This paper will examine how Japanese education policy was articulated discursively from 1996 to 2010 in the semi-annual speeches of prime ministers to the Diet. It will identify three distinct discourses within these policy statements: a progressive discourse emphasizing the rights of individuals; a neo-liberal discourse of social independence and…

In this article, the authors describe a class activity that uses a combination of strategies to overcome obstacles students face when learning about the reproduction of inequality in everyday life. Based on Schwalbe et al.'s (2000) piece on "generic social processes," and following the idea of "making the strange familiar and the familiar…

Objective: This study examined associations between age of menarche and psychosocial outcomes in early adulthood, including sexual behavior, mental health, criminal behavior, and education/employment, to identify the possible causal role of earlier age of menarche in increasing risks of adverse outcomes. Method: Data were gathered from 497 female…

Through scrutinizing three simulated negotiation cases of Chinese MBA students in an American business school, the study illustrates how Chinese face ideology functioned to orient and complicate the students' (pseudo-)business communications with Americans. The students' bone-deep sensitivity to maintaining harmony and interrelationships in the…

Objective: To evaluate the impact of "Fat Pig" on the attitudes of high school students towards fat women and investigate the perspective of dietitians as health professionals on the messages in "Fat Pig." Design: Performance analysis, pre-post analysis of students' responses to self-administrated pre-constructed…

Set against instructional practices that promote competition and individual performance, Dynamic Assessment, in our view, offers a more appropriate form of pedagogy for learners from cultural backgrounds that favour cooperation during joint activity. Indeed, these learners appear to be disadvantaged when negotiating the contrasting values and…

This paper explores the social class-differentiated behaviours of access and traditional-entry students, based on a three-year constructivist grounded theory study with 45 undergraduates at an Irish university. The participant groups behaved significantly differently within the socio-relational realm, engaging in various forms of distancing…

Web 2.0 services include sharing and collaborative technologies such as blogs, social networking sites, online office productivity tools, and wikis. Wikis are increasingly used for the design and implementation of pedagogy, for example to facilitate experiential learning. A U.S. government-funded project for system security risk assessment was…

Catastrophes like Katrina destroy a community's critical infrastructure--a situation that instigates several dilemmas. Immediately, the community experiences information disruption within the community, as well as between the community and the outside world. The inability to communicate because of physical or virtual barriers to information…

The current study examined the relations between individual differences in sustained attention in infancy, the temperamental trait behavioral inhibition in childhood, and social behavior in adolescence. The authors assessed 9-month-old infants using an interrupted-stimulus attention paradigm. Behavioral inhibition was subsequently assessed in the…

Developmental disorders such as subaverage intelligence, pervasive developmental disorders, and genetic syndromes are frequently associated with comorbid attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or ADHD-like symptoms. While there are not pharmacological cures for these developmental disorders, coinciding ADHD and ADHD-like symptoms that…

This paper describes research that compares preservice early childhood teachers' cultural values and the values they believe are held by scientists. Using the Schwartz Values Inventory (SVI) (Schwartz (1992) "Adv Exp Soc Psychol" 25:331-351) preservice early childhood teachers cultural values were assessed, followed by an assessment of…

Video-modeling (VM) is a widely used instructional technique that has been applied to the education of children with developmental disabilities. One form of VM that lacks in-depth analysis is point-of-view video modeling (POVM). The current study investigated the use of POVM to teach three children diagnosed with autism to initiate and maintain a…

Past research has shown that valuing gender conformity is associated with both positive and negative consequences for self-esteem and positive affect. The current research (women, n= 226; men, n= 175) explored these conflicting findings by separating out investing in societal gender ideals from personally valuing one's gender identity ("private…

Schoolwide positive behavior support (SWPBS) is an empirically supported approach that is implemented by more than 10,000 schools in the United States to support student and staff behavior (www.pbis.org). SWPBS is based on a three-tiered prevention logic: (a) Tier 1 interventions support all students; (b) Tier 2 interventions support targeted…