Poised for Prevention: Advancing Promising Approaches to Primary Prevention of Intimate Partner Violence

Includes a discussion of primary prevention of partner violence, promising approaches to environmental/norms change, an examination of primary prevention within immigrant communities, and recommended actions and immediate next steps

Effectiveness of toys as an enhancement to instruction in explanation for students with learning disabilities

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston UniversityStudents with language-based learning disabilities demonstrate learning challenges that must be addressed to enable them to succeed academically. Some of these students have difficulty with the process of organizing their thoughts about information acquired and expressing them in the form of an explanation, both of which are critical to effective learning and the demonstration of learning. Graham's (1990) research reveals that these students use simplified approaches to the task of explanation, illustrating this challenge. This study was designed to analyze the effectiveness of an instructional approach to teach students to give an oral explanation. It utilized a toy to facilitate organization of the students' thinking, potentially aiding in their oral expression of a complete and coherent explanation, and possibly increasing their level of engagement, another area of learning that is also often challenging to these students (Mathinos & Wypych, 1988). The intervention used was based on Self-Regulated Strategy Development, an instructional approach that combines strategy instruction with self-management procedures (Graham & Harris, 1996), and a toy used as a manipulative that was projected to: (a) serve as an analogy to the chronology, completeness, and coherence of an explanation, and (b) increase engagement in the task. This intervention was an application of Universal Design for Learning principles, which was the overarching conceptual framework to this research, that has been found effective to enhance student learning (Rose & Meyer, 2002). A single-subject multiple baseline design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach with four middle school students with learning disabilities, all of whom were selected because of their difficulty with the process of explanation. Measures were taken on baseline levels of engagement and quality of oral explanation with instruction alone, and then with instruction and a toy as an enhancement to instruction. Results revealed that participating students' oral explanation scores increased slightly from baseline to Intervention 1 (Instruction) to Intervention 2 (Instruction review and toy use). While scores increased slightly from Baseline to Intervention 1 (Instruction), the subsequent increase from Intervention 1 to Intervention 2 (with the manipulative toy), was greater. Additionally, when considering student engagement data, for all but one student, the manipulative toy kept students highly engaged in both Intervention phases. This study suggests that the use of a manipulative toy in instruction improved students' learning. It also provides evidence that there is potential for the structured use of manipulative toys as augments to instruction more generally. These results have direct implications for practice in the area of curriculum design for students with learning disabilities

Negotiating Writers’ Rights: Freelance Cultural Labour and the Challenge of Organizing

As media companies grow in profits and economic significance, workers in these industries are experiencing precarious forms of employment and declining union power. This article provides insight into the experiences of a growing segment of the media labour force in Canada: freelance writers, who face declining rates of pay, intensified struggles over copyright, and decreasing control over their work. At the same time, freelancers are currently experimenting with various approaches to collective organizing: a professional association, a union, and an agency-union partnership. As part of a larger project on freelance writers’ working conditions and approaches to organizing, this article provides an overview of three organizational models and raises some early questions about their implications

(Bio)Power to the People? Harnessing Potential in the Creative and Cultural Workplace

By now, glamourous accounts of work in creative and new media industries are common: foosball tables, kitchens stocked with junk food, on-site laundry services, and office complexes that seem more like playgrounds than worksites. This paper considers the practices of these creative and cultural workplaces through Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. A conception of biopolitics as the maintenance and regulation of life itself (Foucault, 1978) can account for these practices as strategies designed to harness the potentiality of labour power and channel it into production for capital accumulation. Although new media workplaces may seem “fun,†some tactics of these workplaces may be better understood as strategies of control, designed to facilitate the self-governing, self-regulating, productive worker

Rats (Rattus norvegicus) flexibly retrieve objects’ non-spatial and spatial information from their visuospatial working memory: effects of integrated and separate processing of these features in a missing-object recognition task

After being trained to find a previous missing object within an array of four different objects, rats received occasional probe trials with such test arrays rotated from that of their respective three-object study arrays. Only animals exposed to each object’s non-spatial features consistently paired with both its spatial features (feeder’s relative orientation and direction) in the first experiment or with only feeder’s relative orientation in the second experiment (Fixed Configuration groups) were adversely affected by probe trial test array rotations. This effect, however, was less persistent for this group in the second experiment but re-emerged when objects’ nonspatial features were later rendered uninformative. Animals that had both types of each object’s features randomly paired over trials but not between a trial’s study and test array (Varied Configuration groups) were not adversely affected on probe trials but improved their missing-object recognition in the first experiment. These findings suggest that the Fixed Configuration groups had integrated each object’s non-spatial with both (in Experiment 1) or one (in Experiment 2) of its spatial features to construct a single representation that they could not easily compare to any object in a rotated probe test array. The Varied Configuration groups must maintain separate representations of each object’s features to solve this task. This prevented them from exhibiting such adverse effects on rotated probe trial test arrays but enhanced the rats’ missing-object recognition in the first experiment. We discussed how rats’ flexible use (retrieval) of encoded information from their visuospatial working memory corresponds to that of humans’ visuospatial memory in object change detection and complex object recognition tasks. We also discussed how foraging-specific factors may have influenced each group’s performance in this task

Coordination of Care by Primary Care Practices: Strategies, Lessons and Implications

Documents successful strategies for coordinating care within primary care settings, including family and caregivers; with specialists; with hospital settings; and with community-based services. Discusses challenges, lessons learned, and implications