Interview with Sister Dorothy Felder

An interview with Sister Dorothy Felder regarding her experiences in a one-room school house.https://scholars.fhsu.edu/ors/1122/thumbnail.jp

Encouraging greater empowerment for adolescents in consent procedures in social science research and policy projects

The CO-CREATE project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 774210.The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child emphasizes the importance of allowing children and adolescents to influence decisions that are important to them following their age and maturity. This paper explores the principles, practices, and implications around using parental versus child/adolescent consent when participating in social science research and policy development. Experiences from two studies are presented: The Confronting Obesity: Co-creating policy with youth (CO-CREATE) and the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study, a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborative Cross-National study. Although parental consent may be an important gatekeeper for protecting children and adolescents from potentially harmful research participation, it may also be considered an obstacle to the empowerment of children and adolescents in case they want to share their views and experiences directly. This paper argues that evaluation of possible harm should be left to ethics committees and that, if no harm related to the research participation processes is identified and the project has a clear perspective on collaborating with the target group, adolescents from the age of 12 years should be granted the legal capacity to give consent to participate in the research project. Collaboration with adolescents in the development of the research project is encouraged.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The assessment of school climate:review and appraisal of published student-report measures

School climate measurement is a long-standing topic in educational research. This review article provides an overview and appraisal of school climate measures published between 2003 and 2013 in scientific journals. A search for published school climate instruments for secondary school students was made in three databases. Twelve articles meeting the inclusion criteria were identified and included. Each measure is described in terms of contents, and psychometric and formal quality criteria. Most of the reviewed measures showed good or acceptable results in reliability analyses but insufficient validity testing. Theory-grounding for measurement development is often missing. All instruments include items addressing the relationship among students and between students and teachers while the environmental-structural area is considered the least. This review provides a compact overview of recently published studies using school climate instruments that have also been tested psychometrically. This may be useful for schools, practitioners, and researchers