Profiles of Three Preservice ESOL Teachers' Development of Instructional Scaffolding

This study explored English as a second language (ESOL) preservice teachers’ conceptions of and abilities to provide scaffolded instruction. In-depth study of three interns indicated that each was unique with respect to their views of scaffolding and in the degree to which their implementation of scaffolded instruction changed over the course of the year. Participants differed in the focus of scaffolding and in their attempts to scaffold within lesson frameworks, across sequential lessons, and through responsive instruction. Though some preservice teachers can develop complex conceptions of the process, scaffolding is closely linked to interns’ understanding of language and literacy development.     

Development of Family Therapy in Hong Kong

This paper provides an insight into the development and growth of family therapy in Hong Kong. Family therapy was introduced in Hong Kong in the early 1980s and is now gaining ground. The authors give a historical account of the development of family therapy in Hong Kong, and report on its progress and achievement for the past three decades there. The field has gone through several stages of development. The 1980s were marked by an importation of Western family therapy models, during which overseas expertise was tapped to promote family therapy. The 1990s were characterized by a blossoming of different schools of family therapy on the local scene. Most schools established their own practice centers, and training packages were tailor-made for local use. The 2000s were an important era of family therapy development in Hong Kong. The field has nurtured a new generation of leaders (both academics and front-line practitioners and trainers) who play an essential role in advancing its development. The paper concludes by identifying problems in clinical practice, professional training, and research and knowledge development, and proposes ways of overcoming these difficulties.     

Commitment of Cultural Minorities in Organizations: Effects of Leadership and Pressure to Conform

Purpose  

In this study, we investigated the commitment of cultural minorities and majorities in organizations. We examined how contextual factors, such as pressure to conform and leadership styles, affect the commitment of minority and majority members.     

Retirement Decisions: Expectation, Intention, and Action

The study examined the expectation-action chain of events in the context of the decision about whether to retire within the subsequent two years. One hundred and twenty-five staff employees at a large university participated. They evaluated their expectations about what would happen if they retired and stated their intention. Two years later they were contacted to see whether they had or had not retired. Expectations were used to predict intentions (78% correct predictions), and intentions were used to predict actions (76% correct predictions). The results were interpreted as evidence supporting the use of the expectation-intention-action chain to characterize retirement decision making. The possible causes of mispredictions were discussed.     

If dancers ate their shoes: Inductive reasoning with factual and counterfactual premises

This experiment addressed the effect of precue information, which may be either familiar or novel, and either relevant or irrelevant, on the solution of inductive reasoning problems. Sixty undergraduate students each completed 216 verbal inductive reasoning problems and five psychometric ability tests. The reasoning problems were equally divided among analogies, classifications, and series completions, with half of each kind of item presented in a standard, uncued format, and half presented with a precue. With respect to internal validation, it was found that for analogies and classifications, subjects take longer to process irrelevant than relevant information if the precue is familiar, but they take longer to process relevant than irrelevant information if the precue is novel. For series completions, this relation does not hold; rather, both novelty and irrelevance add time to the processing of information, with the time for irrelevance greater than that for novelty. The utility of precues for different tasks was explored, and it was found that familiar relevant precues facilitated solution of the more difficult kinds of items (classifications and series completions), but hampered solution of the easier, more automatically solved items (analogies). With respect to external validation, it was found that the nonentrenched induction tasks overlapped with psychometric tests in terms of abilities measured, that the abilities measured were fluid rather than crystallized, and that the precued (more nonentrenched) items were better measures of fluid abilities than were the uncued items.