Equal opportunity versus employment equity

This paper calls for the abolition of employment equity, which is Canada’s equivalent of affirmative action for females. It argues that equal opportunity and meritocrary are necessary and sufficient for social justice, and that preferential treatment only engenders and protracts injustice. To illustrate its claims, the paper presents a case study treating the Canadian Philosophical Association’s notorious 1991 Report by the Committee to Study Hiring Policies Affecting Women. Some debilitating effects of Canada’s radical politicization of sexuality on the general culture are also mentioned. An early version of this paper was presented at The First Annual Laurier Conference on Business and Professional Ethics, at Wilfrid Laurier University in October 1996. I wish to thank Miro Todorovitch for inspiring the paper; Leo Groarke for inviting, discussing, and editing it; Andrew Irvine, Michael Levin, and Judith Wubnig for their helpful discussions; and Grant Brown for providing evidence of explicit quota systems cited in it. I further thank John Furedy and the Directors of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS) for their defense of free and reasoned scholarship, and the referees and editors of Sexuality & Culture for their helpful suggestions in preparing this publication.     

An Incomplete Relevant Modal Logic

The relevant modal logic G is a simple extension of the logic RT, the relevant counterpart of the familiar classically based system T. Using the Routley–Meyer semantics for relevant modal logics, this paper proves three main results regarding G: (i) G is semantically complete, but only with a non-standard interpretation of necessity. From this, however, other nice properties follow. (ii) With a standard interpretation of necessity, G is semantically incomplete; there is no class of frames that characterizes G. (iii) The class of frames for G characterizes the classically based logic T.     

Developmental patterns in priming and familiarity in explicit recollection

Developmental trajectories of two classes of human memory, implicit and explicit memory, appear to diverge. We examined how developmental differences in perceptual and conceptual priming, two types of implicit memory, coincide with differences between familiarity and recollective responses on explicit memory tests that employ the Remember/Know paradigm ( Tulving, 1985 ). Both types of priming were characterized by developmental invariance in 52 children and adolescents ages 8-19 years. Contrary to Komatsu, Naito, and Fuke (1996) results, few age-group differences in perceptual priming were observed following a levels-of-processing encoding manipulation. In contrast, age group differences were found for "Remember" but not "Know" responses. Neither levels of awareness nor strategies influenced priming. Adult levels of performance appear earlier in development on perceptual and conceptual priming tests compared to explicit memory tests. Similar developmental dissociations exist between explicit and implicit memory performance as between "Remember" and "Know" recollective responses.     

Screening ADHD problems in the sports behavior checklist: factor structure, convergent and divergent validity, and group differences

The Sports Behavior Checklist (SBC) is subjected to a principal components analysis, and subscales are correlated with subscales of the Conners' Revised Parent Form and the Social Skills Rating System. Both of these analyses are conducted to determine the construct validity of the instrument. A subsample of lower socioeconomic status individuals is used to compare ADHD and control group differences on the subscales of the SBC. The authors find that a six-factor solution, as proposed by the original authors, accounted for 71.5% of the variance. As hypothesized, subscales on the SBC are low to moderately related to subscales on the anchor measures. Significant group differences are found on the Aggression, Emotional Reactivity, and Injury subscales. Implications and limitations are discussed.     

Creating Trauma-informed Sports Programming for Traumatized Youth: Core Principles for an Adjunctive Therapeutic Approach

ABSTRACT

Youth who have experienced trauma may find opportunities for recovery in community settings, such as team sports. Sports and other community settings may provide an important structure, a venue for persevering toward goals, and a place to connect with mentors and friends. However, the symptoms with which such youth present, such as hyperarousal and aggression, may serve as a barrier to the potentially supportive environment that sports may provide. The typical means of coaching in such environments may be adapted to increase accessibility to youth. In this article, we describe principles of trauma-informed sports programming, including adaptations to play structures, that draw from gold-standard trauma-informed psychotherapy approaches. These techniques may help youth workers adapt their settings to meet a broader range of needs and aspire to provide clinicians with tools for collateral work with trauma-exposed clients.     

Cognitive style in attainment of an upside-down posture in water with and without vision

It is well known that adopting a posture required by the central nervous system takes into account a frame of reference. This frame of reference is built on sensory information and, more particularly, on vision, which is often considered to be the main input. The contribution of vision varies by participant and defines their cognitive style. This study investigates the contribution of visual information and cognitive style to postural strategy and, more precisely, to the construction of an upside-down posture in an underwater condition. Eight synchronized swimmers performed the Rod-and-Frame Test (RFT) to assess their cognitive style and practiced upside-down posture in water to measure their body inclination. The Rod-and-Frame Test scores did not distinguish the participants, as the results of the test showed that most of them were visual-field independent. However, in a closed-eyes condition, participants achieved a more precise vertical position than when using translucent goggles.     

Teachers With Linguistically Informed Knowledge of Reading Subskills are Associated with a Matthew Effect in Reading Comprehension for Monolingual and Bilingual Students

A longitudinal investigation determined the growth of reading comprehension from third to fifth grades in a cohort of students who received Language Enrichment (LE), an Orton-Gillingham–based literacy program, during first and second grades. The LE instruction was provided by regular education teachers who received comprehensive training in linguistically informed content pertaining to reading subskills. All students were traditionally instructed in kindergarten, third, fourth, and fifth grades. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) confirmed that mono- and bilingual students had significantly advantaged individual growth in reading comprehension as measured on the state-mandated Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) when their teachers had more experience implementing LE over students whose teachers had less experience implementing LE, or students whose teachers had no LE training. Findings showed a fan-shaped spread in achievement from third to fifth grades for all students in the cohort. The significance of the spread was confirmed by reliable covariance between the initial reading level and the growth in reading across grade levels. This fan-shaped growth pattern is often referred to as a Matthew effect in reading comprehension (Stanovich, 1986 Stanovich, K. E. 1986. Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4): 360–407. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). These results provide evidence that the Matthew effect may be associated with specific teaching pedagogies, especially early direct implementation of multisensory linguistically informed language arts instruction. LE instruction emphasizes phonemic awareness, symbol–sound correspondences, morphology, and vocabulary to develop phonological decoding strategies, word recognition accuracy, and comprehension of words in text.     

Living at the Crossroads of Cultural Worlds: The Experience of Normative Conflicts by Second Generation Immigrant Youth

The children of immigrants are often referred to as second-generation youth. Although there is tremendous diversity among them, they often share the common experience of being bicultural by holding both heritage and mainstream cultural identities. Given that cultures generally promote similar expectations for youth (e.g., showing respect for parents), holding two cultural identities is not necessarily problematic. Even when cultural expectations do differ, these individuals can typically switch between cultural identities (e.g., South Asian at home; mainstream Canadian at school) as a strategy to avoid conflict. For some issues, however, switching between identities will not resolve the conflict because fulfilling the normative expectations associated with one identity is done at the expense of the ones of the other identity (e.g., choosing a romantic partner that is either from the heritage culture or from mainstream culture). The current paper presents a normative approach to understanding the experience of culturally-based conflicts among second-generation youth. In addition, research stemming from this normative approach in the area of intimate relationships is presented to further illustrate the value of the model in understanding the potential cultural conflicts of second-generation youth and how they may be negotiated.