Social Psychology Meets School Mathematics in PISA 2012: An Application of the Theory of Planned Behaviour in Australia

Educators and government administrators are keen to find interventions to change the rapidly declining enrollments in senior high school mathematics. In 2012, PISA introduced measures to examine the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), a prominent theory from social psychology for encouraging changes in behavior (and perhaps mathematics enrollments). This paper sought to examine the applicability of the TPB for predicting the relationship between students’ intentions, their mathematics attitudes, subject norms, perceived controllability and self-efficacy as well as their mathematics behaviour, using items created by PISA 2012 question designers to assess these TPB constructs. Australian PISA 2012 data from 14,481 students found that the hypothesized TPB antecedents for studying mathematics were very poor predictors of mathematical intentions and indirectly, weak predictors of mathematical behaviour. The Attitudes factor i.e. an interest in mathematics, was found to be the strongest predictor of mathematical intentions. The poor predictive capacity of the TPB was proposed to have been due to ill-defined indicator items in the PISA 2012 measuring instruments, which did not comply with the TPB’s principles of compatibility and aggregation. Future studies testing the TPB in the context of studying mathematics would benefit from undertaking Elicitation studies to identify appropriate TPB antecedents and indicators of the mathematics behaviour being targeted

Photography, Politics and Childhood: Exploring children’s multimodal relations with the public sphere

In qualitative research with children visually oriented and multimodal approaches are identified in the literature as more appropriate for approaching children’s meanings and feelings often deemed to lie beyond the realm of language. In our own research, a comparative ethnography which enquired into the relationships between childhood and public life, with six-to-eight year olds in three cities (Athens, Hyderabad and London), we have reflexively experimented with the employment and remixing of methodologies which would allow us to explore such relationships. In the process of our research, incorporating different visual and ethnographic methods, we have developed a data collection and production process, an adaptation of the photo-story, which allows for a multimodal, processual and reflective enquiry into children’s relationships of concern and politics of care. We review the central visual methods in research with children, we then proceed to provide a documentation of the method, its development and its rationale. Consequently, we provide some examples of the photostory method’s implementation in the Connectors Study together with a discussion of the production processes of the photo-stories themselves and our readings of them. We conclude with a section with reflections on the method, which, we argue provides a departure point from which we may rethink the political in childhood, as well as the ways in which photography is employed as a research method in the social sciences

Mental health diversion courts : some directions for further development

Recent years have seen a growth in the number of specialist courts operating in Australia, including those which aim to address the needs of mentally disordered offenders. This article describes some of the key characteristics of mental health courts, using case studies from the most established court in Australia, the South Australian Magistrates Court Diversion Program (MCDP). This is followed by a consideration of some factors that may affect the future development of this type of program. It is concluded that there is a need to pay careful attention to issues of risk assessment and risk management if the dual goals of improving both the health of individual and the safety of the community are to be realised.<br /

University lecturers' perspectives on initial teacher education for mental health promotion in schools

Copyright ©2017 Sense Publishers Reproduced with permission of the publisher

Possible involvement of caveolin in attenuation of cardioprotective effect of ischemic preconditioning in diabetic rat heart

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Nitric oxide (NO) has been noted to produce ischemic preconditioning (IPC)-mediated cardioprotection. Caveolin is a negative regulator of NO, which inhibits endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) by making caveolin-eNOS complex. The expression of caveolin is increased during diabetes mellitus (DM). The present study was designed to investigate the involvement of caveolin in attenuation of the cardioprotective effect of IPC during DM in rat.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Experimental DM was induced by single dose of streptozotocin (50 mg/Kg, <it>i.p</it>,) and animals were used for experiments four weeks later. Isolated heart was mounted on Langendorff's apparatus, and was subjected to 30 min of global ischemia and 120 min of reperfusion. IPC was given by four cycles of 5 min of ischemia and 5 min of reperfusion with Kreb's-Henseleit solution (K-H). Extent of injury was measured in terms of infarct size by triphenyltetrazolium chloride (TTC) staining, and release of lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and creatin kinase-MB (CK-MB) in coronary effluent. The cardiac release of NO was noted by measuring the level of nitrite in coronary effluent.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>IPC- induced cardioprotection and release of NO was significantly decreased in diabetic rat heart. Pre-treatment of diabetic rat with daidzein (DDZ) a caveolin inhibitor (0.2 mg/Kg/s.c), for one week, significantly increased the release of NO and restored the attenuated cardioprotective effect of IPC. Also perfusion of sodium nitrite (10 μM/L), a precursor of NO, significantly restored the lost effect of IPC, similar to daidzein in diabetic rat. Administration of 5-hydroxy deaconate (5-HD), a mito K_ATPchannel blocker, significantly abolished the observed IPC-induced cardioprotection in normal rat or daidzein and sodium nitrite perfused diabetic rat heart alone or in combination.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Thus, it is suggested that attenuation of the cardioprotection in diabetic heart may be due to decrease the IPC mediated release of NO in the diabetic myocardium, which may be due to up -regulation of caveolin and subsequently decreased activity of eNOS.</p

Present state and future perspectives of using pluripotent stem cells in toxicology research

The use of novel drugs and chemicals requires reliable data on their potential toxic effects on humans. Current test systems are mainly based on animals or in vitro–cultured animal-derived cells and do not or not sufficiently mirror the situation in humans. Therefore, in vitro models based on human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) have become an attractive alternative. The article summarizes the characteristics of pluripotent stem cells, including embryonic carcinoma and embryonic germ cells, and discusses the potential of pluripotent stem cells for safety pharmacology and toxicology. Special attention is directed to the potential application of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) for the assessment of developmental toxicology as well as cardio- and hepatotoxicology. With respect to embryotoxicology, recent achievements of the embryonic stem cell test (EST) are described and current limitations as well as prospects of embryotoxicity studies using pluripotent stem cells are discussed. Furthermore, recent efforts to establish hPSC-based cell models for testing cardio- and hepatotoxicity are presented. In this context, methods for differentiation and selection of cardiac and hepatic cells from hPSCs are summarized, requirements and implications with respect to the use of these cells in safety pharmacology and toxicology are presented, and future challenges and perspectives of using hPSCs are discussed

Peer aggression and well-being study method and participants

The Peer Aggression and Well-being study used a mixed method research design. The Student Aggression and Victimisation Questionnaire include items that enable an assessment of both victimisation and perpetration of peer aggression and bullying. Statistical Package for Social Sciences was used to examine the peer aggression data. Respondents were considered to have experienced repetition of peer aggression if they reported an act against them that was repeated or if they experienced more than one type of peer aggression event at least once or twice. Power imbalance was determined according to the self-reported power imbalance for each peer aggression type experienced. A classification into a category that involved all criteria, such as intentional harm, power imbalance and repetition, over-rode any other classification. Student self-reports of their involvement in peer aggression were examined and students who had perpetrated aggressive acts were categorised according to their intent and perception of harm, power imbalance and repetition, into “perpetrator of aggression” groups. © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Grace Skrzypiec, Mirella Wyra, and Eleni Didaskalou; individual chapters, the contributors