When educational supervision meets clinical supervision: what can we learn from the discrepancies?

The authors question the taken-for-granted notion of supervision. Their concerns arose out of an attempt to introduce 'clinical' supervision into academia as a way of addressing an increasing number of the ethical issues which confront lecturers. They recognise that knowledge can impact adversely on students and that lecturers at times find themselves compromised. They settled on supervision as an organisational space in the domain of power in which to address the distress they observed. However, through their different experiences of supervision, they soon found themselves talking past each other. When clinical supervision meets educational supervision, several anomalies are brought to the fore. The authors draw on Foucault's notion of discourse, and of knowledge as power, in order to foreground these and conclude by cautioning against an uncritical acceptance of supervision as an ethical practice. They believe there is a benefit in bringing together the two discourses of clinical and educational supervision for further discussion.     

Adolescent development of motor imagery in a visually guided pointing task

The development of action representation during adolescence was investigated using a visually guided pointing motor task (VGPT) to test motor imagery. Forty adolescents (24 males; mean age 13.1 years) and 33 adults (15 males; mean age 27.5 years) were instructed to both execute and imagine hand movements from a starting point to a target of varying size. Reaction time (RT) was measured for both Execution (E) and Imagery (I) conditions. There is typically a close association between time taken to execute and image actions in adults because action execution and action simulation rely on overlapping neural circuitry. Further, representations of actions are governed by the same speed-accuracy trade-off as real actions, as expressed by Fitts’ Law. In the current study, performance on the VGPT in both adolescents and adults conformed to Fitts’ Law in E and I conditions. However, the strength of association between E and I significantly increased with age, reflecting a refinement in action representation between adolescence and adulthood.     

Perceptions of unconditional and conditional worth among college students

Self-esteem scales tend to represent conditional perceptions of self-esteem. The Worth Index has been previously validated as an effective measure for identifying both conditional and unconditional perceptions of worth. We administered the Worth Index to 1,161 college-aged students at Brigham Young University to assess their current perceptions of unconditional and conditional worth. Both men and women agreed more strongly with items involving unconditional worth than conditional worth. A negative correlation was found between ratings of unconditional and conditional worth. Women had lower unconditional worth scores than men, which was related to being more likely to wish they were someone else, desire to have a better body, and to being concerned about weight. Agreement with two overview measures of self-esteem involving a "good" sense of self and stability of self-esteem was positively associated with agreement on statements about unconditional worth. This research shows the importance of incorporating unconditional worth into self-esteem measures.     

Differing Perceptions of Mothers,Fathers, and children Concerning Children's Academic Performance

This study examined the hypothesis that mothers' views of their child's performance on an academic task are more synchronous with those of their child than are fathers' views. Parents of 30 sixth-grade children were asked to predict their child's memory spans on a recall and a recognition task given to each child. Parents and children were also asked to judge the importance for the child's performance on 10 attribution factors created for use with memory tests. In line with the hypothesis, mothers predicted the child's memory span more accurately than fathers, and the mothers' attributions were more congruent with those of their children. Mothers were also more aware than fathers of the different demands of the two memory tasks. These findings suggest that mothers may be more aware than fathers of their child's academic progress and that mothers' attitudes and expectations may be more influential in determining the child's path of development.