Enhancing practitioner-led education in social work: developing a secondment project

ABSTRACT

This paper illustrates the development of a secondment project designed to enhance practitioner-led social work education in a Higher Education Institution. The project was developed as part of a Teaching Partnership initiative to establish joint working and standardized approaches to social work education between Higher Education Institutes and Local Authorities across a UK region. Highlighted is how the project utilized a six-stage strategy designed to gather information to produce an evidence-base to support the implementation of a pilot practitioner secondment arrangement. The paper discusses strategies used to gather information from a range of stakeholders to inform the project, the project outcome and some considerations for future secondment arrangements. Contributing to a limited source of literature, challenges and limitations of developing formal secondment arrangements and delivering practitioner-led education in Higher Education Institutes are highlighted. This paper will assist Higher Education Institutes and Local Authorities in the design and implementation of formal secondment arrangements where these are identified as in need of development.     

Does the β-measure make empirical sense? A vignette experiment on humans’ judgment of social dominance

Dominance hierarchies play an important role in governing the social interactions of humans and other species of social animals. In a social group, dominance relations can be inferred from the directed network of matchups between actors. Methodologists have proposed different ways to measure social dominance in directed networks. One such measure, the “β-measure” (van den Brink and Gilles, 2000), emphasizes the quality of defeated opponents in a way that an actor is seen as being more dominant when s/he defeats opponents who are more rarely defeated. While insightful in theory, the validity of the measure in people’s perception remains questionable, considering the cognitive complexity imposed by this measure, compared to a simpler measure that merely counts the number of defeated opponents. We conducted a vignette experiment with human subjects (professional athletes) to test their judgments of the dominance relation in a hypothetical tournament. Fitting our parametric model to peoples’ evaluations in the experiment, we found strong evidence in support of the β-measure: Although, in general, contestants who win more in the tournament are regarded as being more dominant, the contents of the winning records matter, such that those who beat more victorious opponents are further regarded as more dominant than those who defeat less victorious opponents. We also found a gender difference, in that men have a stronger propensity than women to adopt the β-measure when judging social dominance.     

基于OBE教育理念的土木工程专业英语教学改革实践

为提高土木工程专业学生的英语应用能力和《土木工程专业英语》课程的教学效果，本次教改实践以OBE（成果导向教育）教育理念为教改指导思想，以土木工程专业英语教学为教改对象，设计了土木工程专业英语教学的教学内容、教学组织和教学评价等教学环节，在河北工程大学土木工程专业学生中进行了教改实践。教改实践结果表明，基于OBE的土木工程专业英语教学模式在提升土木工程专业学生英语应用能力方面具有很好的效果。本次教改实践的成果值得本校其他工科专业和其他兄弟院校借鉴。     

Social cohesion in Rwanda: Results from a public good experiment

We describe a public good experiment, a type of economic experiment commonly used to examine feelings of prosociality—that is, behaviour which is positive, helpful and intended to promote social acceptance and friendship—and community cohesion, carried out in Rwanda. Contributions in different parts of the country are affected by the local intensity of the 1994 genocide, with more generous contributions being made in areas where violence was greater. This supports earlier research indicating that conflict experience leads to greater prosociality. However, we also find that people who have not, themselves, been targets of violence give lower contributions than people who have. The considerable group‐related and regional differences in social behaviour may have implications for the country's policies to deal with social cohesion.     

提升中小学生阅读兴趣的实证研究——基于MIMIC模型的教学效能分析

提升学生的阅读素养是当前我国阅读课程教学改革的重要目标之一。本研究首次尝试将群文阅读这种新兴的阅读教学方式与传统的单本阅读教学方式进行对比研究，主要从提升学生阅读兴趣的效能方面进行分析与探讨。实验涉及我国中西部5个省市、6个区县共计1 231名中小学生，并使用MIMIC模型，在有效控制测量误差的基础上，对实证数据进行了量化建模与分析，通过分析发现，群文阅读教学对激发学生阅读的“情境兴趣”有更加显著的作用，具体表现为对学生阅读注意力、情感体验、探索意愿、价值感知的影响更大，同时也验证了Knogler提出的“情境兴趣模型”在阅读教学领域的适用性，从而为进一步推进我国中小学阅读课程教学改革提供了科学的数据支撑。因此，为提升中小学生阅读素养，在阅读教学中引入群文阅读这一新兴的教学方式，具有重要的实践价值和现实意义。     

Teaching technologies for immigrant children: an exploratory study of elementary school teachers in Russia*

ABSTRACT

Educational institutions are an important setting where psychological, pedagogical, sociocultural, and language adaptation of immigrant children occurs. A number of teaching strategies, practices, approaches, and methods have been described in the literature. In the Russian context, such strategies have been called ‘technologies’. The purpose of the present exploratory study was to describe teaching technologies used by teachers in Russia when working with immigrant students in elementary schools. Responses of forty-five elementary school teachers to open-ended questions describing technologies they use when teaching children with migration backgrounds were analyzed using content analysis. Findings suggest that Russian elementary school teachers used ethno-cultural group, communicative technologies, games, individualized instruction, and differentiated teaching. Many approaches mentioned can be used inclusively with groups of immigrant and non-immigrant students. Importantly, while teachers supplemented classroom instruction with additional Russian language lessons, none mentioned specific techniques for teaching Russian as a non-native language. These findings are discussed in relation to teaching strategies described in the international literature focused on migrant students. Finally, implications for further research are discussed.     

地方高校推行教师学术休假制度的现实意义与实施策略

教师学术休假是促进教师专业发展的重要形式，是教师自我完善的需要，是提升教师理论水平、科研能力和教学技能的主要手段，是提高教学质量的有效途径。探讨地方高校推行学术休假制的必要性，提出地方高校推行学术休假的建议，对地方高校教师队伍建设具有重要的现实意义。在实施策略上，应注重4个方面：（1）明确参加学术休假的对象主要是教师和教学科研人员；（2）根据教师职业发展的阶段性确定学术休假的时间；（3）合理设置学术休假人员遴选条件，首先应考虑为工作满5年以上的青年教师提供学术休假，其次应考虑为高级职称教师提供学术休假；（4）明确学术休假期间的教师待遇，并加强对学术休假人员的管理。     

Inter-group contact and out-group altruism after violence

Altruism among humans is common. It is especially prominent among in-group members. However, we are struck by results from laboratory-in-the-field experiments with out-group members of different ethnic or religious backgrounds. In all instances, the groups were rivals in civil wars. While we find almost no altruistic behavior among groups that were engaged in fighting, out-group altruism emerges with the passage of time. To address the underlying mechanism that might explain this puzzling result, we use a laboratory experiment that sorts between a norms revision explanation and a contact hypothesis explanation. Our findings show that contact with out-group members, in a mutually beneficial task, results in a reversion to prior levels of out-group altruism following conflict. Our findings reinforce the idea that deeply held attitudes toward a stigmatized out-group change following productive interactions with those out-group members. It is clear that hostility between groups need not persist over time.     

Eye-tracking methodology: exploring the processing of question formats in web surveys

In social research, the use of agree/disagree (A/D) questions is a popular method for measuring attitudes. Research has shown that A/D questions require complex cognitive processing and are susceptible to response bias. Thus, some researchers recommend the use of item-specific (IS) questions. This study examines the processing of A/D and IS questions, using eye-tracking methodology. By recording respondents’ eye movements, how respondents process survey questions can be evaluated. The results reveal that IS questions cause more and longer fixations. However, this only applies to the response categories. There are no differences regarding the question stems. Altogether, it seems that IS response categories trigger deeper cognitive processing than A/D response categories.     

Do individuals successfully cover up their lies? Evidence from a compliance experiment

We study how well individuals in a face-to-face situation can delude others. We exploit data from a laboratory experiment in which participants were asked to assess video-taped statements as being rather truthful or untruthful. The statements are face-to-face tax declarations. The video clips feature each subject twice making the same declaration: One time the subject is reporting honestly, and the other time willingly dishonestly. This allows us to investigate within-subject differences in perceived truthfulness. Our study provides several novel insights. We find that individuals can cover up their lies successfully. On average, a subject is perceived as more truthful if she deceives than if she reports honestly. In particular, individuals with a genuine dishonest appearance manage to increase their perceived truthfulness by up to 14 percent when lying. Moreover, our results show that a subject appears less truthful if she had previously been caught lying. Being detected as a liar previously appears to impair self-confidence and to thereby lower an individual’s ability to deceive.