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It is seldom useful to try to persuade staff to abandon coercive methods in the moment when they are angry or frustrated with students. Instead, these topics can be discussed during new employee orientation and in ongoing staff development. Ironically, many staff members share that in their own roles as parents they seldom rely on spanking or other severe sanctions. Significant numbers report that they themselves were not harshly punished as children either. Instead, caring adults are likely to invest a great deal of time teaching their own kids social skills, often intuitively through modeling and instilling values. Yet when confronted with students who have not been taught the same skills for respectfully interacting with others, their instinct is to react to the youth's problem behavior with punishment. A core principle in Response Ability Pathway (RAP) training, supported by brain research, is that troubled kids are showing "pain-based behavior" (Anglin, 2003; Brendtro, Mitchell, & McCall, 2009). Since punishment entails administering more pain, this often only intensifies distress and causes youth to see adults as their enemies. The dynamics of this counterproductive "tit-for-tat" conflict cycle should be taught to new staff members and frequently revisited throughout a staff member's time of service. While it may be natural for staff to expect troubled students to show positive behavior, this will never happen if they slip into coercive child-rearing strategies. RAP does not promote permissiveness or tolerance of destructive behavior; rather, it prescribes a different type of consequence. Youth are engaged in respectful communication to consider how their behavior is hurting self and others and to learn more effective ways to meet their needs. The core principles of RAP address problems as opportunities to "connect" with youth in order to help them "clarify" challenges and "restore" bonds of respect. (Contains 2 tables.)

Researchers and educators recognize that performance assessments and naturalistic observations are well suited for assessing young children's thinking abilities and understanding. The need to establish explicit evaluation criteria to guide assessment decisions has led to the widespread use of rubrics. Rubrics tend to channel assessors to look for features of task performance that are similar to or different from the description contained in the rubrics and ignore other aspects of task performance or thinking skills. This qualitative research adapted cognitive task analysis techniques typically used to study adult expert performance to explore young children's thinking skills and domain knowledge in their task performances. This innovative approach demonstrates that such techniques as thinking conversations and visual representations can be useful tools for eliciting and analyzing children's thinking processes and skills. These techniques allow for a more open-ended approach to exploring children's thinking competence than such commonly used methods as tests and criteria-based performance assessments. They can be employed to identify specific aspects of children's thinking competence for formative purposes or subsequent targeted assessment. The findings of this study could contribute to both research methodology and educational assessment methods. (Contains 3 figures and 1 note.)

The assessment of young children's thinking competence in task performances has typically followed the novice-to-expert regimen involving models of strategies that adults use when engaged in cognitive tasks such as problem-solving and decision-making. Socio-constructivists argue for a balanced pedagogical approach between the adult and child that takes into account the situated nature of learning and children's emergent competence. The model of task performance co-constructed between the researcher and the children in the study reported here is a direct response to this challenge. The qualitative study involved 28 seven-to eight-year-olds in a primary classroom in New Zealand and examined a total of 25 cases of children's task performances over a period of three months. Case examples are discussed in this article to demonstrate how the model can be used to analyse and assess children's thinking competence. It is argued that the findings discussed in this article could contribute to educational assessment methods.

HTML 5 is the most significant update of HTML in the last 10 years since XHTML was introduced. It promises a vastly improved user experience, increased browser features, cross compatibility and the ability to provide semantic content. In this paper we discuss the near future position for Higher Education in terms of technological transform, the proposed capabilities of HTML 5, and how they may change and how virtual learning environments are implemented in the future. We offer a set of education-based scenarios and how the emerging standard could benefit them. Finally we conclude with possible implementation timescales. (Contains 1 figure.) [This paper was published in the ALT-C 2012 Conference Proceedings.]

This study examined Library Anxiety in a cohort of developmental English students. Levels of anxiety were measured in 191 students using Bostick's Library Anxiety Scale. Thirteen of those students were then interviewed about their use, knowledge and valuation of their campus library. The results of the interviews were compared against the measured anxiety levels. While use of the library had connections to levels of Library Anxiety, library knowledge was primarily affected by the behaviors and attitudes of classroom instructors. Students held high opinions of the library, and librarians; however, this did not result in better use of it or its resources. (Contains 4 tables.)

Though less productive than rival word-formation processes like compounding and affixation, blending is still a rich source of neologisms in French. Despite this productivity, however, blends are often seen by scholars as unpredictable, uninteresting, or both. This analysis picks up where recent studies of blending have left off, using Correspondence Theory and a bundle of segmental constraints to deal with this phenomenon as it pertains to French. More specifically, it shows that blending is the result of a single output standing in correspondence with two or more other outputs, and that we do not need to refer to prosodic information, which is crucial in accounts of blending in languages with lexical stress like English, to account for the process in French. The analysis also differs from previous studies in that it locates blending exclusively within the phonology, leaving its morphological and semantic characteristics to be handled by other processes in the grammar.

Self-talk has been recognised as a tool used by children to regulate their thinking and behaviour. To support children's use of self-regulatory verbal strategies, educators need to understand the context, content and dynamics of children's self-talk. While a significant amount of empirical research had been carried out on self-talk, most was carried out from the perspective of developmental psychology and few sought children's perspectives. This study explored seven- to eight-year-olds' use of self-talk through children's reflective journals and interviews. The findings showed that, as self-talk became largely internalised, the children continued to engage in various forms of self-talk when handling cognitive and socio-emotional challenges. Their self-talk afforded insights into their attitudes and dispositions, their internal standards and mastery goal-orientation and their metacognitive awareness of the efficacy of their self-talk. The study suggests that self-talk could play an important role in children's socio-emotional competence and creative problem-solving.

In the second paper of this series, the effect of transverse femoral stresses due to locomotion in theropod dinosaurs of different sizes was examined for the case of an unchanging leg geometry. Students are invariably thrilled to learn about theropod dinosaurs, and this activity applies the concepts of torque and stress to the issue of theropod locomotion. In this paper, our model calculation of Ref. 1 is extended to incorporate the fact that larger animals run with straighter legs. As in Ref. 1, students use geometric data for the femora of theropod dinosaurs to analyze their locomotion abilities. This can either be an in-class activity or given as a homework problem. Larger theropods are found to be less athletic in their movements than smaller theropods since the stresses in the femora of large theropods are closer to breaking their legs than smaller theropods.

Antelope Valley College Library has provided online library instruction tutorials for students since 2000. These tutorials were developed in three phases during the last five years. This article describes the evolution of the tutorials including how to create a web based tutorial and accompanying interactive quiz. Hardware and software requirements are outlined. The article encourages librarians with modest web development skills to become involved in development of online tutorials designed especially for the particular needs of their student populations. (Contains 9 notes.)

During website development, the selection of suitable computer language and reasonable use of relevant open-source projects is imperative. Although the two languages, PHP and Java, have been extensively investigated in this context, there are not many security test reports based on their open-source projects. In this article, we conducted separate security analyses on web-related open-source projects based on PHP and Java. To this end, different open-source frameworks and services are used to design websites used to test experimental attacks on 12 popular open-source filters available on GitHub, as well as investigate the use of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) in the Firefox browser environment. Using malicious payloads published by Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and others, Cross-site Scripting (XSS), Local File Inclusion (LFI), SQL injection, and LDAP injection are performed on the test targets. The experimental results reveal that although PHP-based open-source projects are more vulnerable to attacks than Java-based ones, there is significant room for improvement. Finally, a whitelist-based filtering scheme is proposed. This scheme filters the inline attributes of label elements so that the filter has an excellent detection rate of malicious payloads while having an excellent pass rate of benign payloads. Effective references and suggestions for web developers are also included to aid the selection of open-source web projects, and feasible solutions to improve filter performance are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]