Research and pupil voice

"There are many reasons for involving children and young people in the process of research (Kirby, Lanyon, Kronin, & Sinclairl,2003). We may for example believe that the research will be better or more meaningful,and have greater validity in revealing children’s views and experiences. Additionally we may believe in the importance of democratic participation, and that children should contribute to the decision-making process in the development of aspects of their lives that particularly concern them. We may also as educators recognize that contributing to the research process provides an important vehicle for personal development. There is therefore a growing body of interest in developing research that might be described as participatory,whether this involves ensuring that the voices of all children are included, extends to the active engagement of children in the research process, or (as in emancipatory research traditions) involves children explicitly leading the research process.

Voice processing abilities in children with autism, children with specific language impairments and young typically developing children

It is well established that people with autism have impaired face processing, but much less is known about voice processing in autism. Four experiments were therefore carried out to assess (1) familiar voice-face and sound-object matching; (2) familiar voice recognition; (3) unfamiliar voice discrimination; and (4) vocal affect naming and vocal-facial affect matching. In Experiments 1 and 2 language-matched children with specific language impairment (SLI) were the controls. In Experiments 3 and 4 language-matched children with SLI and young mainstream children were the controls. The results were unexpected: the children with autism were not impaired relative to controls on Experiments 1, 2 and 3, and were superior to the children with SLI on both parts of Experiment 4, although impaired on affect matching relative to the mainstream children. These results are interpreted in terms of an unexpected impairment of voice processing in the children with SLI associated partly, but not wholly, with an impairment of cross-modal processing. Performance on the experimental tasks was not associated with verbal or nonverbal ability in either of the clinical groups. The implications of these findings for understanding autism and SLI are discussed

NASA/USRA advanced design program activity 1990/1991

Four problems were defined which had aspects which would be reasonably assigned to an interdisciplinary design team. The design problems are: (1) design of a thermal shield for a lunar telescope (thermal protection for a lunar telescope); (2) selenotextile shielding structure (a structure to protect a lunar habitat from intense solar radiation of tubes of woven polytetrafluoroethylene coated fiberglass fabric); (3) pneumatically assisted elbow joint design for the NASA Zero-prebreathe suit (will allow astronauts to make the transition from a high pressure internal environment to a lower pressure suit without spending time in an air lock); and (4) electrochemical system to power assist an astronaut's finger joints (assist in the movement of an astronaut's distal and proximal interphalangeal finger joints)

Gatsby careers benchmark north east implementation pilot: interim evaluation (2015-2017)

This report presents interim evaluation findings on the implementation of the Gatsby Benchmarks (herewith referred to as the Benchmarks) for good career guidance with a sample of 16 pilot schools and colleges (herewith referred to as education providers) in the North East of England. These interim findings report progress made against the Benchmarks during the course of the pilot (autumn 2015 to autumn 2017), the enablers and barriers faced, and the impact of the Benchmarks on learners’ career readiness and attainment. The interim findings suggest the following: Timescale - Schools and colleges involved were able to make significant strides towards fully meeting most, if not all, Benchmarks within two years. To date Benchmark 2 (Learning from career and labour market information) and Benchmark 7 (Encounters with FE and HE) have seen the largest increase in the number of pilot education providers fully achieving them. Benchmark 3 (Addressing the needs of every pupil) and Benchmark 4 (Linking curriculum to careers) have the least number of pilot education providers fully achieving them. Positive impact on learners. Learners show an increase in some aspects of career readiness and tentative increases in some aspects of GCSE attainment. Effective implementation of the Benchmarks. This was enabled by the existence of a regional facilitator to support pilot education providers and strong provider leadership and robust organisational infrastructures. Key barriers were a lack of time and space (in the curriculum), a lack of funding and a lack of commitment at senior leadership level, which impacted on achieving a cultural shift in some education providers. Regional impact. The implementation of the Benchmarks is impacting more widely in the region with non-pilot education providers forming links with pilot providers to seek support on developing good career guidance in their settings. Furthermore, wider stakeholders such as local employers and providers of careers education were also using the Benchmarks to review and develop their services to schools/colleges. Emerging challenges: A noticeable challenge was how the term ‘meaningful’, in relation to encounters with employers and employees, was interpreted and how education providers monitor provision of such encounters.Gatsby Charitable Foundatio

Perceptual similarity in autism

People with autism have consistently been found to outperform controls on visuo-spatial tasks such as block design, embedded figures, and visual search tasks. Plaisted, O’Riordan, and others (Bonnel et al., 2003; O’Riordan & Plaisted, 2001; O’Riordan, Plaisted, Driver, & Baron-Cohen, 2001; Plaisted, O’Riordan, & Baron-Cohen, 1998a, 1998b) have suggested that these findings might be explained in terms of reduced perceptual similarity in autism, and that reduced perceptual similarity could also account for the difficulties that people with autism have in making generalizations to novel situations. In this study, high-functioning adults with autism and ability-matched controls performed a low-level categorization task designed to examine perceptual similarity. Results were analysed using standard statistical techniques and modeled using a quantitative model of categorization. This analysis revealed that participants with autism required reliably longer to learn the category structure than did the control group but, contrary to the predictions of the reduced perceptual similarity hypothesis, no evidence was found of more accurate performance by the participants with autism during the generalization stage. Our results suggest that when all participants are attending to the same attributes of an object in the visual domain, people with autism will not display signs of enhanced perceptual similarity.peer-reviewe

Dakotah Poesy (1986)

Dakotah Poesy is a literary magazine, a collection of poems, short stories, and artwork from staff and students of Dakota State University

Indicators of successful transitions

Taking part in the Future Frontiers programme has significant and positive effects on all aspects of student’s career readiness. In particular, pupils showed significant increases in work readiness, career planning and thinking positively about school. These positive changes are equal or better to other career interventions for young people and their shifts in knowledge, skills and attitudes suggest they will be more able to transition into appropriate destinations post-16.Future Frontier