Engagement mentoring for socially excluded youth: problematising an 'holistic' approach to creating employability through the transformation of habitus

This paper traces the emergence of engagement mentoring, which seeks to re-engage socially excluded youth with the formal labour market by altering their attitudes, values, and beliefs. Engagement mentoring has been promoted in European and British policy as an holistic response to social exclusion, for example, in the new Connexions service. However, the original meaning of 'holism' has become contested, and policies and practices which claim to be holistic require clearer analysis. Drawing on Bourdieuian theory, and evidence from recent research, this paper interrogates the holistic claims of engagement mentoring from the perspective of its intended effects on mentees. It argues that the model treats personal disposition--habitus--as a raw material to be wrought into 'employable' dispositions, with little or no acknowledgement of institutional or structural fields of power. However, habitus is highly complex, with deep-rooted and collective aspects not easily transformed. A greater understanding of habitus might result in more genuinely holistic approaches to mentoring, and counter a perceptible policy drift towards totalitarian rather than holistic practice.     

A comparison of the effects of partial reinforcement schedules using a within-subject serial autoshaping procedure

Three experiments, each using a single group of pigeons, are reported. In Experiment 1 subjects were initially trained with two stimuli, one of which was always followed by food, the other being reinforced according to a 50% partial reinforcement schedule. Subsequently a serial procedure was adopted in which an additional stimulus, C, was consistently followed by the partially reinforced CS. A second additional stimulus, A, was followed on half of its occurrences by the continuously reinforced CS, its remaining presentations being followed by nothing. The rate of autoshaped keypecking was substantially greater during A than during C. In the remaining experiments subjects received first-order conditioning with a single stimulus that was either partially (Experiment 2) or continuously (Experiment 3) reinforced. The stimuli A and C were then again introduced for serial autoshaping. Stimulus A was occasionally paired with the CS and occasionally followed by nothing, whereas stimulus C was always followed by the CS. As in Experiment 1, the rate of responding during A was greater than during C. It is proposed that one influence on the rate of autoshaped keypecking during a CS is the accuracy with which the immediate consequences of that CS are predicted.     

What does it mean to ‘live’ and ‘die’? A cross‐linguistic analysis of parent–child conversations in English and Indonesian

Previous work on children's intuitive knowledge about the natural world has documented their difficulty in acquiring an overarching concept of biological life that includes plants as well as humans and non‐human animals. It has also suggested that the acquisition of fundamental biological concepts like alive and die may be influenced by the language used to describe them, as evidenced by differences between English‐ and Indonesian‐speaking children's performance in tasks involving these concepts. Here, we examine one particularly important source of linguistic information available to children during this acquisition process: everyday conversations with their parents. We take a cross‐linguistic approach in analysing the evidence available to English‐ and Indonesian‐speaking children as they acquire meanings for words corresponding to the concepts alive and die . Our analysis illustrates that young children acquiring English and Indonesian are faced with distinct problems, but that parental input in both languages does little to support the acquisition of broad, inclusive biological concepts.     

Socializing Attribution: Generalization to “Real” Social Environments1

Social status variables have been shown to influence attributional judgments, but their effects have been demonstrated almost entirely in experimental settings. The influence of such statuses in experimental settings may differ from their influence in natural settings. We examined the influence on attributional judgments of the status characteristics of both subjects and actors in conjunction with variations in the degree of “real world” characteristics of both subjects and social context. These comparisons were drawn through a partial replication of earlier research investigating the effects of a social status variable, victim sex, and a situational variable—type of assault—on attributions about an assault victim. The social status characteristic, victim sex, had less influence on attributions in an adult juror sample than in a student sample and testimony-related characteristics were more influential in the adult juror sample than in the student sample. Thus, the categories of variables that influence attributions appear to depend on the context of judgment and on the breadth of subjects' life experience. These findings are discussed and we conclude with the caution that careful identification of the differences produced by context and subject characteristics is necessary to support generalization of laboratory-based research.     

Burden of proof

This paper presents an analysis of the concept of burden of proof in argument. Relationship of burden of proof to three traditional informal fallacies is considered: (i) argumentum ad hominem, (ii) petitio principii, and (iii) argumentum ad ignorantiam. Other topics discussed include persuasive dialoque, pragmatic reasoning, legal burden of proof, plausible reasoning in regulated disputes, rules of dialogue, and the value of reasoned dialogue.     

Verbal conditioning of stimulus significance in the orienting response context

The manipulation of stimulus significance, by instructions from the experimenter, may be taken as an example of verbal conditioning. Consideration of such a mechanism suggested that personality effects previously found in conditioning studies should be apparent in instructional manipulations of significance in a study of the orienting response (OR) to words. Because of recent changes in dimensioning of the personality structure, some of the items originally used to define Eysenck’s extraversion (E) dimension are now used to assess the new dimension of psychoticism (P), suggesting that at least some of the established effects of E upon conditioning may be associated now with P. Hence the P scale was focused on in this study. Words differing on the evaluative dimension of the semantic differential were presented in three blocks, the first under indifferent instructions, the second under instructions to rate the words for their affective impact, and the third under indifferent instructions again. These blocks correspond to baseline, conditioning, and extinction conditions respectively. Electrodermal activity indicated enhanced conditioning, together with greater carry-over effects in the extinction phase, for low-P compared with high-P subjects. The results indicate the importance of personality effects in studies of stimulus significance and illustrate the value of the verbal conditioning mechanism in this area of the OR field. They also suggest the need to re-examine previously obtained E-effects in conditioning studies in light of changing personality tests.     

TEACHING IDIOM COMPREHENSION TO CHILDREN WITH MENTAL RETARDATION

This study examined the effectiveness of a training program designed to teach children with mild mental retardation the meaning of 12 idiomatic phrases, such as “to hit the sack.” Four 9-year-old children participated in the training. A multiple baseline design across subjects and across three sets of idioms was implemented. Training consisted of presenting both literal and idiomatic contexts in the form of story narratives, and asking the children to explain the outcome of the story and to select one picture from an array of four that represented the outcome. All children demonstrated learning, although 1 child required review procedures to facilitate maintenance. Children were able to generalize their receptive learning to an expressive task with varying levels of success. All children demonstrated an ability to understand the learned idioms when presented in unfamiliar contexts.