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Mathematics self-efficacy is considered an important variable in mathematics education because of its links to mathematics achievement. This paper reports on the development of the "Self-efficacy-effort in Mathematics Scale" (SEEMS), an instrument that has strong theoretical and psychometric properties. Based on a sample of n = 224 Australian primary students and n =133 secondary students, the instrument demonstrated positive correlations with related measures of mathematics achievement and mathematics self-concept. Girls had higher mathematics achievement within the primary and secondary school data. There were no significant gender difference in mathematic self-concept scores for the primary and the secondary school students. For mathematics self-efficacy, a gender difference was only identified in the high school data. The implications of this research to mathematics education practices are reviewed in the paper.

This paper draws from a large longitudinal study into issues related to student retention beyond the compulsory years of schooling and gives voice to a commonly-overlooked set of stakeholders, namely those in the community. Although many studies report on students' and teachers' opinions of the influence of the community on student engagement and retention, very little is found based on data from the community members themselves. This paper provides an analysis of 11 in-depth interviews carried out with members of the community during the three-year mixed-methods research project on student retention in rural, regional, and disadvantaged areas of Tasmania. Of the themes that emerged, the most salient was that of the provision of educational pathways for students. Other themes included job opportunities, both as a positive and negative influence on student retention, the responsibilities of the community from the perspectives of community members themselves, and their views of the importance of parents and teachers in relation to retention.

The objectives and programs involved in public library service to children in the Northwest Territories (NWT) are not very different from those of other small public library systems. However, program operation is affected by the vast distances involved, the isolation of the communities, and the presence of ethnic groups whose language had no written form until a century ago. Service to this area is provided by the Northwest Territories Public Library Services. During the six years since a children's librarian was appointed, new facets of the children's program have gradually been introduced. Through cooperation with the Department of Education, visits are made to schools for storytelling and talks on library services. NWT aids local librarians through workshops, booklists, and the encouragement of interlibrary loan. A wide range of children must be provided for, including those for whom English is a second language. There is still a deficit of materials suited to the languages and cultures of these children. The Department of Education has been given the sole responsibility for audiovisual materials, but improved cooperation between the schools and the NWT libraries will allow for a sharing of media resources and improved service to small communities. (Author/SL)

Because critical thinking has become a popular topic among speech communication educators in recent years, this paper reviews the literature on teaching critical thinking skills and discusses its relevance for speech communication instruction. First, the paper briefly sketches the history of the critical thinking movement and describes the reaction of speech communication educators to the movement. Second, definitions of critical thinking are discussed, and the document notes that the definitions--logical, cognitive and communicative--differ depending on point of view. The third topic covered is how critical thinking is taught. Types of thinking skills programs are listed, including the following: (1) general thinking skills programs that can function within a communication curriculum; (2) programs that concentrate on particular skills (such as argumentation, persuasion, debate, and logic) in particular content areas; (3) programs that teach thinking skills in isolation; and (4) programs designed specifically for speech communication classes. Teaching methods such as questioning techniques and modeling are also mentioned. The paper's fourth focus is on evaluating critical thinking. Several theoretical bases for assessment are presented, and the merits of different standardized measures are also debated. The final part of the paper concerns implications of the critical thinking movement for speech communication instruction, including the importance of cognitive and metacognitive aspects of instruction and the transfer of thinking skills to other contexts. Thirty-one references conclude the document. (SKC)

In these proceedings of the Teacher Librarian Strand of the ITEC Virtual Conference (1996), international contributors present papers on 12 key topics of interest to teacher librarians. The following papers topics are addressed: (A) Censorship and the Internet in Schools: Problems and Solutions; (B) Hot Spots on the Web for TLs; (C) Children's Literature and the Internet; (D) The Internet and the TL's Role in the School: Possible, Probable and Preferred Futures; (E) Creating and Managing a Library Web Page: The Practicalities; (F) What Students Produce from the Net: Assessing their Work; (G) Meeting the Professional Information Needs of Teacher Librarians; (H) Home-School Links: Networking the Learning Community; (I) Evaluating Internet Information Services; (J) Access-Forget about Ownership; (K) Cooperative Planning and Teaching: A Collaborative Teaching Model for the 21st Century?; and (L) MOOving Around the Net: The Educational Potential of MOOs. (AEF)

The role of the spouse in both the etiology and the maintenance of alcoholism has been focussed on by theoreticians of various persuasions, including psychoanalytic, behavioral, sociological and family systems. These models, focussing on individual and interactional components of alcoholism, have generated a variety of treatment interventions which involve the spouse in the treatment process. At least three case reports and three controlled studies of concurrent (spouses both in separate therapies) therapy for the alcoholic and spouse have suggested that this approach improves treatment outcome over individual approaches. Numerous reports of conjoint (spouses meeting together with a therapist) treatment (five case studies, five controlled studies) have also found spouse involved treatment to be more effective than individual treatment. A behavioral systems model of alcoholism treatment is discussed. In this model, a functional analysis of drinking behavior breaks down antecedents and consequences of drinking into individual components, spouse components and marital components. Treatment then focuses on each of these aspects sequentially. Each phase of treatment is described in detail. Case illustrations are provided, and a planned controlled evaluation is briefly described. (Author/BMW)

Sloshing model tests or wave impact tests in flumes show great variability in impact pressure measurements. One of the reasons of such variability is the generation of free surface instabilities by the shearing gas flow at the free surface just before the impacts. Pushed by the arrival of the wave, the gas in between the wave front and the wall is accelerating and may reach high velocities triggering free surface instabilities (Kelvin-Helmholtz or Rayleigh-Plateau) around and above the crest for a breaking wave impact. To better understand these phenomena, our long term goal is to study by numerical simulation the early phase of liquid fragmentation in sloshing waves due to the development of gas-liquid interface instabilities. Towards this end, EPM have developed a two-fluid high-precision front-tracking approach based on the Navier-Stokes equations to simulate separated viscous two-phase flows with surface tension (Hay et al., 2015b and 2015d). The proposed simulation method uses adaptivity in space (adaptive remeshing) and time (hp-adaptivity) to yield accurate predictions while keeping computational cost low. Prior to the study of small-scale interfacial instabilities, the numerical tool is validated for the prediction of wave shapes representative of those obtained during wave impact tests in flume tanks or during sloshing tests in partially filled tanks. We consider the propagation of two single waves leading respectively to a flip-through impact and a gas-pocket impact. Discretization errors are assessed through mesh and stepsize refinement studies while calculated wave shapes and pressure fields are compared to other numerical approaches already proposed in the literature. Validation is performed by comparing numerical predictions of forced motion sloshing in tanks to quality experiments. This work is part of a more general R&D program of GTT on numerical simulation of liquid impacts in order to better understand the physics of sloshing impacts within LNG tanks on floating structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our project considers how contemporary forms of televisuality have been made to matter ("reinvented") within a current reasoning about citizenship, government, and welfare. The project also suggests how understanding the relation between reinventing government and reinventing TV requires rethinking some of the dispositions of "critical studies" of TV and other media, and considering the utility of the recent literature that has engaged Michel Foucault's thoughts about liberalism, governmentality, care of the self, technologies of the self, ethico-politics, and biopolitics. We argue that TV has become instrumental to the networks that now link the public, private, and personal programs and techniques for administering welfare. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a Bayesian hierarchical model for the analysis of transitions in employment status using data from a large longitudinal social survey of immigrants to Australia. Data for each subject is observed on three separate occasions, or waves, of the survey. A model for the employment status of immigrants is developed by introducing, at the first stage of the hierarchy, a multinomial model for the response. Six different models of varying degrees of complexity are considered with subsequent terms introduced to explain wave effects and to capture overdispersion in the form of between-subject variability. To estimate the model we use the Gibbs Sampler, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. This algorithm allows time-varying transition effects and within-subject random effects to be estimated with relative ease, and the imputation of missing values according to an appropriate prior distribution. The six alternative models are compared using the Deviance Information Criteria (DIC) which is appropriate for assessing the fit of complex models containing random effects. After accounting for significant covariate effects in the model, results show that the relative probability of remaining unemployed diminished with time following arrival in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that principal support is a key factor in the implementation of effective school library or information literacy programs in schools. An international study of the principals' role in developing and supporting information literacy programs was conducted in Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Japan, Scotland, and South Korea. Principals and librarians in all countries except South Korea differed significantly on the amount of time they perceived the principal to spend on tasks related to the information literacy program. Principals believed they spent more time on these tasks than did librarians. Principals and librarians in Australia, Finland, and Scotland agreed about the amount of time they thought the principal should spend on such tasks in the future. In Canada, Japan, and South Korea, however, there were significant differences between the two groups; the principals believed they should spend more time on the tasks in the future than did the librarians. Overall mean scores on present and future perceptions suggested that in five of six countries principals and librarians are well-aligned in their beliefs about the role of the principal; the exception was Scotland where school librarians are not qualified teachers. These and other findings should be useful to principals and librarians in schools throughout the world, as they struggle in difficult times to provide quality schooling and information services and to contribute to the development of literate and independent library users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An abstract of the article "Nano-mechanical Characterization of Viscoelastic Properties in Polymers and Fibers," by Sandip Basu and Jennifer Hay is presented.

The article discusses the test methodology Continuous Dynamic Analysis (CDA), which measures the storage and loss modulus of thin fibers as function of strain. It informs that the method uses a dynamic tensile testing instrument to measure of various fibers with diameters of the order of a few microns. It further reports that a nanomechanical actuating transducer (NMAT) enables detection of small loads required for deformation of individual fibers. Also discussed is the increase in dynamic storage modulus of polypropylene and polyester with increase in strain due to increase in the alignment of the amorphous molecules.

This paper compares the timing and sequencing of work-family trajectories of young adults in 20 European countries using data from the European Social Survey (2006). It addresses the question of the convergence of transitions to adulthood in Europe. The life course is derived from five standard events - employment, leaving-home, union formation, marriage and childbearing - retrospectively observed for men and women over 35 years old (N = 26,351), over four birth cohorts (before 1935, 1935-1944, 1945-1959, and 1960-1971). We employ optimal matching and cluster analyses to build an empirical typology of life courses. Multigroup dissimilarity indices and correspondence analysis reveal that the 14 patterns uncovered are highly correlated with welfare regimes, historical family systems, and cohorts. Although there was a convergence in the passage to adulthood in North-Western Europe following the post-war boom era, two new models, characterized by an early independence from the family of orientation and delayed family formation, have emerged. The transition to adulthood in Southern and Eastern Europe remains marked by their respective historical family systems. Whereas parental home departure is late and linked to couple formation in Southern Europe, the tradition of joint households is still pervasive in Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, researchers have identified many programs that successfully reduce juvenile delinquency. Evaluations of these programs often, however, do not assess the mediating variables that intervene between program participation and reduced delinquency. Thus, although insight has been gained on which programs are most effective, the question of why they are effective often is not considered. This study addresses this omission by assessing a number of variables that may mediate the effects of a comprehensive intervention on juvenile involvement in violent, property, and substance use offending. This was considered with data from the Children at Risk program (Harrell, Cavanagh, and Sridharan, 1999), a two-year, multi-modal intervention with random assignment that targeted high-risk early adolescents in five U.S. cities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of this paper alludes to Michel Foucault's accounts of various "births" (of the prison, the asylum, the clinic) that individually and collectively contributed to the birth of liberal government in the West during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The paper suggests that Foucault's historiographic strategy, and his historical argument about liberalism (through key words such governmentality, biopower, security societies, freedom, and space) provide a useful perspective about the present relation of "new media" to the so-called "digital-" or "cyber-"city. Not only does this paper critically assess various assumptions about the new-ness of the current city and its media, by considering the "long history" of the "new media city" and "liberalism," and the current contradictions of emergent and residual practices, but it also explains how a Foucaultian perspective about liberalism and biopoliticization provide an alternative to the dominant ways of explaining contemporary cities and their media only or primarily in terms of culture and/or economy. While the paper critically engages various key works about "new media cities," it sketches how the current convergence of urban space, communication media, and neoliberal political rationalities and citizenship developed out of certain cities over the twentieth century. To consider this current convergence, the paper also will examine the recent intersection of "old" and "new" media--Reality TV formats such as Bravo's "Million Dollar Listing" and web-resources such as "Do It Yourself City" (http://diycity.org/). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although much is known about the consequences of low self-control for crime, much less is known about how self-control develops and evolves over the life course. Moreover, the limited research in this area largely has emphasized the study of how "natural" changes in social environments (e.g., changes in peer associations or the quality of parenting) lead to changes in self-control. Entirely neglected is the question of whether changes in self-control over the life course can occur in response to the "contrived" changes associated with direct policy interventions. This study considers this issue by examining the effects on self-control of adolescent participation in a comprehensive set of services designed to prevent crime, drug use, and other problem behaviors among early adolescents. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After September 11, 2001, the Bush-Cheney administration's campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime was rationalized in terms of "advancing" liberal democracy which would "free" the Iraqi people (from their past), empower citizens to govern themselves, and thus contribute to a political modernization (based on the model of the United States). This paper considers how "exporting" or "advancing" democracy in Iraq has occurred in part through the Coalition Provisional Authority's funding of the Iraqi Media Network and its first TV channel, Al Iraqiya., and subsequently the CIA's funding of Al-Hurra--"The Free One" or "TV Freedom." The initiatives were supposed to help modernize a country where citizens had been prohibited from owning satellite dishes that could import foreign broadcasting. This paper discusses Al Hurra's relation to residual and emergent U.S. models of propaganda and information warfare, devoting attention to Al Hurra's direction by the Broadcast Board of Governors (formerly the US Information Agency), its programming's investment in reality TV (e.g., Al Hurra's Terrorism in the Hands of Justice), and these projects' relation to neo-conservative and neoliberal reasoning about "civic empowerment" through public-private partnerships. The paper asks to what extent Al Hurra is a significant departure from previous U.S. initiatives that have conceived of broadcasting as fundamental to liberal, democratic citizenship and publics-and thus to "waging peace." ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a number of studies have observed empirical associations between the occurrence of key life events such as marriage, employment, and military service and desistance from crime. The relationships between these life-course transitions and changes in criminal behavior have been cited as evidence in support of social control and social learning theories of delinquency and in contradiction to alternative theoretical perspectives, including self-control theory, that underplay the significance of life-course transitions to the development of criminal behavior over the lifespan. In this paper, we develop and test an alternative explanation for the apparent impact of marriage, employment, and military service on criminal and delinquent behavior. We argue that these life-course transitions might also promote desistance, in part, by enabling offenders to develop and exercise increased self-control. We then test this hypothesis using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) and explore the implications of our findings for the study of desistance and for self-control theory. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although prior recidivism studies have mostly focused on individual characteristics, Kubrin and Stewart (2006) recently investigated the effects of contextual variables on recidivism, and their analysis indicated that this is a fruitful area of inquiry. Little attention has been devoted, however, to the possibility that individual- and contextual-level variables may operate together to affect recidivism; that is, the two may statistically interact to affect the likelihood of future offending. This study considers this issue by examining whether the effects of individual-level risk factors on recidivism depend on characteristics of the social context to which the offender is released. Using a large sample of prisoners released to Florida communities, the authors examined how the effect of individuals' criminal propensity depends on the social contextual variables of both the county to which the offender is released and the neighboring counties. Implications for theory, research, and policy are discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) self-control theory has inspired extensive new research, with most studies supporting its central prediction that low self-control significantly affects crime and deviance. The theory includes other predictions, however, that have received much less scrutiny. Included among these is the stability thesis-the argument that self-control is developed early in childhood as a result of parental socialization, and that individual differences emerging then persist over time. The purpose of this study is to provide a rigorous test of the stability thesis. First, we examine the extent of stability and change in self-control for a national sample of U.S. children age 7 to 15. We go beyond earlier studies by using a group-based modeling approach (Nagin, 2005) to consider that self-control may not develop in a uniform pattern for all individuals in the sample. Second, we consider whether parenting continues to affect self-control during adolescence-a period after the point at which self-control differences should be fixed. The analysis reveals evidence that both supports and contradicts the theory. Supporting the theory is the roughly 60 percent of respondents who have high levels of self-control from as early as age 7, and exhibit almost perfect stability (in both an absolute and relative sense) through age 15. Contradicting the theory, however, is a smaller portion of respondents (roughly 20 percent) who experienced substantial absolute and relative change in self-control even after the age of 10. Moreover, parental socialization continued to affect self-control during adolescence, even after accounting for both prior self-control and exposure to parental socialization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical research uniformly supports self-control theory's central prediction that low self-control significantly affects crime and deviance. As many have noted, however, this research suggests a level of explanatory power that falls short of the bold expectations generated by Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990). This pattern directs attention to the ways in which the theory could be improved. This paper considers one potential improvement-devoting greater attention to whether the effects of self-control depend on features of the social context. With little exception, the theory attributes causal significance to just a single characteristic of individuals (self-control). We argue, however, that the characteristics of social contexts likely condition the effects of self-control-its effects on crime should be significantly amplified by social contexts that increase opportunities or motivations for crime. This is consistent with emerging evidence that the effects of criminal propensity on crime are greatest when propensity is matched by presence in a criminogenic social environment. Moreover, echoing a point made by others (see Grasmick et al., 1993), we see this possibility as logically compatible with self-control theory. Our arguments on this issue are followed by an analysis of data from a national sample of adolescents in which we consider whether the effects of self-control are in fact conditional on features of the social context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agnew's (1992) general strain theory has greatly contributed to the revitalization of strain theories. The large amount of empirical work testing the theory and the fair amount of supportive findings indicate its importance for research on the causes of crime. Yet, studies using the theory have been limited in scope, focusing almost entirely on juvenile samples. Thus there is a need to test the theory in other arenas. One important focus may be that of the prison. In short, strain experienced in prison may significantly affect later outcomes for individuals, and this may provide insight into ways in which general strain theory can be both tested and extended. This paper considers this issue by suggesting that deprivation models of inmate adjustment to the prison can be used as foundations for the construction of a test of Agnew's theory that seeks to explain inmate misconduct and post-release recidivism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gottfredson and Hirschis (1990) self-control theory has received significant empirical attention, with most studies yielding supportive results, especially regarding its prediction of a significant effect of low self-control on involvement in crime and deviance. The purpose of this study is to assess two predictions the theory makes that generally have received less empirical scrutiny. The first involves the etiology of self-control, with Gottfredson and Hirschi arguing that variation in low self-control is largely explained by patterns of parental socialization. The second involves the stability of low self-control, with Gottfredson and Hirschi arguing that low self-control is established early in life (around age eight) and is highly stable (relative to ones age specific peers) over the remainder of the lifecourse. These two hypotheses are examined with longitudinal panel data collected from a national sample of children and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]