Purpose: The South African vocational education and training (VET) sector is required by legislation to redefine postsecondary education, advance industrialisation and expand the job market to address unemployment in the country. Yet, VET leaders' heterogenous educational and occupational backgrounds do not enable them to address the needs of the…

Adolescents and young adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have persistent difficulty developing and generalizing social communication and interaction skills. Emerging research has demonstrated that people with ASD have benefited from strategies that embed multiple-exemplar training (MET) to increase generalization of social skills.…

Rett syndrome (OMIM #312750) is a progressive neurodevelopmental disease with clinical manifestations including loss of spoken language and apraxia. We summarized per PRISMA guidelines findings on their non-verbal social skills. Twelve studies (n = 479 females, 1.6-52 years) were sorted into a (non-)interventional design including video-coding,…

Social intelligence is the capacity, capability, or ability to build relationships with others effectively; therefore, its existence is vital for an organization's members, including teachers, in the school organization context. Therefore, this study explores the link between social intelligence and creativity, teaching self-efficacy, affective…

This study examines a child's personal experiences with peer relationship building in the classroom and is guided by Vygotsky's cultural historical concepts of the social situation of development and cultural tools and Hedegaard's (2012) model for learning and development. Hedegaard's (2012) dialectical-interactive approach was adopted to analyse…

School readiness assessments in South Africa still predominantly focus on the assessment of cognitive skills. The Emotional Social Screening Tool for School Readiness (E3SR) was developed to bridge the perceived gap in assessing emotional-social skills as a domain of school readiness. An emerging body of research reports exists on the psychometric…

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) focuses on providing socially significant treatments and practices. Recent advancements in ethically-minded research have encouraged practitioners to think beyond the technical skills required for implementing behavior-analytic practices and consider how these practices are delivered. Compassionate care in ABA has…

In "The Purpose-Driven Classroom", author Daniel L. Vollrath uses dispositional teaching to address productivity and promote positive habits in the classroom. He presents seven productive behaviors that general education teachers can teach to all students across all content areas. In utilizing this book's productive behavior strategies,…

According to the research, community mentoring programs can influence an adolescent's social skills, academics, and social mobility. Part of the reason for this is that community-based mentoring programs can provide training and understanding of how adolescents can address situations they may encounter. In addition, community mentoring programs…

Psychosocial competencies; such as prosocial behaviors, compliance with authority, attention regulation, independence, and emotional regulation; play a crucial role in child development. Higher levels of these competencies in childhood are linked to fewer behavior problems, while deficits in these competencies can predict future problem behaviors.…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how rural K-12 leaders in Utah describe their leadership practices. The theoretical framework was based on Robert Greenleaf's Servant Leadership Theory. This study explored three research questions pertaining to: How Rural K-12 leadership practices were described, challenges that…

For nearly three years, a task force with diverse professional backgrounds convened to update the National Physical Education Standards with consideration of the various stakeholders who will be impacted by these changes--most especially students. The previous iteration of the National Standards has been the foundation for the implementation of…

Teaching involves an ethical dimension that tends to remain unspoken and thus difficult to reflect on and discuss. From the perspective of professionalism, professional ethics and a common knowledge base are important to the quality and status of the teaching profession. This descriptive phenomenological study was motivated by the need to know…

Burnout is the leading cause of the special education teacher shortage. A burnout intervention adapted for teachers was tested in two studies. Study 1 used a randomized design; Study 2 was a pre-post design. In Study 1, 44 teachers were randomized into the intervention or an active control. To enhance impact, for Study 2, personal goal-setting was…

Purpose: Conversational latency entails the temporal feature of turn-taking, which is understudied in autistic children. The current study investigated the influences of child-based and parental factors on conversational latency in autistic children with heterogeneous spoken language abilities. Method: Participants were 46 autistic children aged…