Recovery:an international perspective

SUMMARY. Aims To review developments in recovery-focussed mental health services internationally. Methods Two forms of recovery which have been used in the literature are considered, and international examples of recovery-focussed initiatives reviews. A litmus test for a recovery-focussed service is proposed. Results Clinical recovery has emerged from professional literature, focuses on sustained remission and restoration of functioning, is invariant across individuals, and has been used to establish rates of recovery. Personal recovery has emerged from consumer narratives, focuses on living a satisfying, hopeful and contributing life even with limitations caused by the illness, varies across individuals, and the empirical evidence base relates to stages of change more than overall prevalence rates. Clinical and personal recovery are different. Two innovative, generalisable and empirically investigated examples are given of implementing a focus on personal recovery: the Collaborative Recovery Model in Australia, and Trialogues in German-speaking Europe. The role of medication is an indicator: services in which all service users are prescribed medication, in which the term compliance is used, in which the reasoning bias is present of attributing improvement to medication and deterioration to the person, and in which contact with and discussion about the service user revolves around medication issues, are not personal recovery-focussed services. Conclusions The term Recovery has been used in different ways, so conceptual clarity is important. Developing a focus on personal recovery is more than a cosmetic change it will entailfundamental shifts in the values of mental health services

Utilizing Technology to Increase Language Understanding for ELL Students

This action research was driven by the researcher’s interest in using technology to enhance ELL students’ language understanding. Specifically, the researcher was particularly interested in using a class-wide intervention called “Storyworld”. This intervention is technology-based and will be used to help increase English skills including all the language-learning domains: listening, speaking, reading and writing. The researcher is a third grade general-education teacher that has been teaching third grade students for three years. In particular, the population of students within the researcher’s third grade classroom are characterized as English language learners. The intervention, Storyworld, was implemented over a course of 4 weeks including an original benchmark score and post-assessment score after the intervention was fully established. Findings revealed that the technological program, Storyworld, was successful in helping increase English language fluency and skills. The research was conducted to bring forth a new instructional method to be used for ELL students within a elementary-leveled classroom

The Impact of Task Difficulty on Reading Comprehension Intervention with Computer Agents

The Impact of Task Difficulty on Reading Comprehension Intervention with Computer Agent

Interventions to Regulate Confusion during Learning

Confusion provides opportunities to learn at deeper levels. However, learners must put forth the necessary effort to resolve their confusion to convert this opportunity into actual learning gains. Learning occurs when learners engage in cognitive activities beneficial to learning (e.g., reflection, deliberation, problem solving) during the process of confusion resolution. Unfortunately, learners are not always able to resolve their confusion on their own. The inability to resolve confusion can be due to a lack of knowledge, motivation, or skills. The present dissertation explored methods to aid confusion resolution and ultimately promote learning through a multi-pronged approach. First, a survey revealed that learners prefer more information and feedback when confused and that they preferred different interventions for confusion compared to boredom and frustration. Second, expert human tutors were found to most frequently handle learner confusion by providing direct instruction and responded differently to learner confusion compared to anxiety, frustration, and happiness. Finally, two experiments were conducted to test the effectiveness of pedagogical and motivational confusion regulation interventions. Both types of interventions were investigated within a learning environment that experimentally induced confusion via the presentation of contradictory information by two animated agents (tutor and peer student agents). Results showed across both studies that learner effort during the confusion regulation task impacted confusion resolution and that learning occurred when the intervention provided the opportunity for learners to stop, think, and deliberate about the concept being discussed. Implications for building more effective affect-sensitive learning environments are discussed

Authentic Assessment: Evaluating the Saudi EFL Tertiary Examination System

As early as 1983, Rossi propounded that one of the issues of particular interest and development within the foreign and second language teaching profession is that of proficiency testing or the evaluation of a learner's level of linguistic and communicative competence. This still holds true. On the contrary our pilot study using the Question Paper Evaluating Checklists (included in this paper) indicates that all is not right with the designing of EFL question papers in Saudi Arabia though EFL assessment patterns in the KSA have undergone much change from the time that English was first introduced into the curriculum as a compulsory foreign language. It is the demand of time that evaluation patterns be evaluated on the touchstone of latest research and their relationship with classroom practices be established. This will help the learner-teacher combine to plug the loopholes in language training. In other words, we have to realise as educators that good assessment forms the basis of a wealth of learner information that has direct and indirect ramifications on curriculum and pedagogy. Hence the need to study this aspect of EFL in the light of modern literatures in order come up with constructive recommendations

BICAMERALISM OF THE EUROPEAN UNION: DECISION-MAKING IN THE CONCILIATION COMMITTEE

The conciliation committee is the ultimate inter-cameral dispute settlement mechanism of the ordinary (former codecision) legislative procedure of the European Union. Who gets what, and why, in this committee? Are the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers on an equal footing? Upon a closer examination, the institutional set-up of the committee is bias in favour of the Council. The present research investigates under which conditions the European Parliament may be more successful in conciliation bargaining, by three integrating analyses. First, through Wordfish I conduct quantitative text analysis estimating the similarity between the documents of almost all the dossiers that reached conciliation up to February 2012. This evidence suggests that, in almost seventy per cent of times, the final agreement is more similar to the position of the Council. As expected, the Parliament has been more successful after the reform of the Treaty of Amsterdam and in dossiers where the Council decides by qualified majority voting. The Parliament also benefits if the rapporteur comes from a large party because a veto threat is more easily executable. In line with K\uf6nig et al. (2007), the support from the Commission as well as when national administrations are more involved in implementation than the Commission are crucial to parliamentary success. Second, a qualitative expert survey provides an in-depth contribution to the variables affecting legislative outcome for a broad array of cases. The discussions engaged key actors, both from the Council and Parliament, about several dossiers reached the conciliation. The qualitative analysis motivates some of the hypotheses confirmed by the quantitative empirical tests. It investigates the causal mechanism of the rapporteur\u2019s party affiliation, the membership length of the Council president and the Commission\u2019s role, while the personality of the relays actors and the relationship of the assembly with the public opinion, which were not analysed quantitatively, are likely to exert constraints on parliamentarians in finding an agreement or raising the disagreement value they attach to dossiers. Finally, after developing a formal model of conciliation under incomplete information, I select the case of the Telecom Package as analytic narrative to explain how Parliament may extract more concessions from the member states if it manipulates the Council\u2019s believe on its own type

Evaluating a Translingual Administration of the Early Grades Math Assessment (EGMA) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Translanguaging is a view around languages that normalizes diglossia without separation: the linguistic resources of the bilinguals are considered one integrated system. Translanguaging is also a language practice of bilinguals, who select features from their entire linguistic repertoire to make sense of the world around them. Translanguaging is widely used by students and teachers in the bilingual classroom, as it allows students to build upon their entire set of resources, enhance learning outcomes, perform identities, and develop their languages even further. However, translanguaging is rarely used in assessments of bilinguals. Assessments of bilinguals, especially large-scale tests, are typically monolingual in focus and not appropriate for a large portion of the population, who cannot perform as one or two monolinguals. While psychometricians and test developers have spent large amount of resources in developing and testing linguistic accommodations, their efforts are not entirely solving the problems faced by bilinguals. Translanguaging is a framework that may overcome the limitations of linguistic accommodations. However, there is few research on how to properly implement translanguaging in assessments, particularly, in content assessments. The purpose of this work was to evaluate the effectiveness and appropriateness of implementing a translingual administration of the EGMA assessment in the region of Mbandaka, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Using a mixed-methods design, I looked at the effect of translanguaging on scores and the alignment of the framework with the classroom practices enounced by teachers. The results of this study show that the translingual version of the EGMA had a positive effect on the scores of girls who identified as bilinguals, and improved the reliability estimates of all the tasks. The results also show that the translingual EGMA is more appropriate for the context of Mbandaka, yet there are characteristics that prevent us from considering the test fully appropriate for the region. Further research must shed light on the particular aspects of the translingual administration that explained the improvements observed in this study. Future studies should also clarify potential routes to a better and more effective implementation of translanguaging in content assessments

Review of Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy by Paul Horwich 248p (2013) (review revised 2019)

Horwich gives a fine analysis of Wittgenstein (W) and is a leading W scholar, but in my view, they all fall short of a full appreciation, as I explain at length in this review and many others. If one does not understand W (and preferably Searle also) then I don't see how one could have more than a superficial understanding of philosophy and of higher order thought and thus of all complex behavior (psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, society). In a nutshell, W demonstrated that when you have shown how a sentence is used in the context of interest, there is nothing more to say. I will start with a few notable quotes and then give what I think are the minimum considerations necessary to understand Wittgenstein, philosophy and human behavior. First one might note that putting “meta” in front of any word should be suspect. W remarked e.g., that metamathematics is mathematics like any other. The notion that we can step outside philosophy (i.e., the descriptive psychology of higher order thought) is itself a profound confusion. Another irritation here (and throughout academic writing for the last 4 decades) is the constant reverse linguistic sexism of “her” and “hers” and “she” or “he/she” etc., where “they” and “theirs” and “them” would do nicely. Likewise, the use of the French word 'repertoire' where the English 'repertory' will do quite well. The major deficiency is the complete failure (though very common) to employ what I see as the hugely powerful and intuitive two systems view of HOT and Searle’s framework which I have outlined above. This is especially poignant in the chapter on meaning p111 et seq. (especially in footnotes 2-7), where we swim in very muddy water without the framework of automated true only S1, propositional dispositional S2, COS etc. One can also get a better view of the inner and the outer by reading e.g., Johnston or Budd (see my reviews). Horwich however makes many incisive comments. I especially liked his summary of the import of W’s anti-theoretical stance on p65. He needs to give more emphasis to ‘On Certainty’, recently the subject of much effort by Daniele Moyal- Sharrock, Coliva and others and summarized in my recent articles. Horwich is first rate and his work well worth the effort. One hopes that he (and everyone) will study Searle and some modern psychology as well as Hutto, Read, Hutchinson, Stern, Moyal-Sharrock, Stroll, Hacker and Baker etc. to attain a broad modern view of behavior. Most of their papers are on academia dot edu and philpapers dot org , but for PMS Hacker see his papers on his Oxford page. He gives one of the most beautiful summaries of where an understanding of Wittgenstein leaves us that I have ever seen. “There must be no attempt to explain our linguistic/conceptual activity (PI 126) as in Frege’s reduction of arithmetic to logic; no attempt to give it epistemological foundations (PI 124) as in meaning based accounts of a priori knowledge; no attempt to characterize idealized forms of it (PI 130) as in sense logics; no attempt to reform it (PI 124, 132) as in Mackie’s error theory or Dummett’s intuitionism; no attempt to streamline it (PI 133) as in Quine’s account of existence; no attempt to make it more consistent (PI 132) as in Tarski’s response to the liar paradoxes; and no attempt to make it more complete (PI 133) as in the settling of questions of personal identity for bizarre hypothetical ‘teleportation’ scenarios.” Finally, let me suggest that with the perspective I have encouraged here, W is at the center of contemporary philosophy and psychology and is not obscure, difficult or irrelevant, but scintillating, profound and crystal clear and that to miss him is to miss one of the greatest intellectual adventures possible. Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019