Privilege,compromise, or social justice: teachers’ conceptualizations of inclusive education

This qualitative study explored the beliefs of teachers in the USA about the education of students with disabilities, focusing on their conceptualizations of inclusive education. Data were obtained through in-depth interviews with 30 teachers. The findings highlight multiple interpretations of inclusive education and suggest that teachers’ support for inclusive education may be linked with the ways in which they conceptualize this practice. Most teachers’ beliefs about the education of students with disabilities were embedded in dominant educational discourses that centered on the otherness of some students, and an unquestioned acceptance of implicit assumptions in special education. Findings support the need for a paradigm shift in teacher education, moving away from deficit models towards an understanding of inclusive education as linked with issues of social justice.     

A Retrospective,Empirical Study of Grief-Related Beliefs in a Veterans Affairs Medical Center

This article reports on the findings of a retrospective, empirical study that explores and describes grief-related beliefs of a convenience sample of 312 persons in a Veterans hospital. These beliefs may facilitate bereaved individuals’ emotional regulation and adaptive responses to loss conceptualized in the dual process model. The study addresses the question: Do gender, employment status, and loss burden contribute to differences in grief-related beliefs? The findings reveal significant gender differences, and also that grief-related beliefs are reality rather than myth-oriented. Study limitations and implications for social work practice in bereavement care and hospice settings are discussed.     

中东国际体系的宗教因素——以中国在中东的维和与护航行动为考察重点

当前,威斯特伐利亚体系、伊斯兰体系、部族体系这三种国际体系在中东地区处于并行交错的局面,伊斯兰国际体系从中东的崛起和扩张与伊斯兰复兴思潮有着密切联系.进入21世纪,中国在中东的维和与护航行动中,越来越多的因伊斯兰国际体系之故而遭遇到宗教信仰问题.中国在中东军事活动中的涉教方面,主要包括对宗教和信仰的准确认识、中国军人与宗教信仰的关系、国内穆斯林因素和海外军事活动的涉教立法等领域,这些对于中国未来的发展前景至关重要.     

从《牧誓》、《顾命》看“王、玉”的辩证关系

《尚书》是记录上古帝王言行及礼制的著作,阅读文本可以发现其中出现频率很高的汉字有"王"和"玉",二者对应出现在各类仪式叙事中,显得既重要又密切。从人类学视角研究王和玉可以发现:在原始宗教信仰语境中,王和玉是神圣言说的主体,对汉语文学发生活动具有决定性、支配性的作用。在古代权力书写语境中,王和玉就像命运共同体,同时出现在仪式展演中,宣示了权力的完整性和权威性。二者辩证统一,角色上体现了人——神的对应关系,功能上体现了主生杀——掌神通的特征。在他们身上,蕴含着中国古代人文价值观中的天命神授、天人合一的思想,二者的结合阐释了中国古代文化大传统——玉传统在古史叙事中的重要地位。     

Higher Order Uncertainty and Information: Static and Dynamic Games

Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) have shown that in static games, only very weak predictions are robust to perturbations of higher order beliefs. These predictions are precisely those provided by interim correlated rationalizability (ICR). This negative result is obtained under the assumption that agents have no information on payoffs. This assumption is unnatural in many settings. It is therefore natural to ask whether Weinstein and Yildiz's results remain true under more general information structures. This paper characterizes the “robust predictions” in static and dynamic games, under arbitrary information structures. This characterization is provided by an extensive form solution concept: interim sequential rationalizability (ISR). In static games, ISR coincides with ICR and does not depend on the assumptions on agents' information. Hence the “no information” assumption entails no loss of generality in these settings. This is not the case in dynamic games, where ISR refines ICR and depends on the details of the information structure. In these settings, the robust predictions depend on the assumptions on agents' information. This reveals a hitherto neglected interaction between information and higher order uncertainty, raising novel questions of robustness.     

The Effective Sample Size

Model selection procedures often depend explicitly on the sample size n of the experiment. One example is the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) criterion and another is the use of Zellner–Siow priors in Bayesian model selection. Sample size is well-defined if one has i.i.d real observations, but is not well-defined for vector observations or in non-i.i.d. settings; extensions of critera such as BIC to such settings thus requires a definition of effective sample size that applies also in such cases. A definition of effective sample size that applies to fairly general linear models is proposed and illustrated in a variety of situations. The definition is also used to propose a suitable ‘scale’ for default proper priors for Bayesian model selection.     

Why Do People Keep Their Promises? An Experimental Test of Two Explanations1

Numerous psychological and economic experiments have shown that the exchange of promises greatly enhances cooperative behavior in experimental games. This paper seeks to test two theories to explain this effect. The first posits that individuals have a preference for keeping their word. The second assumes that people dislike letting down others' payoff expectations. According to the latter account, promises affect behavior only indirectly, because they lead to changes in the payoff expectations attributed to others. I conduct an experiment designed to distinguish between and test these alternative explanations. The results demonstrate that the effects of promises cannot be accounted for by changes in payoff expectations. This suggests that people have a preference for promise keeping per se.     

Common Learning

Consider two agents who learn the value of an unknown parameter by observing a sequence of private signals. The signals are independent and identically distributed across time but not necessarily across agents. We show that when each agent's signal space is finite, the agents will commonly learn the value of the parameter, that is, that the true value of the parameter will become approximate common knowledge. The essential step in this argument is to express the expectation of one agent's signals, conditional on those of the other agent, in terms of a Markov chain. This allows us to invoke a contraction mapping principle ensuring that if one agent's signals are close to those expected under a particular value of the parameter, then that agent expects the other agent's signals to be even closer to those expected under the parameter value. In contrast, if the agents' observations come from a countably infinite signal space, then this contraction mapping property fails. We show by example that common learning can fail in this case.     

BAYESIAN SMOOTHING WITH OCCASIONAL JUMPS

Consider a sequence of independent random variables X ₁, X ₂,…,X _n observed at n equally spaced time points where X _i has a probability distribution which is known apart from the values of a parameter θ _i ∈ R which may change from observation to observation. We consider the problem of estimating θ = (θ₁, θ₂,…,θ _n ) given the observed values of X ₁, X ₂,…,X _n . The paper proposes a prior distribution for the parameters θ for which sets of parameter values exhibiting no change, or no change apart from a few sudden large changes, or lots of small changes, all have positive prior probability. Markov chain sampling may be used to calculate Bayes estimates of the parameters. We report the results of a Monte Carlo study based on Poisson distributed data which compares the Bayes estimator with estimators obtained using cubic splines and with estimators derived from the Schwarz criterion. We conclude that the Bayes method is preferable in a minimax sense since it never produces the disastrously large errors of the other methods and pays only a modest price for this degree of safety. All three methods are used to smooth mortality rates for oesophageal cancer in Irish males aged 65–69 over the period 1955 through 1994.     

Reconciling Classical and Prior Predictive P-Values in the Two-Sided Location Parameter Testing Problem

Abstract

Micheas and Dey (2003 Micheas , A. C. , Dey , D. K. ( 2003 ). Prior and posterior predictive p -values in the one-sided location parameter testing problem. Sankhya¯ 65 : 158 – 178 . [Google Scholar]) reconciled classical and Bayesian p-values in the one-sided location parameter testing problem. In this article, the classical p-value is reconciled with the prior predictive p-value, for the two-sided location parameter testing problem, proving that the classical p-value coincides with the infimum of prior predictive p-values when the prior ranges in different classes of priors.