Identifying Factors that Influence Academic Performance among Adolescents with Conduct Disorder

The academic underachievement of children and adolescents diagnosed with conduct disorder is well established in the literature. However, no study to date has explored the contributions of personal and contextual variables to specific areas of academic functioning in this population. In this study measures of basic reading, reading comprehension, mathematics reasoning, and numerical operations were assessed using the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT) in 63 participants with childhood onset (CO) conduct disorder and 27 participants with adolescent onset (AO) conduct disorder. Participants were enrolled in a residential treatment facility between 1998 and 2002 at the time of evaluation. A series of ANCOVAs were conducted to evaluate how verbal IQ, onset subtype, comorbid ADHD, and residence location (urban versus nonurban) influenced each academic area. Only verbal IQ was significantly related to all academic areas. After adjusting for the variance explained by verbal IQ, comorbid ADHD did not significantly influence academic scores. After controlling for verbal IQ, participants with either CO or an urban residence were found to have significantly weaker scores in basic reading. Urban residents with CO had significantly weaker performance in mathematical reasoning. Numerical operations scores were the weakest among the four academic areas for both onset groups, and verbal IQ explained a relatively small portion of the variance. Overall, a larger portion of the variance in academic scores was explained among the AO group than the CO group, suggesting subtler complexities among the CO population that are yet unknown. This study highlights the heterogeneity among the conduct disorder population and variation in academic risk by demographic markers. If these results replicate across studies, they may represent a more parsimonious organization of patterns of characteristics that will provide treatment utility for clinical work and educational intervention beyond what is currently used

Understandings of participation in behavioural research: a qualitative study of gay and bisexual men in Scotland

An array of empirical research has emerged related to public participation in health research. To date, few studies have explored the particular perspectives of gay and bisexual men taking part in behavioural surveillance research, which includes the donation of saliva swabs to investigate HIV prevalence and rates of undiagnosed HIV. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-nine gay and bisexual men in Scotland who had participated in a bar-based survey. Thematic analysis of men’s accounts of their motives for participation and their perceptions of not receiving individual feedback on HIV status suggested a shared understanding of participation in research as a means of contributing to ‘community’ efforts to prevent the spread of HIV. Most men expressed sophisticated understandings of the purpose of behavioural research and distinguished between this and individual diagnostic testing. Despite calls for feedback on HIV results broadly, for these men feedback on HIV status was not deemed crucial

AN ANALYSIS OF READING MATERIALS IN “BRIGHT AN ENGLISH COURSE FOR JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT” YEAR VIII PUBLISHED BY ERLANGGA BASED ON THE 2013 ENGLISH STANDARD CURRICULUM

ABSTRACT Recently, the 2013 curriculum has been launched by PeraturanPemerintah No.32 Th. 2013 the educational system of Indonesia has launched the 2013 curriculum which the aim to prepare Indonesian people to be religious, productive, creative and innovative.From the new launched curriculum also make the change in learning sources. One of them is textbook that is conducting in 2013 curriculum.  Because it is an important component that should be considered by the teacher in order to teach well. Textbook consist of several material that assist teaching and learning process. Brown (2001:136) says that the textbook is the most common material or teaching and learning. Richard (2001: 251) also says that the key component of language teaching is teaching material.               Selecting the best textbook is considering difficult for some teachers. Although there are many textbooks which are claimed suitable with the 2013 curriculum, there is no guarantee whether the textbook is relevant to the standard competences of the 2013 English curriculum. To solve this problem, the researcher focused this study: 1) to describe the relevance of the reading materials in textbook entitled “BRIGHT” to the 2013 English Standard Competence in term of cognitive aspects, 2) to describe the relevance of the reading materials in textbook entitled “BRIGHT” to the 2013 English Standard Competence in term of psychomotor aspects.               This study was designed in descriptive qualitative research. The instrument used to collect the data is observation in the form of checklists.               After being analyzed, it is found that all chapters in the first semester are not fully covering the indicators of cognitive aspects in the basic competences three. Meanwhile, some of the reading materials are irrelevant in terms of psychomotor aspects. After all, the researcher argues that this textbook is still appropriate to be used, since the materials are mostly relevant with the 2013 curriculum. This textbook is still suitable to be used in order to help teacher and students in the process of teaching and learning, but is not fully for reading.   Key words: analysis, relevance, reading materials, textbook, the 2013 Curriculum ABSTRAK Baru-baru ini, 2013 kurikulum telah diluncurkan oleh PeraturanPemerintah No.32 Th. 2013 sistem pendidikan Indonesia telah meluncurkan 2013 kurikulum yang bertujuan untuk mempersiapkan masyarakat Indonesia untuk menjadi religius, produktif, kreatif dan innovative. Dari kurikulum  diluncurkan baru juga membuat perubahan dalam sumber-sumber belajar. Salah satunya adalah buku yang sedang melakukan pada tahun 2013 kurikulum. Karena merupakan komponen penting yang harus dipertimbangkan oleh guru untuk mengajar dengan baik. Buku terdiri dari beberapa bahan yang membantu proses belajar mengajar. Brown (2001: 136) mengatakan bahwa buku teks adalah bahan yang paling umum atau pengajaran dan pembelajaran. Richard (2001: 251) juga mengatakan bahwa komponen kunci dari pengajaran bahasa adalah mengajar materi. Memilih buku yag terbaik sulit bagi beberapa guru. Meskipun ada banyak buku yang diklaim sesuai dengan kurikulum 2013, tidak ada jaminan apakah buku tersebut relevan dengan kompetensi standar dari 2013 kurikulum bahasa Inggris. Untuk mengatasi masalah ini, peneliti memfokuskan penelitian ini: 1) untuk menggambarkan relevansi bahan bacaan dalam buku berjudul "BRIGHT" ke 2013 English Standard Kompetensi dalam hal aspek kognitif, 2) untuk menggambarkan relevansi bahan bacaan di buku berjudul "BRIGHT" ke 2013 English Standard Kompetensi dalam hal aspek psikomotorik. Penelitian ini dirancang dalam penelitian deskriptif kualitatif. Instrumen yang digunakan untuk mengumpulkan data adalah observasi dalam bentuk checklist. Setelah dianalisis, ditemukan bahwa semua bab pada semester pertama tidak sepenuhnya menutupi indikator aspek kognitif dalam kompetensi dasar tiga. Sementara itu, beberapa bahan bacaan yang relevan dalam hal aspek psikomotorik. Setelah semua, peneliti berpendapat bahwa buku ini masih layak untuk digunakan, karena sebagian besar bahan yang relevan dengan kurikulum 2013. Buku ini masih cocok digunakan untuk membantu guru dan siswa dalam proses belajar mengajar, tetapi tidak sepenuhnya untuk membaca

A New Perspective on Aggression in the Schools: Exploring Parental Aggression Towards Teachers

While a substantial amount of research has been devoted to identifying the causal influences and perpetrators of delinquency and victimization among students in the public school setting, similar literature focusing on aggression against teachers is typically concerned only with those instances where the students are the perpetrators. In an exploratory effort to add to that literature, we use data collected from a sample of 544 public school teachers in Kentucky to examine teacher perceptions of the prevalence, predictors, and consequences of problematic parental behavior in schools. Our results suggest, within the limitations of the sample under study, a substantial minority of teachers had been victims of verbal abuse and threats from parents, but only a small percentage of teachers had experienced any physical aggression from parents. In other words, while the problem of parental aggression was present for many of the teachers under study here, it was a problem of verbal aggression, not physical aggression, and resulted primarily from issues surrounding disciplinary actions. Additionally, many of the respondents agreed that both the school board and the criminal justice system were reluctant to prosecute parents who violate the law on school grounds and disagreed that policies at their school adequately punished parents who create conflict

Do Accountability Policies Push Teachers Out?

The impact of accountability on U.S. schools, for good or ill, is a subject of debate and research. The authors recently studied an aspect of accountability that had previously received little attention. They asked, do accountability reforms affect public schools\u27 ability to retain their teachers? By analyzing data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and the Teacher Followup Survey, they found strong (but unsurprising) evidence that accountability made teacher retention more difficult in low-performing schools; schools whose students scored low on high-stakes assessments had higher teacher turnover than those that scored higher; and schools that received sanctions because of their low performance had even higher turnover. The most helpful finding of the analysis was that even in schools subject to sanctions, higher teacher turnover was not inevitable. Schools that had better working conditions—and especially those that gave teachers greater classroom autonomy–were able to mitigate the negative effects of accountability sanctions. The authors conclude that holding teachers accountable for results must be paired with giving them control over the instruction that produces these results