Mothers' use of touch across infants' development and its implications for word learning: Evidence from Korean dyadic interactions

Caregivers' touches that occur alongside words and utterances could aid in the detection of word/utterance boundaries and the mapping of word forms to word meanings. We examined changes in caregivers' use of touches with their speech directed to infants using a multimodal cross-sectional corpus of 35 Korean mother-child dyads across three age groups of infants (8, 14, and 27 months). We tested the hypothesis that caregivers' frequency and use of touches with speech change with infants' development. Results revealed that the frequency of word/utterance-touch alignment as well as word + touch co-occurrence is highest in speech addressed to the youngest group of infants. Thus, this study provides support for the hypothesis that caregivers' use of touch during dyadic interactions is sensitive to infants' age in a way similar to caregivers' use of speech alone and could provide cues useful to infants' language learning at critical points in early development.     

Summer learning programs and student success in the global economy

In the United States and around the rest of the world, there is a renewed focus on ensuring that schools are providing students with the skills necessary to compete in the global economy. High-quality summer learning programs are an ideal vehicle to help students gain content knowledge and develop innovative skills: they provide time for individual exploration and hands-on, experiential opportunities that can instill a lifelong love of learning that carries into the classroom and the workforce.     

School Based Vision Centers: striving to optimize learning

As the average age of the Canadian population continues to increase, and providing care at home to frail older adults becomes ever more prevalent, support for family and friend caregivers remains a key social policy issue. Economic support is an important consideration given the impact of caregiving on labour force participation. Yet the caregiving/paid work relationship is not always straightforward. While caregiving often restricts employment, limited attachment to employment may also influence the decision to provide care. Isabel's story, collected as part of a study of sibling views of fairness in sharing parent care as well as parent assets, provides a case study in how siblings give different priority to care work versus career work and what support needs arise including those related to sibling conflict over differing priorities. Isabel claims she sacrificed her career to care for her ailing mother while her siblings argue that through caregiving, Isabel was sheltered from the paid workforce.     

Reassessing the developmental needs of children with learning disabilities: Programmatic implications

The complex growth patterns of children with learning disabilities place them at significant emotional and social risk in interpersonal, family, and institutional relationships. Programmatic interventions that address specific ego functions as well as an approach to a remedial and preventive program design to strengthen social and interactional skills are explored. The author proposes a program design to pair schools with community centers in order to provide opportunities for developing these skills.A version of this article was presented at the NASW School Social Work Conference, New Orleans, LA, January 31-February 3, 1985.     

Summer Engagement for At-Risk Youth: Preliminary Outcomes from the New York State Workforce Development Study

The goal of engaging high-risk youth in pro-social activities is to reduce involvement in the criminal justice system and create experiences that increase the youth’s chance of success in education and employment in the future. However, the literature does not support this assumption. The current study looks at the Summer Youth Engagement Program in New York State (NYSYEP). NYSYEP attempts to engage youth in a variety of pro-social activities including employment; education programs; organized recreation programs; and, volunteer work or community service. The hypothesis for the study was that youth who were engaged in pro-social activities would be more likely to be rearrested than youth who were not engaged. The number of hours of youth engagement was found to reduce the odds of being rearrested, but by only 2 %.     

Competencies of disabled entrepreneurs in Iran: implications for learning and development

This qualitative research set out to explore competencies of disabled entrepreneurs by presenting their lived experiences in developing their capabilities to create and manage their own business. The research also aimed to identify the dimensions and components of entrepreneurial competencies of disabled entrepreneurs. The participants were 16 entrepreneurs with physical and mobility disabilities, four educational managers of disabled vocational education and rehabilitation centers, and four entrepreneurship academics. Our findings suggested that the disabled entrepreneurs possess specific personal and functional entrepreneurial competencies. Personal competencies include attitudinal competencies, entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurship learning self-efficacy. Functional competencies encompass entrepreneurial competencies, commitment and social competencies.     

Asking about the future: methodological insights from energy biographies

Temporality is fundamental to qualitative longitudinal (QLL) research, inherent in the design of returning to participants over time, often to explore moments of change. Previous research has indicated that talking about the future can be difficult, yet there has been insufficient discussion of methodological developments to address these challenges. This paper presents insights from the Energy Biographies project, which has taken a QLL and multimodal approach to investigating how everyday energy use can be understood in relation to biographical pasts and imagined futures. In particular, we detail innovative techniques developed within the project (e.g. SMS photograph activities) to elicit data on anticipated futures, in ways that engender thinking about participants’ own biographical futures and wider societal changes. We conclude by considering some of the significant benefits and challenges such techniques present. These methodological insights have a wider relevance beyond the substantive topic for those interested in eliciting data about futures in qualitative research.     

School as haven: Transforming school environments into welcoming learning communities

This study investigated school factors that impact attendance. Interviews and focus groups with over 60 key stakeholders from five Maryland counties were conducted. Respondents indicated that despite individual, family, and community factors that contribute to non-attendance, students will attend a school that is intentional about creating a welcoming climate that is supportive and academically stimulating. Attendance can be improved when schools evaluated policies that may unintentionally deter student attendance, when students feel heard by school personnel, and when students are given opportunities to establish supportive relationships with caring adults in and out of the classroom.     

Reintegration upon return: insights from Ecuadorian returnees from Spain

Using the ECM2 survey data on Ecuadorian migrants returning from Spain, we investigate the determinants of reintegration upon return. We study how the migration experience, but also the before‐ and after‐migration characteristics, correlate with migrants’ outcomes upon return. We adopt a broad conception of reintegration, considering jointly labour market‐related outcomes that proxy for structural reintegration and subjective indicators that provide insights on sociocultural reintegration. The determinants of these two types of outcomes appear to be different: reintegration indeed encompasses multiple dimensions which cannot be captured by a single indicator. Our results suggest that return assistance programmes’ efficiency in helping reintegration could be improved by (I) targeting, ex‐ante, returnees who plan to launch their own business, and, ex‐post, the most vulnerable workers (women, older returnees, unemployed), and (ii) facilitating the labour market integration of foreign‐educated returnees. They also call for further research to better understand the consequences of these programmes.     

Women and poverty: insights from individual consumption in Albania

This paper studies how a society with traditional gender norms and competitive marriage market conditions may favor unequal distribution of resources within households and a consequent increase in female poverty. We propose a method to estimate individual consumption from household expenditure data. After estimating individual consumption, we apply a fuzzy approach for poverty analysis. Compared to standard poverty measures, the approach is less sensitive to changes in the distribution of consumption around the poverty line, generated when accounting for unequal distribution of household resources. The approach, applied to the analysis of individual poverty in Albania, revealed considerable intrahousehold inequality that specifically affects women and is correlated with imbalances in the sex ratio induced by past migrations. This leads to an expected general increase in poverty rates, mainly driven by a previously unperceived issue, female poverty, which emerges as an aspect of concern to consider in future anti-poverty policies.     

Custodianship and its implications for the Children Act

SUMMARY. Custodianship of children was introduced by the 1975 Children Act, but not implemented until 1985. It has now been overtaken by new concepts in the 1989 Children Act, but the experience thus far provides useful indications of how Residence Orders may be operated. Based on Department of Health funded research, this article shows how careers and birth families see such measures designed to give security to children while maintaining contact with their original parents. The article gives important information to all professionals who will have to work with the new principles of parental responsibility.     

Implants and ethnocide: learning from the cochlear implant controversy

This paper uses the fictional case of the ‘Babel fish’ to explore and illustrate the issues involved in the controversy about the use of cochlear implants in prelinguistically deaf children. Analysis of this controversy suggests that the development of genetic tests for deafness poses a serious threat to the continued flourishing of Deaf culture. I argue that the relationships between Deaf and hearing cultures that are revealed and constructed in debates about genetic testing are themselves deserving of ethical evaluation. Making good policy about genetic testing for deafness will require addressing questions in political philosophy and anthropology about the value of culture and also thinking hard about what sorts of experiences and achievements make a human life worthwhile.     

Directive teaching and gut learning: The seminar technique and its use in video-based role-play learning

Abstract

Traditional models of teaching in higher education induce a sense of competition amongst, students, exposing their varying degrees of competence. This is particularly true in seminar teaching where students are expected to perform individually in front of their peers. Some show up better man others, and tiiose who do badly are not only penalized by their teachers and peers but also caught in a cycle of deteriorating performance.

Because social work training is concerned with teaching good practice to each and every student, some of whom are more naturally able man others, the traditional style of seminar can be counter-productive and so undermining for some that they become unable to learn. Moreover, some of those who present well in academic seminars may be the less competent in the field and vice versa; good performance in class and good practice do not necessarily go together. As a teaching method in social work training the seminar needs to be adapted and made a more sensitive instrument.

A related problem is that an academic style of teaching can render social work material lifeless; it is difficult to develop skills and different ways of intervening when the subject matter presented does not come across as real and alive.

While David Wallbridge was working on the Seminar Technique, Hazel Danbury was experimenting with the use of closed circuit television in student case discussions. She soon discovered the same problems occurring with CCTV as were found in the seminar. This paper outlines some ways of minimizing these problems: First, David Wallbridge's Seminar Technique is explained. This is followed by an account of how Hazel Danbury used it in conjunction with CCTV and then monitored the method over a ten-week term. Finally there is a brief account of the students own evaluation of the method.     

Order of selection in vocational rehabilitation: implications for the transition from school to adult outcomes for youths with learning disabilities

Interagency cooperation between special education and vocational rehabilitation (VR) is central to ensuring the continuity of services to young adults with disabilities who are in transition from school to adult living. However, the interface between special education and VR may be complicated by order of selection, an equally binding mandate in federal VR policy to provide priority services to individuals with the most severe disabilities. Because students with learning disabilities are typically perceived as having mild rather than severe disabilities, these youths are most at risk for falling through the cracks in the service landscape once they leave the school setting in states where the VR agency is implementing an order of selection procedure. This article identifies and discusses common impediments to collaborative transition planning for students with learning disabilities that may be intensified when the state VR agency is operating under an order of selection plan. Recommendations are provided to facilitate greater interagency cooperation among schools and VR agencies so that transition planning and implementation for students with learning disabilities is not subverted as a result of the order of selection mandate.