Articles of Interest Nvember 2011 Issue of Notepad

1. A Prospective Study of Diet Quality and Mental Health in Adolescent

By Felice N. Jacka, Peter J. Kremer, Michael Berk, Andrea M. de Silva-Sanigorski, Marjorie Moodie, Eva R. Leslie, Julie A. Pasco, Boyd A. Swinburn, PLOS One ( Public Library of Science) October 2011

In this study, 3040 Australian adolescents, aged 11-18 years at baseline, were measured in 2005-6 and 2007-8. Information on diet and mental health was collected by self-report and anthropometric data by trained researchers.

As expected, the biggest predictor of a participant's mental health in 2007 was their mental health in 2005; but the researchers also found that diet quality in 2005 - either healthy or unhealthy - often predicted mental health in 2007. The relationship was clear, even after taking into account other variables such as age, gender, level of physical activity, weight and socioeconomic status. 

This study highlights the importance of diet in adolescence and its potential role in modifying mental health over the life course. Given that the majority of common mental health problems first manifest in adolescence, intervention studies are now required to test the effectiveness of preventing the common mental disorders through dietary modification.

The results of the study can be found in the journal PLoS One at: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0024805 

(Source: ABC Health and Wellbeing, http://www.abc.net.au/health/thepulse/stories/2011/09/28/3326945.htm, viewed 5 October 2011.)

2. Rethinking Gifted Education Policy - A Proposed Direction Forward Based on Psychological Science

By Rena Subotnik, Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, Frank Worrell, Psychological Science in the Public Interest  - a Journal for the Association for Psychological Science, January 2011

This article provides an overview of what has been learned about giftedness from psychological science and suggests some directions for the field of gifted education.

The authors argue that, in the USA, "athletic and other artistic performance talents are treated very differently from talents in more traditional academic areas."

Children's performance and athletic abilities are identified, cultivated, actively nurtured, and often refined through intensive coaching and training.  But this intense support is not always provided to children who display academic talents. According to the authors, the academic community needs to join their colleagues in the arts and athletics in applying the science of optimal performance to the academic disciplines.  "For example, judgments made by music or athletic talent scouts are based on demonstrations of how well one does on tasks that closely mirror actual demands made in those fields.  Academic areas however, rarely rely on demonstrated achievement, but rather on standardized tests because K-12 teachers' judgments tend not to be sufficiently trusted."

They make the following key points

·         "abilities matter, particularly abilities associated with specific domains of talent. They are malleable and need to be cultivated;

·         domains of talent have developmental trajectories that vary even within domains with regard to when they tend to start, peak, and end;

·         at every stage in the talent-development process, opportunities need to be provided by the community (broadly defined to include school, neighborhood, local and regional community, society at large), and opportunities need to be taken advantage of and committed to by the talented individual;

·         psychosocial variables are determining factors in the successful development of talent; and

·         eminence, which we characterize as contributing in a transcendent way to making societal life better and more beautiful, is the aspired outcome of gifted education."

 In particular they argue that children need

·         opportunities that expose them to advanced knowledge, skills and values in their field of interest and also need to be motivated to take advantage of these opportunities.

·         the same kind of mental skills training given to athletes and artistic performers to help talented students deal with the pressure that comes with both challenge and success.

Read article  http://psi.sagepub.com/content/12/1/3.full

3.         Re-thinking the Asian Dimension of Australian History

 By Prof David Walker, Paper presented at the National History Teachers Conference, 3 October 2011.  

He said: "We have a long history, dating from at least the nineteenth century, of seeing the nation as having an increasingly 'Asian' future and eliciting both apprehension and hope in the process."

Read article http://www.asiaeducation.edu.au/for_teachers/curriculum_resources/history_cr/history_cr_landing_page.html

4.         Sex, Love and Other Stuff

This is a new resource for young men aged 14-18 that addresses questions related to sex and respect.  It was Developed by the Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria (DVRCV).

The booklet, called Sex, love and other stuff, fills a gap in the need for violence prevention and respectful relationship advice for this age group. The content is based on feedback from focus groups and an online survey. The researchers who compiled the booklet found that, unsurprisingly, there was a lot of interest from boys in finding out about sex, but that they also wanted to know about how to talk to girls and exactly what a relationship is as well as to know that they were doing things consensually. 

According to the DVRCV, one of the 'key causes of violence against women is a rigid adherence to gender stereotypes' and this booklet is designed to help young men "think about masculinity and stereotypes". It is hoped the booklet will engender respectful relationships and a reduced tolerance for violence. 

Hard copies can be ordered from the following website: http://www.sexloveandotherstuff.com/ (up to 10 copies can be obtained free of charge within Victoria, with a small charge for larger orders and orders outside Victoria).

(Source: Signposts, YACVic's rural e-bulletin, 10 October 2011.)

5.         What is Campbell's Law?

This article was submitted by Lyndsay Connors because the concept of Campbell's Law has been used in so many public fora without explicit explanation.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell's_law

Campbell's law From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Campbell's law is an adage developed by Donald T. Campbell:^[1]

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

The social science principle of Campbell's law is sometimes used to point out the negative consequences of high-stakes testing in U.S. classrooms.

What Campbell also states in this principle is that "achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. (Similar biases of course surround the use of objective tests in courses or as entrance examinations.)"^[1]

Campbell's law was published in 1976 by Donald T. Campbell, an experimental social science researcher and the author of many works on research methodology. Closely related ideas are known under different names, e.g. Goodhart's law, and the Lucas critique.

Technically schooled people often use the term "Heisenberg" as a shorthand to represent concepts such as Campbell's law. This is taken from the concept of Heisenberg uncertainty in quantum physics where the act of measuring something changes what is being measured.

 Notes

·         1. Campbell, Donald T., Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change The Public Affairs Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover New Hampshire, USA. December, 1976.

References

·         Rothstein, Jesse (University of California - Berkeley) "Review of Learning About Teaching" National Education Policy Center, 1/13/11. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-learning-about-teaching

·         "Learning About Teaching" Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 12/10/10. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/college-ready-education/Documents/preliminary-findings-research-paper.pdf

·         Berliner, David C. & Nichols, Sharon L. "High-Stakes Testing Is Putting the Nation At Risk" Education Week, 3/12/07. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/03/12/27berliner.h26.html

·         Nichols, Sharon L. & Berliner, David C. "The Inevitable Corruption of Indicators and Educators Through High-Stakes Testing" The Great Lakes Center for Education Research & Practice, East Lansing, MI, March 2005. http://www.greatlakescenter.org/g_l_new_doc/EPSL-0503-101-EPRU-exec.pdf

See also

·         Nichols, S. L., & Berlner, D. C. (2007). Collateral Damage: How high-stakes testing corrupts America's schools Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press

·         Tony Waters, "CAMPBELL'S LAW, PLANNED SOCIAL CHANGE, VIETNAM WAR DEATHS, AND CONDOM DISTRIBUTIONS IN REFUGEE CAMPS" at Ethnography.com

 6.         Leadership and Innovation in Regional Australia - a higher education case study

By Wayne Graham, On line opinion, 2 November 2011

The importance of higher education as a driver of economic, social and cultural development is well recognised. Higher education provides significant benefits to individuals and to society.  However, Australia's proportion of 25 to 34 year olds with a bachelor degree qualification has remained static for many years and is falling behind other similar countries within the Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Rates in rural Australia are significantly lower that in urban areas.  Graham believes that recent policy developments combined with innovative regional leadership are beginning to change the situation.

He refers to a number of programs and initiatives that have been established to support the reforms such as the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP), the Structural Adjustment Funding (SAF), and the new funding for the Education Investment Fund (EIF) Regional Priorities Round.

This paper examines how this is working in the New South Wales Mid North Coast.

Read article http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12826&page=0

 7.      Behavioral and neural correlates of delay of gratification 40 years later,

 By B. J. Caseya,1, Leah H. Somervillea, Ian H. Gotlibb, Ozlem Aydukc, Nicholas T. Franklina, Mary K. Askrend, John Jonidesd, Marc G. Bermand, Nicole L. Wilsone, Theresa Teslovicha, Gary Gloverf, Vivian Zayasg, Walter Mischelh,1, and Yuichi Shoda, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America , July 2011

This group of researchers examined the neural basis of self-regulation in individuals using a cohort of preschoolers who performed the delay-of-gratification task 4 decades ago.

In the original study 4-year-olds at Stanford's Bing Nursery School were asked to hold off eating one sweet in exchange for the promise of two sweets 15 minutes later. Fewer than one in three children passed the so-called "marshmallow test."

In the years that followed, numerous follow-up and variation studies found that the preschoolers who managed to delay gratification were also more likely later on to do well in school, avoid substance abuse, maintain a healthy weight, and even perform better on the SAT than peers who couldn't resist temptation.

In this study, a subset of 26 of these original participants underwent functional imaging, for the first time, to test for biased recruitment of frontostriatal circuitry when required to suppress responses to alluring cues. Whereas the prefrontal cortex differentiated between no-go and go trials to a greater extent in high delayers, the ventral striatum showed exaggerated recruitment in low delayers. Thus, resistance to temptation as measured originally by the delay-of-gratification task is a relatively stable individual difference that predicts reliable biases in frontostriatal circuitries that integrate motivational and control processes.

The findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that a student's ability to delay gratification and moderate responses to environmental cues can be important to academic success.  There is also evidence that this can be taught.

Read more: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/19/1108561108.full.pdf+html

8.         Studies point to principal training as 'cost-effective' reform

Often in reform efforts focused on teacher effectiveness, principals are overlooked. Two new studies examining the National Institute for School Leadership, a for-profit company that works in 19 states, point to the importance of school leaders. Researchers found statistically significant gains on test scores at hundreds of schools  in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts with principals trained by the institute.

These are not the first studies to reach the conclusion that leadership matters. A 2009 study done by New Leaders for New Schools found that principal effectiveness accounted for 25 percent of student gains. Teacher effectiveness, by comparison, accounted for 33 percent. And school reformers-both in traditional public schools and charters-have been clamoring for better leadership development for years.

These new studies, conducted by Old Dominion and Johns Hopkins Universities, provide a new argument for the training programs: They can be cost-effective.

The National Institute for School Leadership (NISL) charges districts or states $15,750 to prepare in-district trainers, who then train aspiring principals and veteran school leaders, with the institute's support. Fees for a principal to undergo the training range from $2,500 to $5,250, depending on the number of participants in the 12- to 15-month program.

In Pennsylvania-where schools with NISL-trained principals beat their peers by almost 10 percentage points on state tests-the average cost per principal was $4,000, or $117 per student.

The company is buying new advertisements  "to bring home that point," said President and CEO Bob Hughes. "You can get ... effects for very little money by concentrating on the leadership."

In the Massachusetts study, students in 38 schools that had a principal who went through the leadership training program in 2007 and remained at the school through 2010 saw gains that were "quite large" compared to other school-reform efforts. On average, students gained the equivalent of an extra month of learning.

"Out of all the professional development funding that is spent, only about 1 percent relates to the principal or the leadership of the school," Hughes said. "Almost all of it is focused on the teaching ... but we need to widen that."

The researchers concluded in the Massachusetts study that it may be more practical to train principals at struggling schools instead of removing them, a main strategy under Obama administration-led reforms.

The federal government's School Improvement Grants, aimed at  the bottom 5 percent of schools nationwide, come with four possible plans a failing school can adopt, but all require that the principal be fired if he or she has been in the position for more than two years. The requirement has led some schools across the country to turn the money down.

But even for those schools that took the money and fired their principal, Hughes sees his group as having an important role in working with their replacements. "We believe that just the sheer numbers mean that most of the [hires] will be coming from the" same district, he said. "And those are the ones we really want to focus on."

To read the full article go to http://hechingered.org/content/studies-point-to-principal-training-as-cost-effective-reform_4410/

9. Waiting for Gonski- A CASE FOR CONSOLIDATING FUNDING FROM STATES AND THE COMMONWEALTH

In a paper commissioned by the Australian Education Union Dr Jim McMorrow has put forward 5 key goals that the funding review should address:

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  achieving a mature partnership between Commonwealth and State governments -


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  putting public schooling back at the centre of national priorities and agreements


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  adopting national target resource standards for schools to guide planning for greater public investment


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  using public funds to narrow resource gaps between schools that cannot be justified on educational grounds


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  protecting public investment against erosion through inflation

·      

According to McMorrow, the problems that need to be addressed include the loss of an explicit legislative commitment by the Commonwealth Government for the support of high quality public schooling. 

When the Howard Government came to power in 1996, one of its first steps was to remove Commonwealth legislation with long-standing provisions requiring government agencies to have regard to: the primary obligation, in relation to education, for governments to provide and maintain government school systems that are of the highest standard and are open, without fees or religious tests, to all children  (Schools Commission Act 1973, S13(4); Employment, Education and Training Act 1988,  S24(2)).

The use of a funding measure (the SES measure) that has the effect of breaking the long-standing link between total income from fees and other sources of private income and the level of entitlement to public funding for non-government schools.  McMorrow refers to it as an indexation arrangement that lacks integrity.  In fact under the AGSRC indexation arrangements, the greater the need differential between the government and non government sector the greater the unjustifiable windfall gain the plethora of targeted programs with a bewildering array of funding  sources and accountability requirements.

Read more: http://www.aeufederal.org.au/Publications/Papers/Papers&Submissionindex.html#2011