Professional Functioning: Exploring Developmental Narratives of Counselor Trainees

The authors analyzed the reflective journals of 49 counselor trainees in internship using a conventional content analysis approach. Developmental insights from the 4 overarching themes and 7 subthemes are provided to assist counselor education and supervision programs in supporting the professional functioning of counselor trainees.     

Discourse communities: A framework from which to consider professional development for rural teachers of science and mathematics

This paper explores aspects of professional development for teachers of science and mathematics in schools in rural Australia. The study identified a range of issues including tensions between government, school and individual professional learning priorities and their respective responsibilities; the shaping of professional development by rurality; and issues of generic versus subject-specific professional learning. The paper will focus on the needs of teachers, particularly secondary teachers, for subject-specific professional development and the capacity of different professional development approaches for satisfying these needs. The notion of discourse communities is proposed as a framework for considering this issue.     

The Usefulness of a Science Degree: The “lost voices” of science trained professionals

This paper reports a study of science graduates who are employed in positions outside their discipline specialisation. The research was designed to uncover the reasons for them choosing to study science at university, the competencies they utilise in their work and their lives, and how these relate to their undergraduate education in science. The study is seen as important in that already about one‐half of science graduates are in such positions and it is argued that there is a need in scientific and technologically based societies to have a greater representation of such people in decision‐making positions in government and industry. The directions for the science degree that can be drawn from the data gathered are congruent with those arising from other relevant studies. That is, attention should be paid to widely used skills, such as communication and problem‐solving, and to developing an understanding of science within its social and ethical context. An argument is mounted for considering the way the science degree is presented to potential students and to the general public.     

The Effects of a Programed Textbook on Achievement Under Three Techniques of Instruction

The experiment examined the relationship among several variables affecting extra-dimensional (ED) shift performance. Children and adults were trained to one of three criteria and given one of two ED shifts. All tasks required S to choose one of two colored geometric forms projected on a screen. The results are: (a) older Ss made fewer errors in training and transfer than younger Ss; (b) overtraining did not facilitate the ED shift wherein stimuli remained the same from training to transfer for the adults, but it did for the 7- and 8-year-old children; (c) overtraining inhibited the performance of the 5- and 6-year-old Ss given this ED shift; (d) overtraining neither facilitated nor inhibited the ED shift wherein stimuli changed from training to transfer. An interpretation was given in terms of verbal labeling, discrimination of change, perservative errors, and task difficulty.     

Evaluating courses: an examination of the impact of student gender

Previous research into the effects of gender differences on course evaluations has failed to take into account a number of intervening variables. In part 1 of the present study a questionnaire was administered to 504 female and male students measuring whether they noticed, remembered things, and related to others. These are all measures which have been linked to evaluation abilities. Females were found to score more highly on all three. In part 2 of the study 23 presentations of a course were evaluated, and it was shown that females and males do respond differently. Females evaluated certain, but not all, aspects of the courses more favourably, but the pattern of differences varied depending on whether the measure used was a structured or an open‐ended evaluation.     

The Development of Attention to Objects and Scenes: From Object-Biased to Unbiased

Selective attention is the ability to focus on goal-relevant information while filtering out irrelevant information. This work examined the development of selective attention to natural scenes and objects with a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. Children (N = 69, ages 4–6 years) and adults (N = 80) were asked to attend to either objects or scenes, while ignoring the other type of stimulus. A multinomial processing tree model was used to decompose selective attention into focusing and filtering components. The results suggest that attention is object-biased in children, due to difficulty filtering attention to goal-irrelevant objects, whereas attention in adults is relatively unbiased. The findings suggest important developmental asymmetries in selective attention to scenes and objects.