The educational psychologist as a pedagogue for pupils with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties

This thesis reflects my personal and professional journey from teacher to educational psychologist through significant periods in the education of children with Social Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (SEBDs) in the UK. It also draws of on lessons learnt from my experience working in North America in the early years of my career. The main aims of my research were to: (1) Appraise the contribution an educational psychologist could make in assessing the learning potential of children and young people with SEBDs, and (2) Consider the „added value‟ that an educational psychologist might bring to enable these children as better learners and teachers as better teachers of children with SEBDs. 45 Children and young people with Social Emotional Behavioural Difficulties and their parents and teachers participated in the research. A mixed methods approach was employed to undertake three related case studies and a reflexive and narrative analysis was employed. Main outcomes of the research were (i) SEBDs were almost always accompanied by often unrecognised learning difficulties; (ii) A cognitive assessment by an educational psychologist had an added value in understanding the needs of the child; (iii) When parents and teachers of children who participated in an especially designed intervention, it changed their views of their children‟s behaviours. They reported significant improvement in their children‟s social skills and behaviour. I conclude the thesis by considering the implications of findings for the benefit of children with SEBDs. It is crucial that teachers identify and assess learning difficulties in all children and young people and clearly differentiate these from matters of and interventions for behaviour difficulties. Teachers and parents can be empowered to deal with their children‟s behavioural difficulties by involving the Educational Psychologist as a pedagogue, sitting as he or she does at the crossroads of education and psychology

Investigating Unipolar Switching in Niobium Oxide Resistive Switches: Correlating Quantized Conductance and Mechanism

Memory devices based on resistive switching (RS) have not been fully realised due to lack of understanding of the underlying switching mechanisms. Nature of ion transport responsible for switching and growth of conducting filament in transition metal oxide based RS devices is still in debate. Here, we investigated the mechanism in Niobium oxide based RS devices, which shows unipolar switching with high ON/OFF ratio, good endurance cycles and high retention times. We controlled the boundary conditions between low-conductance insulating and a high-conductance metallic state where conducting filament (CF) can form atomic point contact and exhibit quantized conductance behaviour. Based on the statistics generated from quantized steps data, we demonstrated that the CF is growing atom by atom with the applied voltage sweeps. We also observed stable quantized states, which can be utilized in multistate switching

An Identity Based Key Management Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Pairwise key establishment is one of the fundamental security services in sensor networks which enables sensor nodes in a sensor network to communicate securely with each other using cryptographic techniques. It is not feasible to apply traditional public key management techniques in resource-constrained sensor nodes, and also because the sensor nodes are vulnerable to physical capture. In this paper, we introduce a new scheme called the identity based key pre-distribution using a pseudo random function (IBPRF), which has better trade-off between communication overhead, network connectivity and resilience against node capture compared to the other key pre-distribution schemes. Our scheme can be easily adapted in mobile sensor networks. This scheme supports the addition of new sensor nodes after the initial deployment and also works for any deployment topology. In addition, we propose an improved version of our scheme to support large sensor networks.Comment: 7 pages, Published in Proceedings of 4th Asian International Mobile Computing Conference (AMOC 2006), Kolkata, India, pp. 70-76, January 4-7, 200

Further Results on Geometric Properties of a Family of Relative Entropies

This paper extends some geometric properties of a one-parameter family of relative entropies. These arise as redundancies when cumulants of compressed lengths are considered instead of expected compressed lengths. These parametric relative entropies are a generalization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence. They satisfy the Pythagorean property and behave like squared distances. This property, which was known for finite alphabet spaces, is now extended for general measure spaces. Existence of projections onto convex and certain closed sets is also established. Our results may have applications in the R\'enyi entropy maximization rule of statistical physics.Comment: 7 pages, Prop. 5 modified, in Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theor