‘The trouble with Year 10’. 13 – 16 year old school students’ attitudes to higher education

This study looked at the impact of Widening Participation interventions on the attitudes of young people towards higher education. A total of 2731 adolescents aged 13–16 years completed a self-report measure of their attitudes to higher education, general and academic self concept and identification with school, family and peers. This was matched with data on the students’ academic attainment and social backgrounds. As expected, attainment scores were significantly positively correlated with take up of Widening Participation activities aimed at increasing participation in higher education, attitudes towards going to university and academic motivation. However, attainment was negatively correlated with perceptions of family attending university and identification with family. Regression analyses found that perceptions of family views about attending university were not a predictor of taking part in Widening Participation activities but were a predictor of attitudes towards higher education. Students in Year 10 aged 14–15 were significantly more negative on most factors than either older or younger students.     

ELSI Priorities for Brain Imaging

As one of the most compelling technologies for imaging the brain, functional MRI (fMRI) produces measurements and persuasive pictures of research subjects making cognitive judgments and even reasoning through difficult moral decisions. Even after centuries of studying the link between brain and behavior, this capability presents a number of novel significant questions. For example, what are the implications of biologizing human experience? How might neuroimaging disrupt the mysteries of human nature, spirituality, and personal identity? Rather than waiting for an ethical agenda to emerge from some unpredictable combination of the concerns of ethicists and researchers, the attention of journalists, or after controversy is sparked by research that cannot be retracted, we queried key figures in bioethics and the humanities, neuroscience, media, industry, and patient advocacy in focus groups and interviews. We identified specific ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) that highlight researcher obligations and the nonclinical impact of the technology at this new frontier.     

Book Reviews

Abstract

This article reports on a comparison of the views of teachers in Italy and the United Kingdom on their profession in relation to other professions. Common constructs about their profession are discussed for each national group, followed by a commentary on the similarities and differences between the groups related to their embedding culture. For example, both groups perceive teachers as having much in common with social workers and the clergy in terms of high demand for emotional involvement and creativity, while both express concern over low income for effort conjoined with erosion of professional autonomy. This latter concern is more pronounced in the data from Italy, reflecting the more centralized control of curriculum, a policy only currently being initiated in the United Kingdom

Although we are sympathetic to the reservations of Yorke (1987) about their utility in the study of teachers' thinking (as noted in Pope [1981] and Denicolo [1985]), we found the grid procedure to be a useful vehicle for exploring the issues in this study. Thus we have avoided treating the grid data in an essentially positivistic manner and did use notes made during the conversations that occurred during grid completion to shed light on the personal meaning to the participant of the words used to denote each construct. Within this article the details of personal meanings of each participant are omitted, although the analysis and discussion took account of these, since our particular goal here is to present the group data for the two countries.

The focus had been on the teachers' constructs regarding the teaching profession. The same data could be used to illuminate their views on any of the professions discussed in the study. In addition to developing insights into teachers' thinking about their profession, the study helped to strengthen the developing spirit of international collaboration in research in teacher education from the perspective of personal construct psychology.     

Reducing cognitive complexity in a hypothetico-deductive reasoning task

The confusion/non-consequential thinking explanation proposed by Newstead, Girotto, and Legrenzi (1995) for poor performance on Wason's THOG problem (a hypothetico-deductive reasoning task) was examined in three experiments with 300 participants. In general, as the cognitive complexity of the problem and the possibility of non-consequential thinking were reduced, correct performance increased. Significant but weak facilitation (33-40% correct) was found in Experiment 1 for THOG classification instructions that did not include the indeterminate response option. Substantial facilitation (up to 75% correct) was obtained in Experiment 2 with O'Brien et al.'s (1990) one-other-THOG classification instruction. In Experiment 3, a revised version of O'Brien et al.'s pre-test problem format also led to substantial facilitation, even with the use of the standard three-choice THOG classification instruction. These findings are discussed in terms of Newstead et al.'s theoretical proposal and possible attentional factors.     

Religiosity, Religious Doubt, and the Need for Cognition: Their Interactive Relationship with Life Satisfaction

Previous research has found a consistent, negative relationship between holding religious doubts and mental well-being, and a small positive relationship between religiosity and mental well-being. To assess the interrelationship between religious doubt, religiosity, and need for cognition on life satisfaction, a survey was administered to an almost exclusively Christian sample of 192 Americans drawn from undergraduates and alumni of a small mid-western college, undergraduates from a small south-eastern college, and several churches from the metro-Detroit area. Zero-order correlations revealed relationships between religiosity and life satisfaction, as well as religious doubt and life satisfaction. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that the three-way interaction of religiosity, religious doubt, and the need for cognition was predictive of life satisfaction. Significant two-way interactions also emerged for both gender and religiosity, and gender and religious doubt as predictors of life satisfaction. Based upon these findings, counseling applications are discussed, and the importance of probing for interactions in research on religious influences on well-being is espoused. Portions of this research were presented at the 2004 Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Honolulu, HI.     

Alcohol-Involved Rapes: Are They More Violent?

Alcohol's psychological, cognitive, and motor effects contribute to rape. Based on theory and past research, we hypothesized that there would be a curvilinear relationship between the quantity of alcohol consumed by perpetrators and how aggressively they behaved. Moderate levels of intoxication encourage aggressiveness; however, extreme levels severely inhibit cognitive and motor capacity. We also hypothesized that victims' alcohol consumption would have a curvilinear relationship to their resistance. These hypotheses were examined with data from 132 college women who had been the victims of attempted or completed rape. Although there was a curvilinear result for perpetrators, the slope of the curve suggested that aggressiveness was worst when no alcohol or the highest levels of alcohol were consumed. There was a negative linear relationship between victims' alcohol consumption and resistance. Difficulties associated with accurately assessing degree of intoxication from survey data are discussed and suggestions are made for improving alcohol measurement in rape research.     

Gender, Internet identification, and Internet anxiety: correlates of Internet use.

This paper reports a study that investigated the effects of gender, Internet anxiety, and Internet identification on use of the Internet. The study involved 608 undergraduate students (490 females and 118 males). We surveyed the students' experience with the Internet, as well as their levels of Internet anxiety and Internet identification. We found a number of gender differences in participants' use of the Internet. Males were proportionally more likely to have their own web page than were females. They used the Internet more than females; in particular, they were more likely to use game websites, to use other specialist websites, and to download material from the Internet. However, females did not use the Internet for communication more than males. There was a significant positive relationship between Internet identification and total use of the Internet, and a significant negative relationship between Internet anxiety and total use of the Internet. Controlling for Internet identification and Internet anxiety, we found a significant and negative correlation between gender and use of the Internet. In total, all three of our predictors accounted for 40% of the variance in general Internet use: with Internet identification accounting for 26%, Internet anxiety accounting for 11%, and gender accounting for 3%.     

Reliability and validity of the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale

To investigate the reliability and validity of the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale (YGTSS), 28 youth aged 6 to 17 years with Tourette's syndrome (TS) participated in the study. Data included clinician reports of tics and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) severity, parent reports of tics, internalizing and externalizing problems, and child reports of depression and anxiety. All children participated in a 2nd YGTSS administration by the same rater 48 days later. Good internal consistency and stability were found for the YGTSS scores. YGTSS scores demonstrated strong correlations with parent-rated tic severity (r = .58-.68). YGTSS scores were not significantly related to measures of clinician ratings of OCD severity (r = .01-.15), parent ratings of externalizing and internalizing behavior (r = -.07-.20), and child ratings of depression (r = .02-.26) and anxiety (r = -.06 -.28). Findings suggest that the YGTSS is a reliable and valid instrument for the assessment of pediatric TS.     

Stammering and therapy views of people who stammer

This study used a postal questionnaire to seek the views of adults who stammer concerning the effect of stammering on their lives, the speech and language therapy and other remedies they have tried, and their hopes for speech and language therapy in the future. The 332 returned questionnaires indicated that stammering had the greatest adverse effect on school life and occupation. Speech and language therapy had been helpful to many, but the nature of the benefits and specific therapies used were not cited in many responses. An emergent theme in unhelpful therapy was the dissatisfaction that arises when individual needs are not met. In the future, people want help in controlling stammering and in developing coping strategies. The desire for timely and effective therapy for children, ongoing help and for group or intensive work has implications for service organization and therapist's skills. The survey highlights the need for therapists and clients to negotiate therapy aims and procedures that are clearly defined, appropriate to individual needs, achievable, and, if possible, recorded and measured. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to list (1) the areas most and least affected by stammering, (2) the therapy approaches respondents had found helpful, and (3) other remedies that tried to help stammering.