Acquiring a pet dog significantly reduces stress of primary carers for children with autism spectrum disorder: a prospective case control study

This study describes the impact of pet dogs on stress of primary carers of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Stress levels of 38 primary carers acquiring a dog and 24 controls not acquiring a dog were sampled at: Pre-intervention (17 weeks before acquiring a dog), post-intervention (3–10 weeks after acquisition) and follow-up (25–40 weeks after acquisition), using the Parenting Stress Index. Analysis revealed significant improvements in the intervention compared to the control group for Total Stress, Parental Distress and Difficult Child. A significant number of parents in the intervention group moved from clinically high to normal levels of Parental Distress. The results highlight the potential of pet dogs to reduce stress in primary carers of children with an ASD

Lessons from Peer Support Among Individuals with Mental Health Difficulties: A Review of the Literature

We conducted a comprehensive narrative review and used a systematic search strategy to identify studies related to peer support among adults with mental health difficulties. The purposes of this review were to describe the principles, effects and benefits of peer support documented in the published literature, to discuss challenging aspects of peer support and to investigate lessons from peer support. Fifty-one studies, including 8 review articles and 19 qualitative studies, met the inclusion criteria for this review. Most of the challenges for peer support were related to “role” and “relationship” issues; that is, how peer support providers relate to people who receive peer support and how peer support providers are treated in the system. The knowledge gained from peer support relationships, such as mutual responsibility and interdependence, might be a clue toward redefining the helper-helper relationship as well as the concepts of help and support

Design of an Algebraic Concept Operator for Adaptive Feedback in Physics

International audienceIn an adaptive learning environment, the feedback provided during problem-solving requires a means, target, goal, and strategy. One of the challenges of representing feedback to meet these criteria, is the representation of the effect of multiple concepts on a single concept. Currently, most of the methods (linguistic knowledge base, expert knowledge base, and ontology) used in representing knowledge in an adaptive learning environment only provide relationships between a pair of concept. However, a cognitive knowledge base which represents a concept as an object, attribute, and relations (OAR) model, provides a means to determine the effect of multiple concepts on a single concept. Using the OAR model, the relationships between multiple pedagogical, domain, and student attributes are represented for providing adaptive feedback. Most researchers have proposed adaptive feedback methods that are not fully grounded in pedagogical principles. In addition, the three knowledge components of the learning environment (pedagogical, domain and student models) are mostly treated in isolation. A reason for this could be the complex nature of representing multiple adaptive feedback characteristics across the main components of a learning environment. Thus, there is a need to design a concept operator that can relate the three facets of knowledge in an adaptive learning environment. Using the algebraic concept operator $$R_{i}^{in}$$, the effect of multiple attributes of the three knowledge components on the student’s performance is represented. The algebraic concept operator introduced in this article will allow teachers and pedagogy experts to understand and utilize a variety of effective feedback approaches