Engagement mentoring for socially excluded youth: problematising an 'holistic' approach to creating employability through the transformation of habitus

This paper traces the emergence of engagement mentoring, which seeks to re-engage socially excluded youth with the formal labour market by altering their attitudes, values, and beliefs. Engagement mentoring has been promoted in European and British policy as an holistic response to social exclusion, for example, in the new Connexions service. However, the original meaning of 'holism' has become contested, and policies and practices which claim to be holistic require clearer analysis. Drawing on Bourdieuian theory, and evidence from recent research, this paper interrogates the holistic claims of engagement mentoring from the perspective of its intended effects on mentees. It argues that the model treats personal disposition--habitus--as a raw material to be wrought into 'employable' dispositions, with little or no acknowledgement of institutional or structural fields of power. However, habitus is highly complex, with deep-rooted and collective aspects not easily transformed. A greater understanding of habitus might result in more genuinely holistic approaches to mentoring, and counter a perceptible policy drift towards totalitarian rather than holistic practice.     

A comparison of the effects of partial reinforcement schedules using a within-subject serial autoshaping procedure

Three experiments, each using a single group of pigeons, are reported. In Experiment 1 subjects were initially trained with two stimuli, one of which was always followed by food, the other being reinforced according to a 50% partial reinforcement schedule. Subsequently a serial procedure was adopted in which an additional stimulus, C, was consistently followed by the partially reinforced CS. A second additional stimulus, A, was followed on half of its occurrences by the continuously reinforced CS, its remaining presentations being followed by nothing. The rate of autoshaped keypecking was substantially greater during A than during C. In the remaining experiments subjects received first-order conditioning with a single stimulus that was either partially (Experiment 2) or continuously (Experiment 3) reinforced. The stimuli A and C were then again introduced for serial autoshaping. Stimulus A was occasionally paired with the CS and occasionally followed by nothing, whereas stimulus C was always followed by the CS. As in Experiment 1, the rate of responding during A was greater than during C. It is proposed that one influence on the rate of autoshaped keypecking during a CS is the accuracy with which the immediate consequences of that CS are predicted.     

Verbal conditioning of stimulus significance in the orienting response context

The manipulation of stimulus significance, by instructions from the experimenter, may be taken as an example of verbal conditioning. Consideration of such a mechanism suggested that personality effects previously found in conditioning studies should be apparent in instructional manipulations of significance in a study of the orienting response (OR) to words. Because of recent changes in dimensioning of the personality structure, some of the items originally used to define Eysenck’s extraversion (E) dimension are now used to assess the new dimension of psychoticism (P), suggesting that at least some of the established effects of E upon conditioning may be associated now with P. Hence the P scale was focused on in this study. Words differing on the evaluative dimension of the semantic differential were presented in three blocks, the first under indifferent instructions, the second under instructions to rate the words for their affective impact, and the third under indifferent instructions again. These blocks correspond to baseline, conditioning, and extinction conditions respectively. Electrodermal activity indicated enhanced conditioning, together with greater carry-over effects in the extinction phase, for low-P compared with high-P subjects. The results indicate the importance of personality effects in studies of stimulus significance and illustrate the value of the verbal conditioning mechanism in this area of the OR field. They also suggest the need to re-examine previously obtained E-effects in conditioning studies in light of changing personality tests.     

TEACHING IDIOM COMPREHENSION TO CHILDREN WITH MENTAL RETARDATION

This study examined the effectiveness of a training program designed to teach children with mild mental retardation the meaning of 12 idiomatic phrases, such as “to hit the sack.” Four 9-year-old children participated in the training. A multiple baseline design across subjects and across three sets of idioms was implemented. Training consisted of presenting both literal and idiomatic contexts in the form of story narratives, and asking the children to explain the outcome of the story and to select one picture from an array of four that represented the outcome. All children demonstrated learning, although 1 child required review procedures to facilitate maintenance. Children were able to generalize their receptive learning to an expressive task with varying levels of success. All children demonstrated an ability to understand the learned idioms when presented in unfamiliar contexts.     

Looking at pictures but remembering scenes.

Ss tend to remember close-up photographs as having had extended boundaries (Intraub & Richardson, 1989). Three alternate explanations were tested: object completion, distortion toward a perceptual schema, and normalization toward a prototypic view. In three experiments, 55-130 undergraduates viewed 16 close-up, prototypic, or wide-angle views of objects for 15 s each. Immediately or 48 hr later, they rated test pictures on a 5-point scale as "same", "closer up", or "father away." Results ruled out object completion because boundary extension occurred when the picture contained no incomplete objects. Immediate tests supported the perceptual schema hypothesis because all unidirectional distortions involved boundary extension. Delayed tests were more suggestive of a memory schema effect because wide-angle pictures yielded boundary restriction. A two-component model of picture processing is proposed.     

GENDER BIASES IN TEXTBOOKS FOR INTRODUCTORY PSYCHOLOGY AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Because of spreading concerns about gender stereotypes in textbooks, in 1975 an American Psychological Association Task Force recommended changes in the type of language that should be used to report research findings and in the type of information that should be included in reports of psychological research. These recommendations also applied to the presentation of psychological information in textbooks. Studies in the subsequent 7 years indicated some decrease in the use of sex-stereotyped language and some decrease in gender-biased content. Researchers typically concluded, however, that although some improvements had occurred, gender biases and stereotypes still occurred in texts. The present study reports an extensive content analysis of current textbooks for introductory psychology and human development courses. Representation of the work, theory, and behavior of males continues to significantly exceed the representation of the work, theory, and behavior of females, and females continue to be portrayed in negative and gender-biased ways.