Evaluation of outcome in school consultation

To further understanding regarding how content of change, degree of change, and initial level of functioning influence consultants' evaluation of consulation outcome, 14 mental health consultants completed a questionnaire. For each of the 18 prepost consultation ratings on the questionnaire (2 context × 3 degrees of change × 3 initial levels = 18), consultants rated the success of consultation and the degree to which they would like to have been the consultant. Analysis of variance results for both dependent measures indicate main effects for degree of change and initial level. Neither main effects for content nor interaction effects are indicated. It appears that consultants perceive consultation as more successful with and prefer working with consultees who improve the most and who function at a higher initial level.     

Evaluation of violent behaviors in secondary school

School harassment, or bullying, is a term that for being so frequent already forms a part of our vocabulary. In the present work one presents a new instrument of evaluation of the violence that happens in the school centers. The Questionnaire of School Violence (CUVE) has been elaborated and, later, applied to a sample of 1637 teenagers of seven centers of Secondary Obligatory Education (public and compound). The CUVE evaluates in a trustworthy way five dimensions of the school violence: a) physical indirect violence on the part of the student body; b) verbal violence of the student body towards companions; c) physical direct violence between (among) pupils; d) verbal violence of the student body towards the professorship; and e) violence of the professorship towards the student body.     

Evaluation of a youth suicide prevention school program

Adolescent suicide is a subject of increasing national concern. In California, this problem was addressed through the implementation of a three-year youth suicide prevention school program established by legislative mandate in 1983. Findings for the first two years of the program indicate significant gains in understanding of youth suicide prevention techniques for those high school students who completed a four-hour training course. School staff and parents completing 90-minute youth suicide awareness seminars indicated that they most appreciated receiving practical advice and resources they could use in responding to a potentially suicidal young person.     

Stress-management training: Evaluation of effects on school psychological services

School psychologists participated in a cognitive-behavioral stress-management training program. The data showed decreases in self-reported anxiety and increases in job satisfaction of school psychologists as a result of the training. In addition, teacher satisfaction with school psychological services increased after participation in teacher inservice workshops generated as a result of training the school psychologists.     

Neurobehavioral Evaluation System (NES) and school performance

The aims of this study were to explore the validity of a set of computerized tests, and to explore the validity of reaction time variability as an index of sustained attention. In Phase 1, 105 children 7–10 years old were presented with five tests from the Neurobehavioral Evaluation System (NES). The children were able to complete four of the tests: the Continuous Performance, Simple Reaction Time, Symbol-Digit Substitution, and Digit Span tests. In Phase 2, a follow-up of 88 children, performance on these tests was significantly associated with teachers' ratings of attention and with standardized academic achievement measures. Moreover, variability on the Simple Reaction Time and performance on the Digit Span and Symbol-Digit tests significantly predicted reading achievement. Similarly, performance on the Digit Span and Symbol-Digit tests significantly predicted mathematics achievement. In addition, variability on the Simple Reaction Time and Digit Span test performance were significant predictors of reading achievement above and beyond the prediction provided by teachers' ratings.     

Evaluation of a course in sex roles for secondary school students

As powerful socializing agents, schools can be important facilitators in changing social norms of gender-role expectations. This research study was designed to determine the impact of an interdisciplinary course in the effects of sex-role stereotyping on awareness and attitudes of the participants. The high school students in the experimental program increased their awareness of the stereotyping process and the effects of narrowly defined sex roles. These students perceived the roles of males and females in a more socially androgynous context than did students who did not take the course.     

Free writing: Evaluation of a preventive program with elementary school children

Eight-session free-writing workshops focusing on developing elementary schoolchildren's use of different describing words, reference to self, expression and clarification of feelings, and expression of stress responses were introduced to 324 fifth-grade children living on the northern border of Israel where the probability of war-related crisis is particularly high. The purpose of the study was to evaluate (a) the effectiveness of the workshop and (b) the applicability of free writing in an actual stressful event. Results indicated that the workshop group exhibited higher mean scores than the nonintervention control group on all behavior measures, both after the workshop and following a stressful event (shelling of the town). The theoretical background for free-writing conceptualization is given and the implications of the results are discussed in light of large-scale preventive intervention.     

Evaluation of a preventive intervention for child anxiety in two randomized attention-control school trials

The present research examined the effectiveness of a cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) based intervention program, FRIENDS, for children from grades 4 to 6, using random assignment at the school-level and an attention-control design in two longitudinal studies. The first study targeted children with anxiety symptoms (N = 191, mean age = 10.1) as screened with self, parent, and teacher-reports; the second study took a universal approach with full classrooms of children participating (N = 253, mean age = 9.8). The results showed no intervention effect in both studies, with children’s anxiety symptoms decreasing over time regardless of whether they were in the story-reading (attention control) or FRIENDS condition. The findings also indicated that girls reported a higher level of anxiety than boys and children in higher grades reported lower anxiety relative to younger children in both studies. In addition, similar patterns were found using a subgroup of children with high-anxiety symptoms from both studies.     

The architecture of personality

This article presents a theoretical framework for analyzing psychological systems that contribute to the variability, consistency, and cross-situational coherence of personality functioning. In the proposed knowledge-and-appraisal personality architecture (KAPA), personality structures and processes are delineated by combining 2 principles: distinctions (a) between knowledge structures and appraisal processes and (b) among intentional cognitions with varying directions of fit, with the latter distinction differentiating among beliefs, evaluative standards, and aims. Basic principles of knowledge activation and use illuminate relations between knowledge and appraisal, yielding a synthetic account of personality structures and processes. Novel empirical data illustrate the heuristic value of the knowledge/appraisal distinction by showing how self-referent and situational knowledge combine to foster cross-situational coherence in appraisals of self-efficacy.     

Attitudes of secondary school teachers towards prospective school counsellors

A test of attitudes to the place of counsellors in schools was administered to 100 teachers at secondary schools in Manchester. The attitudes were generally favourable, though there was evidence of considerable ignorance about the counsellor's role and also of doubts about confidentiality. More favourable attitudes tended to be held by arts teachers, teachers without children of their own, and teachers who had a degree but no further qualifications.     

Elementary school principals assess services of school psychologists nationwide

A one-page questionnaire was sent to 400 elementary school principals nationwide to assess their opinions regarding services of the school psychologist. These elementary school principals indicated that the school psychologist was found to be most helpful when providing the traditional services of psychological testing, personality and emotional assessment, consultation, and screening. Changes in school psychological services desired by the elementary school principals were more time from the school psychologist and an increase in individual and group counseling, preventive mental health, and inservice training. If elementary principal opinion is to be regarded, gross alterations to existing services of the school psychologist are not indicated by the results of this study.     

Changes in predictors of school performance in secondary school

The aim of this paper is to identify the functions that best predict school achievement among adolescents and whether they change or remain stable as pupils grow older. For this purpose, we used a sample of 1392 pupils of both sexes, belonging to second and fourth grades of Secondary School of Galicia (Spain). The students were assessed with a battery of instruments that provided data about a range of variables such as family system, personal characteristics, social relationships, goal orientation, attributional variables, attitudes towards evaluation and studies, as well as learning processes and strategies. Sixty-eight potentially predictive variables were obtained and they were subsequently related to "high", "intermediate" and "low" levels of school achievement by means of discriminant analysis. Results showed that school achievement can be discriminated by two functions, which include 12 variables in second grade, dropping to 8 in fourth grade. Of these, only five are common to both years. The results of this research project support the idea that the functions that best predict school achievement vary throughout Secondary Education.     

Evaluation of a social skills program based on social learning theory, implemented in a school setting

Using a sample of 647 Canadian children in kindergarten to Grade 3 (325 boys, 322 girls), the present study evaluated the perceived effectiveness of Skillstreaming (McGinnis & Goldstein, 2003), a widely known social skills program implemented to target the development of four skill sets, i.e., listening, following directions, problem-solving, and knowing when to tell. Results indicated significant postprogram improvements in all skills as well as in ratings of overall prosociality obtained from both classroom teachers and mental health staff, with medium to large effect sizes obtained from teachers' and mental health professionals' ratings, respectively. Additional analyses yielded significant but weak moderator effects of grade and preprogram prosocial functioning for teacher ratings but no consistent moderator effects for children's sex or school location (i.e., urban versus rural) regardless of rater.     

Cognition without classical architecture

Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988) argue that any successful model of cognition must use classical architecture; it must depend upon rule-based processing sensitive to constituent structure. This claim is central to their defense of classical AI against the recent enthusiasm for connectionism. Connectionist nets, they contend, may serve as theories of the implementation of cognition, but never as proper theories of psychology. Connectionist models are doomed to describing the brain at the wrong level, leaving the classical view to account for the mind.This paper considers whether recent results in connectionist research weigh against Fodor and Pylyshyn's thesis. The investigation will force us to develop criteria for determining exactly when a net is capable of systematic processing. Fodor and Pylyshyn clearly intend their thesis to affect the course of research in psychology. I will argue that when systematicity is defined in a way that makes the thesis relevant in this way, the thesis is challenged by recent progress in connectionism.     

Brain-inspired distributed cognitive architecture

In this paper we present a brain-inspired cognitive architecture that incorporates sensory processing, classification, contextual prediction, and emotional tagging. The cognitive architecture is implemented as three modular web-servers, meaning that it can be deployed centrally or across a network for servers. The experiments reveal two distinct operations of behaviour, namely high- and low-salience modes of operations, which closely model attention in the brain. In addition to modelling the cortex, we have demonstrated that a bio-inspired architecture introduced processing efficiencies. The software has been published as an open source platform, and can be easily extended by future research teams. This research lays the foundations for bio-realistic attention direction and sensory selection, and we believe that it is a key step towards achieving a bio-realistic artificial intelligent system.     

A neural cognitive architecture

It is difficult to study the mind, but cognitive architectures are one tool. As the mind emerges from the behaviour of the brain, neuropsychological methods are another method to study the mind, though a rather indirect method. A cognitive architecture that is implemented in spiking neurons is a method of studying the mind that can use neuropsychological evidence directly. A neural cognitive architecture, based on rule based systems and associative memory, can be readily implemented, and would provide a good bridge between standard cognitive architectures, such as Soar, and neuropsychology. This architecture could be implemented in spiking neurons, and made available via the Human Brain Project, which provides a good collaborative environment. The architecture could be readily extended to use spiking neurons for subsystems, such as spatial reasoning, and could evolve over time toward a complete architecture. The theory behind this architecture could evolve over time. Simplifying assumptions, made explicit, such as those behind the rule based system, could gradually be replaced by more neuropsychologically accurate behaviour. The overall task of collaborative architecture development would be eased by direct evidence of the actual neural cognitive architectures in human brains. While the initial architecture is biologically inspired, the ultimate goal is a biological cognitive architecture.     

Practicing school psychologists' perceived role in prevention of school violence

School psychologists have been called upon to take a leadership role in school-violence prevention, but little is known about their involvement in this issue, especially in states where school shootings have occurred. The current study surveyed 258 Michigan school psychologists about their role in prevention of school violence. Analysis suggested respondents felt prepared to address violence prevention but do not have a leadership role and are not sought for advice about prevention. The number of annual special education evaluations was significantly associated with frequency of being sought for advice on violence prevention but was not related to perceptions of leadership or preparedness. Modest relationships were noted between feeling prepared, knowledge of risk factors, and self-perceptions of a leadership role. Suggestions for research are included.