The influence of practicum supervisors’ facilitation styles on student teachers’ reflective thinking during collective reflection

Student teachers’ reflective thinking is closely associated with learning and improving practice. Novice student teachers require adequate support to reflect more deeply. The role of ‘others’ in collective reflection and knowledge generation as an outcome creates a platform for deep reflection, addressing both the processes and premises of reflective thinking. Facilitation styles of practicum supervisors could influence the level of student teachers’ reflective thinking during collective reflection. This is a case study using purposeful sampling involving a Malaysian teacher training institution that conducted an undergraduate early childhood programme in collaboration with a UK university. Sources of evidence were interviews, direct observations and documents. Data collected were analysed using both inductive and deductive methods. It was found that facilitation styles influence the depth of student teachers’ reflective thinking during group dialogic reflection. A continuum of facilitation styles from collaborative to instructive typologies was constructed. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Prospective payment: its impact on psychology's role in health care

This article describes the new Medicare payment system based on diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) and its impact on professional psychology. DRGs represent medically oriented notions about how many inpatient days a prudent physician needs to effectively treat a patient who suffers from a specified disease. However, for the most part, DRGs ignore the behavioral variables that moderate entry into the tertiary care system and the subsequent use of hospital resources. Under DRGs, the development and use of behavioral treatments for somatic disorders could be discouraged. For example, many newer behavioral medicine techniques may be more time-consuming and/or expensive than traditional treatment options (e.g., bed rest vs. biofeedback for low back pain) and thus not fall within the time period or "trim points" alloted for such disorder, regardless of comparative effectiveness. Also, under the new system, psychologists can no longer bill separately for their inpatient services. It is argued that the framers of health care policies should recognize and support health psychologists in light of the fact that many of their techniques can reduce the cost and consumption of health care through programs that: reduce behavioral risk factors, increase compliance with medical regimens, and prepare patients psychologically for stressful medical procedures.     

Conceptual Organization and Memory in Nonretarded,Mildly Retarded,and Moderately Retarded Adults

Moderately retarded, mildly retarded, and nonretarded adults learned a list of 12 items from three categories to a criterion of 75% correct recall in a freerecall learning paradigm. Retention was measured 1 week later. The moderately retarded took more trials and had lower retention and clustering scores than the others. The mildly retarded took more trials and had lower retention than the nonretarded. The results violate Murdock's total time hypothesis (Cooper & Pantle, 1967) but support Mandler's (1967) contention that learning is enhanced by the mental capacity for organization.     

‘The experiencing of experience’: a Pragmatic reassessment of Rogerian Phenomenology

This paper draws on a study that asked twenty family users about their first session of family therapy. Analyses of the interviews indicated that families entered therapy with a pre-existent knowledge about therapy, which did not always chime with those of professionals and which positioned speakers in ways which governed their expectations and perceptions of therapy. This paper, therefore, is concerned with the acquisition and deployment of knowledge: specifically, the knowledge involved in being a user of family therapy. Three key discourses were identified through this analysis: medical, counselling and consumerist. We aim to illustrate how these discourses served as a resource for members of the family in constructing therapists, therapy and themselves in relation to their experience. The examination of the rhetorical, ideological and practical effects of the positions chosen and the objects constructed, in terms of how speakers wanted to present themselves, with what enhanced or diminished status as patients, shows users actively engaging with the power of therapeutic institutions. Users’ accounts suggest that while most speakers felt anxious about the prospect of therapy, there were clear differences in overall satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the experience according to the synchrony between speakers’ construction of the therapist, and themselves as client/patients. Those who seemed to take a traditional view of therapy within a medical discourse valued therapists who offered diagnosis and a cure; those who sought and experienced a counselling relationship with the therapist found their experience to be constructive in terms of enhanced self-knowledge. We believe that the research findings discussed in this paper have implications for family therapists in accommodating to parental and child positions to maximise the effectiveness of therapy and so minimise drop-out.     

Are Pre-Assembly Shared Work Experiences Useful for Temporary-Team Assembly Decisions? A Study of Olympic Ice Hockey Team Composition

The purpose of this study was to investigate if pre-assembly shared work experiences among temporary team members facilitate individual and team performance. Archival data from the 2014 Men’s Olympic Ice Hockey Tournament (12 teams, 25 players each) was used in the study. Measures of social network centrality were computed based on the pre-assembly shared work experiences among national team members derived from professional and amateur affiliations. These measures were used to predict objective individual and team performance criteria. Players’ closeness centrality scores, from pre-assembly shared work experience networks, positively predicted their goals, assists, and being involved in more positive than negative plays. Teams with less centralized pre-assembly shared work experience network structures tended to perform better than teams with more centralized pre-assembly shared work experience network structures. Temporary teams are commonly used by organizations to perform tasks that are specific, important, and of short duration. Because temporary teams have little time to develop the shared properties required for effective team functioning, assembly decisions are of paramount importance. The results from this study suggest that centrality measures derived from pre-assembly shared work experiences are useful to consider when assembling temporary teams. Few studies have investigated the impact of pre-assembly shared work experiences on individual and team performance. Using objective data, this study provides evidence that pre-assembly shared work experiences relate to individual and team performance in temporary teams, supporting the need for expanded research in this area.