An evaluation of a school counselling service with direct links to Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) services

An evaluation of a Scottish secondary school-based counselling service for students aged 11 to 18 is presented. Improvement in student emotional well-being was measured using the Young Persons Clinical Outcomes for Routine Evaluation (YP CORE) questionnaire and participant questionnaires which were developed for the study. Significant improvements were found, following counselling, for functioning, problems and well-being, with all three showing a large effect size. The counselling service was rated as helpful by the majority of the participating students, referrers and guidance staff. These findings are analysed with reference to the unique structure of this school counselling service with its governance framework integrated into the local Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) service

Hannah More and the Evangelical Influence on the English Novel

Hannah More was a significant literary, political, and social figure of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ample evidence exists that More\u27s only novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808), played a significant role in increasing the popularity and acceptability of the genre of the novel. Yet, More\u27s rightful place in the story of the rise of the novel has been largely overlooked in literary criticism today. This dissertation examines the life, work, and influence of Hannah More, an Evangelical Anglican, feminist, and social reformer. Emphasis is placed on those aspects of her life that demonstrate More\u27s unique position as a bridge between the social, religious, economic, and cultural chasms that helped to define eighteenth-century English society. As an Evangelical, More helped to shape this influential movement\u27s attitude toward the novel. Evangelicals tended to view the novel as, at best, a diversion from more pious pursuits and, at worst, a means of corrupting readers (particularly female readers) during an era experiencing an increase in leisure time and a perceived decrease in manners and morality. Because she was an Evangelical and because her work was imbued with the language and guided by the perspective of this increasingly influential movement, More exploited with remarkable success an otherwise objectionable art form for her didactic purposes. The foundation for the success of More\u27s novel can be found, in part, in the didactic tradition in literature. Conduct books, tracts, spiritual biographies and periodical literature all share a tradition whose influence can be seen in More\u27s novel and in its public acclaim. A survey of the periodical reviews finds a wide range of views on the literary and cultural implications of More\u27s novel. Jane Austen\u27s Mansfield Park provides a case study of how More\u27s novel shaped the development of the novel into the nineteenth century. Ultimately, however, understanding the limits of the relationship between art and didacticism help to reveal the flaws in Coelebs in Search of a Wife and to explain its failure, despite tremendous contemporary success, to maintain a place in the canon of English literature

Case study:exploring children’s password knowledge and practices

Children use technology from a very young age, and often have to authenticate themselves. Yet very little attention has been paid to designing authentication specifically for this particular target group. The usual practice is to deploy the ubiquitous password, and this might well be a suboptimal choice. Designing authentication for children requires acknowledgement of child-specific developmental challenges related to literacy, cognitive abilities and differing developmental stages. Understanding the current state of play is essential, to deliver insights that can inform the development of child-centred authentication mechanisms and processes. We carried out a systematic literature review of all research related to children and authentication since 2000. A distinct research gap emerged from the analysis. Thus, we designed and administered a survey to school children in the United States (US), so as to gain insights into their current password usage and behaviors. This paper reports preliminary results from a case study of 189 children (part of a much larger research effort). The findings highlight age-related differences in children’s password understanding and practices. We also discovered that children confuse concepts of safety and security. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research. This paper reports on work in progress.<br/

“Passwords protect my stuff” - a study of children’s password practices

Children use technology from a very young age and often have to authenticate. The goal of this study is to explore children’s practices, perceptions, and knowledge regarding passwords. Given the limited work to date and that the world’s cyber posture and culture will be dependent on today’s youth, it is imperative to conduct cyber-security research with children. We conducted surveys of 189 3rd to 8th graders from two Midwest schools in the USA. We found that children have on average two passwords for school and three to four passwords for home. They kept their passwords private and did not share with others. They created passwords with an average length of 7 (3rd to 5th graders) and 10 (6–8th graders). But, only about 13% of the children created very strong passwords. Generating strong passwords requires mature cognitive and linguistic capabilities which children at this developmental stage have not yet mastered. They believed that passwords provide access control, protect their privacy and keep their “stuff” safe. Overall, children had appropriate mental models of passwords and demonstrated good password practices. Cyber-security education should strive to reinforce these positive practices while continuing to provide and promote age-appropriate developmental security skills. Given the study’s sample size and limited generalizability, we are expanding our research to include children from 3rd to 12th graders across multiple US school districts

Children's password-related books:efficacious, vexatious and incongruous

Software is developed specifically for children and this often requires them to authenticate themselves, usually by entering a password. Password hygiene is important for children, because the principles they learn in early life will often endure across their life span. Children learn from their parents, siblings, teachers, and peers. They also learn from educational resources, such as children’s books. We carried out a content analysis of a range of children’s books that aims to educate children about passwords. We used directional coding, as informed by a systematic literature review of methods, such as those used in other content analysis-based studies of children’s books. We examined the principles the books taught, and whether these were correct. We also analysed how the books portrayed the genders of characters, in various roles. We found that principle coverage was variable, with books sometimes teaching outdated principles. Genders were evenly represented in the books. Finally, our analysis revealed conflation of the terms “safety” and “security” in the cyber domain. We conclude the paper by justifying the adjectives we use in the title.</p

The “three M’s” counter-measures to children’s risky online behaviors:mentor, mitigate and monitor

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to scope the field of child-related online harms and to produce a resource pack to communicate all the different dimensions of this domain to teachers and carers.Design/methodology/approachWith children increasingly operating as independent agents online, their teachers and carers need to understand the risks of their new playground and the range of risk management strategies they can deploy. Carers and teachers play a prominent role in applying the three M’s: mentoring the child, mitigating harms using a variety of technologies (where possible) and monitoring the child’s online activities to ensure their cybersecurity and cybersafety. In this space, the core concepts of “cybersafety” and “cybersecurity” are substantively different and this should be acknowledged for the full range of counter-measures to be appreciated. Evidence of core concept conflation emerged, confirming the need for a resource pack to improve comprehension. A carefully crafted resource pack was developed to convey knowledge of risky behaviors for three age groups and mapped to the appropriate “three M’s” to be used as counter-measures.FindingsThe investigation revealed key concept conflation, and then identified a wide range of harms and countermeasures. The resource pack brings clarity to this domain for all stakeholders.Research limitations/implicationsThe number of people who were involved in the empirical investigation was limited to those living in Scotland and Nigeria, but it is unlikely that the situation is different elsewhere because the internet is global and children’s risky behaviors are likely to be similar across the globe.Originality/valueOthers have investigated this domain, but no one, to the authors’ knowledge, has come up with the “Three M’s” formulation and a visualization-based resource pack that can inform educators and carers in terms of actions they can take to address the harms