpretation of the traditional language areas as playing a more general role across modalities in relation to communicational mediation of social semantic meaning…. [Direct]