Online Education And College Degree

Online degree, online education, part 25. APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS

2010-03-11T07:13:00.000-08:00

APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
Applied behavior analysis is a methodology for systematically applying the principles of learning theory to develop interventions that will improve socially significant behaviors to a meaningful degree, as well as demonstrate that the interventions employed are responsible for the improvement in behavior. Applied behavior analysis has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a highly effective approach across a wide range of problems and environments, including education, mental health and mental retardation, parent training, environmental management, and organizational management. Applied behavior analysis is a specialty used by various professions. It is not regulated by most states, except as part of psychology or other established professions, although there have been a few attempts to recognize trained and qualified behavior analysts over the years. Most recently the nonprofit Behavior Analyst Certification Board has promoted a national certification program to identify and credential qualified practitioners and trainers.

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Principles and Techniques
Several terms besides applied behavior analysis have been used to describe intervention methods based on behavioral learning theories, including behavior modification, behavior therapy, and others. Although sometimes used interchangeably, there are possible distinctions made. Applied behavior analysis is used most often for the orientation that derives predominantly from Skinnerian operant conditioning and follows a radical behavioral philosophy. Although other behavioral orientations often utilize operant principles to differing degrees, they typically place a greater emphasis on classical conditioning processes (the neo-behavioristic mediational model) or cognitions and perceptions as targets for change (social learning theory and cognitive behavior modification) than does applied behavior analysis.
Operant conditioning eschews hypothetical mental constructs as explanatory contracts. Behaviors are viewed as being selected by environmental consequences, much like adaptive changes are in Darwinian evolution, rather than being emitted to serve some future purpose. That is, a child does not cry in order to attract attention but cries because crying has resulted in reinforcing consequences in similar situations in the past (unless, of course, the crying is in response to actual physical discomfort).
The central precept of applied behavior analysis is that behaviors are under the control of environmental stimuli. Functional relationships are described by a three-term contingency that consists of antecedents, responses (behaviors), and consequences. At times these are referred to as the ABCs of behavior. Early uses of behavior analysis focused primarily on changing behaviors through manipulating consequences. All consequences are seen as directly influencing whether behaviors will recur in the future. Conse-quences can be grouped into three main types: reinforcing, punishing, or neutral stimuli.
The first class of consequences, reinforcers, consists of events that increase the future probability of a behavior they immediately follow. These include events that strengthen behaviors when they are presented following the behavior, such as food, attention, or social praise. This operation is referred to as positive reinforcement. For example, a child may learn to apologize because the apology consistently is followed by parental praise. Behaviors also can be strengthened through the removal of an aversive (negative) stimulus following a behavior. This operation is termed negative reinforcement. This would be the case if a child learns to apologize if the apology terminates (or avoids) being scolded by his or her parents.
Reinforcers can either be biologically preestablished (primary reinforcers), such as food or water, or can acquire reinforcing properties through careful pairing with primary reinforcers (conditioned reinforcers).

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Most reinforcers are differentially effective with different people rather than being universal. This is particularly true of conditioned reinforcers such as praise or tokens. The schedule of reinforcement used to deliver reinforcers also is important. Early in the process of strengthening a behavior, reinforcers are typically delivered on a continuous schedule, where a reinforcer is given each time the response occurs. Later in the process, various schedules are used that deliver reinforcers more intermittently and help increase resistance to extinction and/or produce specific types of responding patterns.
Punishment consists of two operations, but these weaken the likelihood of behaviors recurring. In positive punishment, the presentation of the consequence following the behavior results in weakening future occurrences of a behavior. An example might be a brief swat on the bottom when a young child chases a ball into the street. Removing a reinforcing stimulus contingent upon a behavior also can weaken it. This is negative punishment and includes, for example, taking away television-watching privileges for a short time to weaken a child's lying behavior. Applied behavior analysts typically advocate negative punishment as a more appropriate reductive method in most cases.
Behavior also may be decreased through the use of extinction, where the connection between a response and its maintaining consequences is discontinued, leading to a progressive decline in the rate of a previously reinforced response.
Antecedents, which are the front end of the three-term contingency, influence behaviors largely through a prior history of differential association with reinforcing or punishing consequences. When a child's behavior has been reinforced previously in a situation, the likelihood of that behavior is heightened under similar circumstances. It is lowered in situations in which reinforcement has been consistently withheld or punished. For example, a child whose father con-sistently buys him candy in a store when he whines is likely to exhibit similar behaviors in the future when shopping with his father. With his mother, who does not "give in," the child will learn not to whine.
Another type of antecedent stimulus used program-matically includes visual, verbal, or physical prompts given to increase the likelihood a child will respond appropriately to the given situation. For example, pictures of objects may be placed with letters to assist a child in learning letter sounds. These can then be removed either abruptly or through a gradual process called fading. Modeling can be seen as a special form of prompting in which someone demonstrates a desired behavior to increase its likelihood.
When a behavior is not present in the individual's repertoire, the procedure of shaping or successive approximations may be used. Shaping involves reinforcing progressively closer approximations of the desired behavior. For example, in teaching new words to a young child, the child is reinforced for vocalizations that are increasingly more like the desired word. As the sequence progresses, the word must be more and more like the target word for the child to receive reinforcement.
Particularly important behavioral concepts for instructional applications include discrimination, generalization, and concept formation. Behaviorally, concept formation occurs when the same response occurs to a group of discriminably different objects that have some aspect in common (as well as responding differently to other classes of stimuli). Concept formation involves both generalization and discrimination: generalization within classes and discrimination between classes. Thus, a child who responds "dog" to different examples of dog but not cats or other animals is exhibiting concept formation.
Many other effective techniques have evolved over time from this relatively small set of basic principles. In addition to those just mentioned, these include procedures such as overcorrection, token economies, time-out, response cost, self-monitoring, and task analysis.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online degree, online education, part 24. Anxiety Disorders.

2010-02-11T05:49:00.000-08:00

Anxiety Disorders in Children and Adolescents in School
Many children and adolescents who either have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or have high levels of anxiety experience difficulty in the school setting. Students with anxiety disorders or high levels of anxiety have more difficulty learning new material, receive poorer grades, and do not perform as well on standardized and classroom tests. These students may struggle in core courses such as reading and math. They are also more likely to repeat a grade and drop out of school.
Besides experiencing academic difficulties, children and adolescents with anxiety disorders experience poor peer relationships. Because of cognitive distortions or maladaptive thinking patterns, these children and adolescents view their relationships with others more negatively. These negative perceptions of their relationships with others reduce the likelihood of interactions with peers. These individuals may feel socially isolated and experience depression and feelings of hopelessness.
Symptoms of anxiety can significantly interfere with children or adolescents' social-emotional and academic functioning. In light of these concerns, children and adolescents with an anxiety disorder may be eligible for special education and related services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA). Specifically, anxiety disorders are categorized under the emotional disturbance (ED) category of disabilities. To meet the criteria for an emotional disturbance, a student must exhibit one or more of the following conditions, and the condition(s) must have occurred over a long period of time and to a marked degree and must adversely affect the individual's educational performance:
1.An inability to learn that cannot be explained by intellectual, sensory, or health factors
2.An inability to build or maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers
3.Inappropriate types of behavior or feelings under normal circumstances
4.A general pervasive mood of unhappiness or depression
5.A tendency to develop physical symptoms or fears associated with personal or school problems

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Assessment of individuals With an Anxiety Disorder
To detect an anxiety disorder or high levels of anxiety in individuals of different ages, a multimethod approach to the assessment of anxiety is recommended. A multi-method approach involves the use of different types of measures completed by multiple informants across multiple settings to detect anxiety and comorbid conditions. A variety of assessment techniques, including clinical interviews, rating scales, direct observations, self-report, and psychophysiological measures, are available to assess anxiety in individuals of different ages. Many of these measures are completed by multiple informants (self, parent, spouse, and/or teacher) across multiple settings (home, school, and/or work).
Treatment of Anxiety
Once an assessment or evaluation is completed and high levels of anxiety are detected or an anxiety disorder is diagnosed, assessment results are linked to interventions to ameliorate anxiety and its negative effects. Different treatment strategies are available to address anxiety, including pharmacotherapy, behavioral strategies, and cognitive-behavioral interventions. Additional strategies may also be used to address comorbid issues. Thus, a multimodal approach, consisting of two or more interventions, is often used to alleviate an individual's anxiety and its negative effects.
Pharmacological treatment is one means of alleviating anxiety in individuals. Medications that have been used to treat anxiety include benzodiazepines, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, tricyclic antidepressants, and buspirone. Medication is often used in combina-tion with other treatments such as cognitive-behavior therapy because although the medication may reduce anxiety symptoms, it does not help individuals learn to cope effectively with their anxiety.
Behavioral interventions are another means of reducing anxiety in individuals. Relaxation training, systematic desensitization (graduated exposure), and modeling are some of the behavioral strategies used to treat anxiety. These strategies have been shown to be effective. Relaxation training may include deep breathing exercises or progressive muscle relaxation. Progressive muscle relaxation involves individuals learning to relax and tense different muscle groups in order to become more relaxed. Relaxation training may also be found in systematic desensitization. In systematic desensitization, a fear hierarchy is created, consisting typically of 10 to 15 steps evenly spaced. For example, if an individual had a fear of large dogs, the first step in the fear hierarchy may consist of a discussion about dogs. The second step may involve looking at a picture of dogs. The third step of the fear hierarchy may involve driving past a pet shop and so on until the last step, when the individual pets a real-life dog. The purpose of creating a fear hierarchy is to gradually expose the individual, step by step, to the feared stimulus. The graduated exposure can be conducted using imagery or real-life experiences. Relaxation or another incompatible response to anxiety is induced along the way to calm the individual as graduated exposure of the feared stimulus occurs. Modeling is another behavioral strategy used to reduce fears and anxieties. Modeling is based on social learning theory in which an individual observes, either live or on film, a person who interacts successfully with the feared stimulus or situation. The model is typically of the same age and gender as the individual. After watching the model interact successfully with the feared stimulus or situation, the individual is more likely to perform the same behavior, and the fear and anxiety associated with the feared stimulus or situation are reduced.
Cognitive-behavioral strategies, such as self-instruction, self-control training, and rational-emotive therapy, have also been used to alleviate individuals' anxieties. Self-instruction involves the use of positive self-talk to handle anxiety-provoking situations. In self-control training, individuals learn to modify and restructure maladaptive thoughts, resulting in less anxiety in the presence of anxiety-provoking stimuli or situations. Less anxiety experienced then leads to positive changes in behavior because these individuals are more likely to approach the feared stimuli or situations. Replacement of false, irrational beliefs that underlie an anxiety problem with rational beliefs is the focus of rational-emotive therapy.

Prevention of Anxiety
Because anxiety is a common mental health concern facing many Americans today, efforts should be directed toward the prevention of anxiety disorders. The emotional, social, and economic costs associated with anxiety disorders are astronomical. Economic costs alone are estimated to be more than $40 billion per year. Yet, few prevention programs exist. Although prevention programs are costly up front, universal (primary), selective (secondary), and indicated (advanced) prevention programs are needed. Future efforts should be directed toward the development and implementation of these programs, as there will never be enough mental health professionals to provide adequate treatment of anxiety and other disorders.

Patricia A. Lowe and Jennifer M. Raad

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online Education And Degree. Part 23. Common Features of Anxiety Disorders

2010-02-06T02:29:00.000-08:00

Although different types of anxiety disorders exist, according to Michael Telch, Jasper Smits, Matt Brown, and Victoria Beckner, there are some common features across these different disorders. Common features include escape and avoidance behaviors, chronic worry, attentional hypervigilance, faulty threat perception, and sympathetic activation. Individuals with an anxiety disorder try to avoid or escape from stimuli or situations that make them anxious, and they constantly worry about current and future events. These individuals attend excessively to cues that they perceive as threatening. The excessive attention given to these cues is referred to as attentional hypervigilance. Faulty threat perception is another common feature found among individuals with an anxiety disorder. These individuals erroneously perceive situations as threatening. Sympathetic activation is also a core feature found among individuals with an anxiety disorder. Activation of the sympathetic nervous system producing physiological changes in the body occurs in individuals with an anxiety disorder when there is no real or potential threat. Physiological changes experienced by these individuals in the absence of a real or potential threat may include accelerated heart rate, muscle tension, and increased perspiration and respiration.
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Types of Anxiety Disorders
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fourth Edition, Text Revision) (DSM-IV-TR) has identified 15 types of anxiety disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder, separation anxiety disorder, specific phobia, social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, acute stress disorder, panic attack, panic disorder with and without agoraphobia, agoraphobia without a history of panic disorder, anxiety disorder not otherwise specified, anxiety disorder due to a general medical condition, and substance-induced anxiety disorder. Generalized anxiety disorders, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorders, panic disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorders are the most common types of anxiety disorders.
Although there are several types of anxiety disorders, each involves an excessive degree of worry or fear about certain stimuli, situations, or events, which significantly interferes with an individual's normal state of functioning. Generalized anxiety disorder is characterized by a chronic, excessive, and uncontrollable degree of worry about a variety of events or situations, such as friends, family, school, work, or the future. Symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder include fatigue, irritability, restlessness, muscle tension, and difficulties with concentration and sleep. Another common anxiety disorder, specific phobia, is characterized by an extreme and irrational fear in response to a specific stimulus, such as animals or insects (e.g., dogs), aspects of the natural environment (e.g., storms), blood (e.g., viewing blood or receiving an injection), situations (e.g., being in small spaces), or other stimuli (e.g., loud sounds or costumed characters). This worry must be present for at least 6 months and may lead to symptoms in children such as crying, clinging, tantrumming, dizziness, shortness of breath, and fainting.
Like a specific phobia, social phobia is associated with particular circumstances and must involve symptoms present for at least 6 months. An individual with a social phobia experiences extreme worry regarding social situations. The individual may worry over or fear the possibility of ridicule, humiliation, or embarrassment in social situations, such as speaking in class or conversing with peers. Individuals with a social anxiety disorder may attempt to avoid or escape social behaviors, and they often have poor social skills. These individuals may also experience symptoms such as trembling hands or voice, perspiration, muscle tension, and blushing.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder involves obsessions (recurrent or persistent thoughts or worries that intrude on, and interfere with, an individual's normal functioning) and compulsions (repetitive behaviors, rituals, or practices in which the individual engages to provide relief from, or comply with, the obsessive thoughts or worries). Common obsessions and compulsions in children include contamination (hand washing), safety (checking), preoccupations with orderliness and symmetry (ordering, aligning), and counting or touching rituals. Individuals with an obsessive-compulsive disorder may feel embarrassed by their compulsions and may experience difficulties related to concentration, preoccupations, and perfectionist tendencies.
Posttraumatic stress disorder refers to stress or worry experienced by an individual following a traumatic event (such as a serious injury, death, or catastrophic event). The individual reexperiences the event (via flashbacks, nightmares, or images), as well as the accompanying physiological arousal, and may attempt to avoid stimuli associated with the event. Following the event, the individual may feel helpless, fearful, agitated, or disorganized and may experience hypervigilance, irritability, and difficulties with concentration or sleep. These symptoms must be present for at least 1 month following the traumatic event. If symptoms are present for less than 1 month, then an acute stress disorder may be present. Similar to posttraumatic stress disorder, acute stress disorder also results from witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event. Symptoms include reexperiencing the event and the accompanying physiological arousal; however, these symptoms are present for no more than 1 month.
A panic disorder refers to recurrent and unexpected panic attacks that are followed for at least 1 month by concern about, or consequences of, having another attack and/or a change of behavior related to the attack. Panic attacks develop abruptly, often last for approximately 10 minutes, and involve symptoms such as heart palpitations, sweating, chest pain, dizziness, fear of dying, feelings of detaching from one's body, and feelings of losing control. If the attacks become more frequent, the individual may come to fear experiencing a panic attack in public places, and develop agoraphobia (fear of public places) as well. However, agoraphobia may also develop in the absence of, and without resulting from, a panic disorder. In these cases, individuals may avoid public situations, such as being in a crowd or traveling in a train, and may experience symptoms of panic in these situations.
Separation anxiety disorder is an anxiety disorder commonly found in children. Separation anxiety disorder refers to excessive and unrealistic worry in response to separation from home or a caregiver. Children with separation anxiety disorder may experience nightmares with separation themes, headaches, stomachaches, or nausea. These symptoms must be present for at least 4 weeks. Separation anxiety disorders tend to decrease with an increase in age. That is, this type of anxiety disorder is common during the childhood years but declines during the adolescent and adulthood years.
Anxiety disorders may also result from external factors, such as a general medical condition or substance use. Finally, for individuals who experience symptoms of anxiety, but whose symptoms, duration, or impairment do not meet the criteria for a specific disorder, a diagnosis of anxiety disorder not otherwise specified (NOS) may be appropriate.
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EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online degree, part 22. Prevalence of Anxiety and Comorbid Conditions.

2010-02-05T03:22:00.000-08:00

Prevalence rates of anxiety in community samples are difficult to estimate, especially given the fact that internalizing disorders, such as anxiety, are often difficult to observe and identify. Prevalence estimates for clinical levels of anxiety in children, young and middle-age adults, and older adults range from 5% to 19%, 6% to 8%, and 9% to 11%, respectively. In general, the prevalence of anxiety disorders has been found to increase with age in the child and adolescent population, decline during the young and middle-age adult years, and slightly increase in the older adult years. Gender differences have also been found in the literature. Specifically, females typically report more anxiety symptoms than do males. However, it remains unknown at the present time whether this gender difference is due to females actually experiencing more anxiety symptoms than males or whether females are simply better able to recognize and report their symptoms of anxiety than are males. On the other hand, overall, more females than males are believed to suffer from an anxiety disorder. However, the gender ratios differ based on the type of anxiety disorder diagnosed and the age of the individual. Despite this variability and the need for further research with regard to prevalence rates among different ages and genders, it is clear that anxiety continues to be a major problem for individuals of all ages and one that can potentially lead to significant difficulties within multiple domains of functioning.
Anxiety disorders have high rates of comorbidity with other disorders. The rate of comorbidity between anxiety and depressive disorders may be as high as 55% to 65%. Speculation as to why these rates are so high is that both anxiety and depression share a similar trait known as negative affectivity, or emotional distress. Negative affectivity includes such affective states as worry, self-dissatisfaction, and sadness. High comorbidity rates may also be due to a sequential link between anxiety and depression, with anxiety serving as an early precursor to a depressive disorder. Comorbidity rates are also high between different types of anxiety disorders. It is not uncommon for an individual who has one anxiety disorder to be diagnosed with another anxiety disorder. Other common comorbid conditions include substance use disorders and disruptive behavior disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and conduct disorder.

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From a trait model perspective, anxiety is viewed as a stable personality characteristic. Without treatment, anxiety disorders may persist. Approximately 45% to 65% of individuals diagnosed with an anxiety disorder do not show remission of symptoms. However, approximately 35% to 55% of individuals do show remission, but many who show remission develop other disorders, especially other anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders interfere with the social and emotional well-being of individuals. If individuals are still in school, academic development may be impaired. For adults, work productivity may decline and unemployment may increase.
Developmental Precursors or Etiological Factors
Different theories exist about the development of an anxiety disorder. The three most popular models used to explain the development of an anxiety disorder are the biological, behavioral, and cognitive models. Biological explanations of anxiety focus on genetics, neurotransmitters, differences in structural regions of the brain, abnormalities in the immune system, and behavioral inhibition. Genetics is believed to play a role in the development of an anxiety disorder. Genetic influences account for approximately 30% to 35% of the variance in anxiety in most cases, suggesting that anxiety is moderately inheritable. The neuro-transmitter gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA) has received some attention as a possible risk factor in the-development of an anxiety disorder. GABA may increase excitatory responses to real or perceived threats, or it may fail to send messages to inhibit these responses. Perturbations in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis indicate structural brain differences in individuals with an anxiety disorder. Behavioral inhibition may be another possible etiological factor. Behavioral inhibition characterizes a child's temperament. Children with this type of temperament are shy and exhibit inhibited behaviors in response to novel stimuli. These individuals are also highly physiologically reactive to such stimuli.

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Behavioral explanations for the development of an anxiety disorder focus on learned behaviors. According to behaviorists, anxiety is a learned behavior that is acquired and maintained through a combination of classical and operant conditioning, operant conditioning alone, or modeling. From a classical and operant conditioning perspective, anxiety problems result when a neutral stimulus, such as a large dog, is paired repeatedly with an aversive stimulus (i.e., an unconditioned stimulus), such as a loud noise, to produce an unconditioned response, such as a startled reaction. Through repeated pairings with the unconditioned stimulus, the neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus, and this conditioned stimulus will produce a conditioned response. In other words, the presence of a large dog will result in a startled response without the loud noise being present on a regular basis. The conditioned stimulus (i.e., a large dog) will then be avoided, and by avoiding the conditioned stimulus, an individual's anxiety is reduced. The avoidance behavior demonstrated by the individual in response to the large dog is an example of operant conditioning. In operant conditioning, the stimulus, task, or situation feared is maintained by a negative reinforcement con-tingency. The feared stimulus, task, or situation is avoided, and the avoidant behavior is maintained because it reduces the individual's anxiety. In modeling, the individual observes the behavior of significant others in response to aversive stimuli, tasks, or situations. When significant others exhibit avoidance behavior and anxiety in response to aversive stimuli, the individual learns to model these behaviors. Exposure to similar aversive stimuli, tasks, or situations will produce similar behaviors.
The cognitive approach to anxiety disorders assumes that distorted cognitions are responsible for symptom manifestation. According to cognitive psychologists, individuals who have an anxiety disorder or experience high levels of anxiety exhibit threat-related attentional and interpretative biases. These individuals attend to threat-related stimuli, and they interpret ambiguous or neutral stimuli as threatening.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online Education, College Degree, Part 21. ANXIETY.

2010-02-03T04:12:00.000-08:00

Anxiety is a common mental health concern facing many Americans today. In 1997 Thomas Huberty defined anxiety as a unique emotional state characterized by feelings of distress and tension about real or anticipated threats that may manifest in cognitive, behavioral, or physiological patterns. Anxiety can have devastating effects on individuals, as it can interfere with their learning and social and emotional development. In this entry, general information about anxiety is presented. Common features found among the anxiety disorders, types of anxiety disorders, and etiologi-cal factors underlying anxiety disorders are discussed. Prevention and intervention strategies are covered.
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Components of Anxiety
Anxiety is a complex emotional state and may involve and influence multiple domains of an individual's functioning. Specifically, an individual may experience cognitive, behavioral, and physiological effects. Common cognitive symptoms of anxiety include excessive worries, concentration difficulties, and memory and attention problems. Anxiety may also be manifested through such behavioral symptoms as motor restlessness, difficulty sitting still, and attempts to escape or avoid anxiety-provoking stimuli or situations. Finally, anxiety also includes physiological symptoms, such as muscle tension, increased perspiration, rapid heartbeat, headaches, and stomachaches.
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Anxiety as a Unique Emotion
Anxiety is a unique emotion as it can be viewed in both a positive or negative light. A slight amount of anxiety can be helpful and facilitate an individual's performance, whereas too much anxiety can be debilitating and hinder one's performance. In small amounts, anxiety can serve as a motivator and lead to optimal performance in school, work, sports, or other areas in an individual's life. For example, a student can become slightly anxious before a major exam. The slight anxiety felt can motivate the student to study for the exam and do better because of the time spent preparing for the exam. In contrast, high levels of anxiety may interfere with the student's ability to concentrate, process information, or retrieve information from long-term memory. Under these circumstances, the student is less likely to perform his or her best on the exam.
Anxiety can also alert an individual to a potential danger. The fight-or-flight response, also referred to as the acute stress response, involves the activation of the sympathetic nervous system in an emergency situation. The individual will respond to a threatening or dangerous situation by fighting or fleeing. Thus, many believe that anxiety serves as a survival mechanism and protects the individual from harm.
Besides its positive and negative aspects, anxiety can be viewed as a normal indicator of development. During the normal course of development, individuals experience fears and anxieties, but the specific fears and anxieties experienced vary as a function of age. Moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that the number of specific fears and anxieties decrease with age, whereas others suggest that the number of specific fears and anxieties remain the same across the life span. Sources of anxiety for infants include loud noises, strangers, and novel stimuli, and for toddlers, separation from major attachment figures and imaginary creatures. Children fear large animals, darkness, and natural events, and adolescents fear social alienation. Sources of anxiety for adults include natural events, injury, and financial issues. Most individuals experience these age-specific anxieties and fears, which are mild and transient in nature.
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EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online Education And Degree. Part 20. ANDROGYNY.

2009-10-22T04:52:00.000-07:00

Androgyny is a term derived from the Greek andras (avSpaq—man) and gyne {yovx\—woman) referring to either the absence of any distinguishing masculine or feminine traits, as in the Hijras of India, or the combination of both masculine and feminine characteristics, whether spiritual, psychological, or physiological.
Most Western cultures presume a binary opposition between male and female. In the 1950s, June Singer revived a mystical interest in androgyny, reconciling the "masculine" and "feminine" aspects of a single human, restoring the balance between what Jung called animus and anima. Like Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung, Singer treated androgyny as archetypal, in which the divided self yearned for the complete reunion of male and female. This understanding of androgyny as a metaphysical ideal was implicit in shamans or deities like Buddha, Shiva, Kuan Yin, and Elohim. Even so, Singer believed that the sexes were naturally differentiated: that males are generally aggressive, dominant, hard, and logical, and women are passive, compliant, soft, and intuitive.
In 1974, Sandra Bern published the Bern Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), a self-test listing 20 socially desirable female traits, 20 socially desirable male traits, and 20 considered to be neutral. Male traits included "forceful," "analytical," and "self-sufficient"; female traits included "sympathetic," "loyal," and "compas-sionate"; and neutral items included "truthful," "sincere," and "friendly." Scores revealed the respondent's self-reported possession of socially desirable, stereotypically masculine and feminine personality characteristics. An individual who received high scores for both female and male traits was defined as androgynous, whereas one with low scores in both was described as undifferentiated. Gender traits had little correlation with the ascribed sex of participants. Like Singer and Jung, Bern believed that people who had androgynous psychological traits were the most effective and well-functioning individuals in society.
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At this time, Constructivism claimed that gender was socially constructed and could therefore be changed at will. Resistance to gender binaries and heterosexuality took the form of transvestitism, or performances as drag queens or drag kings. Kate Bornstein, having performed as a cross-dressing performance artist and encouraged the self-construction of "who you are," used surgery to change herself in 1998 to a "male-to-female lesbian transsexual" but has now settled into being neither male nor female, a gender outlaw.
To describe a born male as "lesbian" indicates some of the conceptual change required by this new gender fluidity, but it did not necessarily accommodate androgyny. A medical category, gender identity disorder, was created to describe those who felt incompatibility between their felt identity and their anatomy. Improvements in surgical processes made it possible to normalize anatomies as normalized male or female, and medical research sought to explain sex "transgres-sions" (gender identity disorder, cross-dressing, or homosexuality) physiologically in order to remove blame and effect a "cure." A few transsexuals, like female-to-male Jamison Green, rejected such normalizing "cures" and accepted their androgynous status to the extent of having hormone treatment but not requiring a surgically constructed penis or denying their past.
Despite a relatively low level of sexual dimor-phism in humans, Charles Darwin had naturalized the sex binary in The Descent of Man by referring to naturally selected sex differences between male and female in gonads, sex organs, body mass, amount and placement of body hair, intelligence, psychological traits such as aggression, and child-rearing practices. But he tended to overlook the high amount of androgyny in the natural world, for instance, in worms and snails. About 30% of the fish species on a coral reef start out as males and end as females, or vice versa, or are both male and female at the same time. Could humans be naturally androgynous?
In 1993 in Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler argued that even though we construct gender, our material bodies sometimes prevent us from conforming to social norms. Earlier in Gender Trouble, she claimed that drag queens in their "queer performativ-ity" demonstrate resistance to being required to "perform" normal dichotomous roles of male or female which they do not feel. The existence of physically androgynous humans challenges those dichotomies at an even more profound level.
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Anne Fausto-Sterling estimates conservatively that 1 in 1,000 persons is born with androgynous physiological features. Previously called hermaphrodites, they are now medically defined as intersex, a term, like androgyny, applied to any person with characteristics determined as neither exclusively male nor female, or combining features of both. The most common cause of so-called sexual ambiguity is congenital adrenal hyperplasia, an endocrine condition in which the adrenal glands produce unusually high levels of virilizing hormones. In genetic females, this leads to an appearance that may be slightly masculinized (large clitoris) to quite masculine. Another form of intersex is andro-gen insensitivity syndrome, in which people born with masculinizing Y chromosomes do not develop male morphology. Other physiological androgynes show chromosome variations such as 47XXY, 45XO, or mosaics. Far from being revered as complete or ideal persons, such anatomical androgynes are usually classified as male or female sex at birth and surgically or hormonally transformed into either male or female in childhood, with remaining variations of the male-female binary seen as transgressive.
Bern and Fausto-Sterling argue that the danger of perpetuating the male-female binary lies in the fact that cultural roles and norms remain dictated by males and highly polarized male values. The placement of the androgyne at the center of our understanding of physical and cultural humanness and our acceptance of complex combinations of male and female defuse current hegemonies.

Felicity Ann Haynes

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

American Indians and Alaska Natives 2.

2009-09-29T05:44:00.000-07:00

The 21 st Century
Today, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the First Nations are a young population as compared with other ethnicities, with just less than half living on a reservation or federal trust land and a little more than half living in urban areas. First Nations persons are overrepresented within the numbers of negative social and economic indicators of disparity. Though rates vary widely between tribes and geographic regions, the First Nations find themselves with many of the most disparaging statistical measures of societal success. Economically, they lag behind other ethnic populations, having high poverty and unemployment rates and disproportionately low educational opportunities and graduation rates at all levels. Physical health disparities include high rates of diabetes and heart disease. Mental and behavioral health disparities include depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and alcohol abuse for the First Nations as a whole.
First Nations children and youth receive disproportionately low levels of prenatal care as compared with other populations. They are exposed to alcohol in utero at higher rates and thus suffer rates of fetal alcohol syndrome disproportionately. As a group, First Nations youth endure disproportionate rates of diabetes, obesity, inner ear infection, cancer, and toxin exposure. The lack of accessible culturally competent health care compounds the negative impact on First Nations health. Suicide and homicide are among the top 10 causes of death for First Nations youth ages 5 through 14 years, and loss and grief follow this young population as a whole, given the historical and persistent struggles with which it is faced. Emerging public health issues for the First Nations include high rates of pregnancy for young women and girls who have insufficient access to prenatal care, escalating rates of sexually transmitted disease (including HIV/AIDS), and an explosion of gang involvement, even in reservation areas.
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Health, Resiliency, and the Balance way
The disparities and impacts of coloniztion with which many First Nations struggle is best conceptualized through an Indigenous worldview. The situation then becomes historically bound and has been framed by First Nations elders and tradition keepers as transcending time in a spatial fashion and experienced both individually and collectively. Thus, historical events are experienced in real time by individuals and their communities. Healing occurs through communal support and recognition of suffering and ritual interventions. In this way, suffering is acknowledged by the individual and his or her support system, and assessment, diagnosis, and treatment occur via a vehicle that emphasizes both individual and group strategies. First Nations scholars and clinicians advocate for an intervention framework that recognizes the inter- and multigenera-tional nature of the loss, stress, and trauma to which American Indians and Alaska Natives are exposed. Such a framework is congruent with the First Nations concept of time and healing and draws upon the use of traditional concepts and strategies.
Assessment, Diagnosis, and Treatment: First Nations Values and Ancient Knowledge
Despite the breath of diversity within the First Nations population, pan-cultural values and worldview perspectives exist. One commonly held view is that of time as cyclical and spatial versus linear, as conceived by the mainstream. Emphasis is on process rather than product. Contextual space or environment is often closely tied with experience and thus with healing. The First Nations see all as connected, whether celestial, elemental, mineral, fauna, animal, or human. Relationships are not compartmentalized along blood lines but rather viewed as broad connections that invoke relational roles. For example, siblings and cousins may be seen as equivalent relationships for an individual, and both will be referred to as brothers or sisters. In this spatial worldview, conceptions of wellness and ill health, life and death are grounded in the idea of keeping balance internally and with the world around one's self, and moving from one time-space domain to the next, respectively. Traditional healers utilize place (e.g., sacred locations) and integrate the help of other elements (e.g., plants, animals) to aid in helping the indi-vidual rebalance. Given the value placed on process and the cyclical nature of existence, all human experiences are held as important. Events such as dreams, visions, and premonitions are integrated into the healing process and not pathologized in the vein of mainstream psychology. Traditionally, there is a broad acceptance of difference and individual diversity, and thus a strategy of relative noninterference exists. Persons are supported through change individually with a healer and/or communally, and they are encouraged to find their own path to meaning and balance, utilizing their own gifts and strengths in doing so. This idea of individual difference and noninterference is quite divergent from mainstream thinking and is particularly evident in mainstream socially constructed concepts, such as that of gender or sexual orientation/preference. Pan-culturally, First Nations persons traditionally view gender as discrete from sexual orientation, identity, and preference.
Given the historical context within which the fields of psychology and education have developed and the current statistics the First Nations face, it is clear that pervasive cultural competence is lacking in assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of this population. Stereotyping, stigma, and discrimination pervade the intervention process with the First Nations and are highly correlated with low rates of contact and retention within the helping professions. Clinicians must consider the possibility of institutional distrust on the part of First Nations clients. Accommodation must be made for cultural differences present between the client and the clinician as well as between the client and the system of service. Language can pose a particular roadblock to intervention, regardless of whether the client speaks English as a second or a first language. Previous generations pass down the cultural worldview housed in Indigenous languages. First Nations languages are relational and descriptive in nature and do not accommodate compartmentalization as English does. Most Indigenous languages provide an understanding of the world as either animate or inanimate, not living or dead. Gendered language too is relatively nonexistent in the fashion of Western-mainstream languages. A close examination of popular standardized assessment and diagnostic tools quickly reveals their inability to competently accommodate First Nations clients. The vast majority of such tools, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fourth Edition, Text Revision) (DSM-W-TR), have been developed through a linear, White mainstream worldview, and few have been standardized or explored in relationship to their use with the First Nations.
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Learning: indigenous Science and Knowledge Acquisition
American Indians and Alaska Natives have had sophisticated systems of hypothesis testing and knowledge acquisition for thousands of years. This knowledge has persisted in oral, written, pictorial, and ritual traditions. Unfortunately, systemic racism, discrimination, and ignorance have all played a role in the perpetuation of the stereotype of First Nations science as a proto-knowledge, a less sophisticated form of Western-mainstream constructs. It is in this atmosphere that First Nations persons are educated by mainstream institutions of learning. Acculturation and assimilation pressures are significant for First Nations children in educational settings and persist through higher education.
Preschoolers may encounter difficulties adjusting to their new setting and its demands. Traditionally, First Nations youth are raised with close attention to attachment building and may share a bed with their primary caretaker(s), may be breastfed until they are 3 or 4 years old, and may enjoy the attention of multiple caretakers regardless of blood ties. Children entering ele-mentary school are often encountering mainstream culture for the first time and can be shaken by the shift in worldviews within which they must function. Boys may be ridiculed for keeping their hair traditionally long, and all youth are subject to defending themselves against the onslaught of holidays and practices celebrated in school systems that may be Christian-focused or U.S. nationalist. Language issues can be a particular challenge, and children may be required to shift from an experientially based traditional educational focus at home to a more linear, prescribed learning style in the educational setting. By middle and high school, First Nations youth often confront the full force of stereotyping and discrimination, as well as the aforementioned risk factors. They may encounter existential crises, struggling to integrate traditional spiritual beliefs with mainstream culture. The risk for internalized oppression is great, as teens strive for identity and self-preservation. A traditional adolescent may attend a school that promotes stereotyping and demeans the spiritual worldview of First Nations persons via Indian mascots or the promotion of, and forced participation in, Christian-based activities. This pressure mounts as those First Nations youth who do graduate from high school attempt to make their way to college. College students may have to travel great distances from their tribal communities and lands, deepening existential struggles. In higher education they find few First Nations mentors, little funding, and can struggle greatly to resolve the rift between their traditional worldview and that of the Western mainstream.
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Indigenizing the Mainstream
Best practices with American Indians and Alaska Natives mandate the integration of traditional knowledge, practices, community, and tradition keepers. Successful strategies and programs are individualized and recognize the potential for divergent worldviews and diversity within this group. Legitimate ways of knowing and healing are held within the First Nations culture and have been utilized for thousands of years to educate and heal this group. The educational psychologist will find a wealth of helpers within the commu-nity's natural supportive structure. Elders, traditional healers and mentors, extended family, and many others can be of assistance for case conceptualization and treatment. Traditional knowledge and values can be found in a group's original instructions (creation story) and provide a useful framework for conceptualizing a client's struggle, as well as his or her ethnic identity. Finally, policies that support the integration of understanding between the mainstream and First Nations may be supported by educational psychology as socially just objectives that promote healing and understanding for both groups.
Leah M. Rouse Arndt

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

American Indians and Alaska Natives

2009-09-28T13:01:00.000-07:00

AMERICAN INDIANS AND ALASKA NATIVES
American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) are persons descended from the original inhabitants of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean. Those who occupy what is now the State of Alaska are referred to as Alaska Natives. The colonization experience of Alaska Natives is originally seeded in Russian occupation, but their experience mirrors that of the tribes in the lower 48 states. As a group, tribal peoples of the Continental United States are referred to herein as First Nations persons. In the United States, there are more than 560 federally recognized nations and an untold number of non-federally recognized groups. These First Nations are culturally distinct and include populations speaking more than 300 discrete languages. The 2000 U.S. Census Bureau reported First Nations persons of full or partial decent comprise roughly 1.5% of the total U.S. population, accounting for slightly more than 4 million persons. In 1987, Russell Thornton estimated the population had exceeded 72 million in 1492. By 1800, according to Thornton, the number had been reduced by roughly 95% as a result of disease, warfare, and oppression. Systemically, the fields of education, mental and behavioral health, and medicine are products of this historical context. A conscious endeavor to comprehend the First Nations experience is essential to any professional working with this population. Sadly, this process is generally not undertaken during academic pro-fessional training. Following is a discussion of the historical implications for First Nations persons in relation to their inter- and multigenerational experience. Cultural resiliencies and treatment implications are considered, as well as best-practice frameworks.
Historical Context
It is widely recognized that Columbus was not the first European to make contact with the Americas. Regardless, this discovery myth persists and permeates presumptions about the First Nations in many fields, including educational psychology. The consequences of Columbus's contact, however, have been significant. One of the earliest outcomes of his arrival was the enslavement of Indigenous inhabitants. European-modeled slavery directly contributed to the mass disruption of many tribes' gender role structures and systems of government. Tribes were impacted differently by slavery depending upon the era in which they interacted with the newcomers; however, contact generally magnified intertribal disputes and fostered a divide-and-conquer stance toward the First Nations. Perhaps at the height of irony, some First Nations even adopted a pseudo-European model of slavery after years of intermingling with those of European and African descent. When slavery was abolished in the United States, all but one slave-holding tribe extended full tribal citizenship to newly freed slaves. This entitled former African slaves the right to acquire land, tribal representation, and protection under tribal laws, therefore requiring the U.S. government to deal with such persons as African Indians. Slavery historically correlates with the introduction of blood quantum as a measure of ethnic identity and belongingness for First Nations persons, a concept formalized within the federal reservation system. The impact of European-modeled slavery in the Americas is complex and ongoing, and its understanding changes the completion of what has traditionally been perceived as a Black and White element of American history.
More devastating than slavery to the First Nations and their ways of living was the impact of disease post-1492. Of the many diseases brought to the Americas by Europeans, the greatest killer was smallpox. This disease followed trade and warfare routes and struck in repeated waves of pandemic, decimating the vulnerable immune systems of the First Nations. Thornton has identified scores of other diseases introduced by Europeans, including measles, the bubonic plague, cholera, several variations of venereal disease, and rare forms of influenza and respiratory disease. Likewise, the introduction of African slaves to the Americas saw the presentation of diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. Thus, the clear conqueror of the First Nations was the repeated exposure to dis-eases by which they were decimated at a horrific and incomprehensible rate.
As the First Nations population decreased and the number of Europeans increased, the competition for land and resources became a focal point for conflict. Warring European groups, such as the French and English, capitalized on traditional rivalries between some First Nations tribes and forged alliances with opposing tribes. Most alliances were relatively short lived and dissipated once the First Nations were no longer of benefit to their White allies. Tensions soared between Europeans and the First Nations as the United States of America declared its independence. With the cultural integration of European tools of war such as the horse and firearms, conflicts between the two groups became more intense and lethal. The United States adopted a strategy of treaty making and entered into agreements with First Nations tribes, promising to cease hostilities in return for land concessions on the part of First Nations persons. Between the years of 1775 and 1890, hundreds of treaties were signed between the First Nations and the United States, though few were honored by the United States for any meaningful length of time in their original form. Tribes continued to be encroached upon, and armed conflict flourished. The U.S. Bureau of the Census indicated in 1894 that more than 53,500 American Indians were killed in wars between the United States and First Nations tribes. This number is likely in the hundreds of thousands if one includes the numbers who died as a result of Indian against Indian warfare as an outcropping of some tribes' alliances with the U.S. government. Acts of genocide add to First Nations casualties. Genocide includes acts intended to destroy (partly or wholly) a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, including killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm, instituting living conditions highly correlated with death, preventing births to the group, and/or forcibly transferring children of one group to another. Both the U.S. government and its citizens committed acts of genocide. Often cited are incidents of germ warfare via infected blankets given to some First Nations; however, it is difficult to determine how many deaths may have occurred in this fashion, if any. Clear examples of genocide against the First Nations are found in incidents such as the hunting down and murder of First Nations persons during raids in the California and Texas territories, where American Indians were commonly viewed as less than human. In addition, scores have died as a result of harsh governmental policies that fostered little chance for sustenance and survival. It is difficult to discern where acts of warfare end and genocide begins. Many of the incidents of the Indian Wars once described as battles, such as those at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, have now come to be known as massacres of First Nations persons instead.
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Though resistance continued on a relatively small scale after 1890, that year is generally recognized as the end of the Indian Wars. As the First Nations fell under the control of the United States, relocation and removal were increasingly used to deal with "the Indian problem." Removals persisted for decades following 1890, and nearly every First Nations group was affected by relocation as the United States strove to accommodate its encroaching settlers. These forced moves separated individuals from their families, communities, and traditional lands upon which entire ways of life and worldview systems resided. During marches, tribes often endured harsh treatment and conditions, cutting to the core of the human capacity to make meaning of what was being endured. High rates of mortality were recorded, and historical writings reveal the emergence of modern-day disorders such as refugee syndrome and concentration camp syndrome, conditions currently recognized as manifestations of posttraumatic symptoms. The First Nations were faced with repeated and persistent stress, trauma, loss, and grief to which they were forced to respond. A core source of resilience and coping was found in the pan-Indigenous value system and worldview. The First Nations turned to their spiritual leaders for guidance and hope. As the U.S. government sought continually to manage its Indian problem, it resorted to an apartheid approach of diplomacy—the reservation system. Tribes were generally removed from traditional lands and given dominion over a smaller tract. The life on reservations was often appalling, with starvation, violence, and death all too frequent. The changes First Nations persons faced were pervasive and affected their mental, behavioral, and physical health. The impact of this paternalistic treatment by the United States persists, and First Nations persons continue to struggle with the implications.
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As American Indians and Alaska Natives fell under the increased control of Whites, acculturation and assimilation pressures mounted. This is particularly true in respect to the education of First Nations youth. The boarding school era is recognized by First Nations scholars and professionals as the most destructive period in U.S. Indian policy. During the 1800s and 1900s, First Nations children were removed from their homes, as early as age 5, and sent to Christian mission and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools for European-oriented education with a focus on assimilation into White culture. Probably the most famous school was Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, the first off-reservation government-sponsored boarding school. The school was established in 1879 by Henry Pratt, a veteran of the American Civil War and the Indian Wars, whose goal was the complete assimilation of the First Nations. Pratt's motto was "Kill the Indian and save the man." This stance toward Indian education continued well into the 1900s, and First Nations youth were trained in domestic and labor tasks via the school's outing system that prepared them for their place in White society. Children were not allowed to practice traditional culture and were prevented from speaking traditional languages and wearing traditional hairstyles and clothing. First Nations youth were forced to practice Christianity and forbidden, often in the face of physical threat, to practice their traditional religions. Children were subjected to harsh punishment in the military fashion of the schools' educational philosophy, and many children endured emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. This era saw generations torn from their traditional, holistic ways of learning and knowledge acquisition and reared instead in a militaristic, institutional setting virtually devoid of the caretaker bonds now recognized as fostering healthy attachment and relationships. The full effect of the boarding school era continues to be examined in respect to both the costs to and the resiliencies drawn upon by First Nations persons.
As failed Indian policies became apparent to the mainstream citizenry, the political tide turned from paternalism to that of fostering self-determination. One failed attempt at this goal was that of Termination. Termination policy was instituted in the early to mid-1900s to defederalize tribes, dissolving their political status as sovereign nations within the United States and thus their trust relationship with the government. The naive intention was to end governmental paternalism, but what was actually instituted was another form of forced assimilation. First Nations persons were subjected to state laws, and tribal lands were converted to private ownership by former tribal members. First Nations persons were forced to own land individually versus communally and were often forced to utilize it for farming, though virtually no provisions were made for helping tribes obtain the needed capital for such an endeavor. Much of the land made its way to White owners when the Indigenous owners were forced to sell it to support themselves and their families. Virtually overnight, First Nations persons in as many as 100 reservations, bands, and rancherias became not Indian as defined by mainstream law. Termination policy has resulted in significant identity struggles for many American Indians and Alaska Natives, as one's ethnicity is defined by another, seemingly at whim and on a continuous basis. An additional outcome of Termination was the mass removal of First Nations persons from reservation areas to urban areas with the promise of employment, education, medical care, and improved quality of life. Unfortunately, what many First Nations families found was poverty and an increased sense of marginalization, as they were now separated from their tribal communities.
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The 1960s marshaled in an era of societal and political change in the United States. Self-determination for the First Nations emerged as a priority, and the coming decades saw increased emphasis on fostering sovereignty. The Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed, prohibiting states from assuming jurisdiction over federally recognized tribal peoples and their lands under Public Law 280. The Indian Education Act of 1972 was an initial effort to require specialized training for educators in an effort to produce and fund cultural competency and to stimulate local attention to First Nations issues. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 encouraged tribes to assume control over federally funded program provided additional funding. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 was a response to the massive removal and institutionalization of First Nations children via foster care, adoption, and detention in juvenile facilities. First Nations children were to be preferentially placed with First Nations families under the jurisdiction of tribal courts. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 recognized the right of First Nations persons to practice their religions and required federal entities to adopt policies of noninterference. In 1988 the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act further defined tribal sovereignty. Also in 1988, Section 5203 of the Tribally Controlled Schools Act added to the intent of the Indian Civil Rights Act and fully repudiated Termination policy. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 acknowledged the profound impact that centuries of objectiflcation have wrought upon the First Nations. The remains of First Nations persons and their burial sites were recognized as sacred, and scores of the deceased were released from museums around the world and returned for proper rites among their peoples. Finally, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 furthered the de-objectification of First Nations peoples and helped turn the tide of cultural acquisition.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Education And Degree. Part 17. Alternative academic assessment - 2.

2009-09-27T11:12:00.015-07:00

Advantages
Efficiency
The administration of AAAs is quick (taking as little as 1 minute) and requires few resources. Items can be developed easily by teachers and taken right from the curriculum. Furthermore, AAAs require little training to administer or score. Also, because they are flexible and can be designed to assess specific domains of academics, AAAs allow school psychologists and other educators to test specific assessment questions rather than routinely test across a broad number of academic domains.
Use of Local Norms
Performances on AAA are often interpreted with reference to local normative data. Local norms are developed from samples of student behavior using AAA procedures. Local norms directly represent the school district population, academic goals, and outcomes rather than the performance of students nationwide. They also decrease the likelihood of bias in decision making because they are representative of student age, grade, race, educational background, and socioeconomic status.
Another advantage of local norms is that there is greater overlap between what is taught and what is tested. Districts have the flexibility to design comparative data based on the specific curriculum. This high teaching-testing overlap yields more meaningful data on student progress. CBM-R is the most common alternative academic assessment that is used to create local norms. In many districts, students complete CBM-Rs in the fall, winter, and spring.
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Benchmarking
Benchmarks are sometimes used to evaluate student performance with a criterion-referenced interpretation.
Both benchmarks and local norms are used as referents to evaluate whether students are making adequate progress to achieve expected long-term goals. For example, if students are expected to read 60 words correctly per minute in CBM-R by spring of first grade, then by winter, it is likely they should read 45 words correctly per minute. A student who scores significantly lower than the winter benchmark is identified as at-risk. The student is then given additional help so that by spring, he or she achieves the targeted level of performance. Benchmarking provides information that will help in determining which students are at risk and should be monitored more closely. To this end, benchmarking is also a vital component of prevention. It allows educators to identify and fix small problems before they become larger.
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Utility Within the Problem-Solving Model
Historically, students were placed in special education based on their scores on large norm-referenced tests (the "test and place" model). An intelligence score below a certain criterion resulted in a label such as "learning disabled." The student was then matched to special education services based on that label, and the problem was viewed as an inherent trait within the student. Beginning in 2001, a shift has occurred away from the traditional model and toward the problem-solving model.
The problem-solving model focuses not on traits of the student but on environmental and situational factors that can be modified to increase student outcomes. The problem-solving model follows these steps: identify the problem, measure the severity of problem, explore possible interventions, implement an intervention, and measure progress in hopes that the student can be successful in the general education setting. The problem-solving model is a circular process, as progress is constantly being monitored and interventions are adjusted accordingly. The problem-solving model does not rely on unproven inferences as does the traditional model. Hypotheses are continually tested and monitored with AAAs. Thus, decisions are evidence-based because student data are considered when creating and modifying interventions.
AAAs provide the necessary tools to implement the problem-solving model, as they efficiently assess student performance and can be repeated often. As the popularity of the problem-solving model increases, so does that of AAAs.
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Utility for Progress Monitoring
Alternative academic assessments not only identify students who are at-risk but also determine if intervention efforts are successful. Because they are efficient and drawn directly from the curriculum, AAAs can be used repeatedly to monitor student progress and response to intervention. Repeated measures provide not only the level of performance but also the student's rate of growth. This allows educators to determine if the student is making adequate improvement or not. If the intervention does not produce the desired rate of growth, then changes are made to the intervention.

Theodore James Christ and Sarah Scullin

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Education And Degree. Part 16. Alternative academic assessment.

2009-09-26T12:29:00.000-07:00

ALTERNATIVE ACADEMIC ASSESSMENT
Alternative academic assessment (AAA) is a class of procedures that are commonly used to assess student
Types Curriculum-Based Assessment
Most AAAs fall under the umbrella of CBA. The fundamental characteristics of CBA include that it (a) derives from, or is substantially similar to, the curriculum; (b) is linked to instruction; and (c) is used primarily to guide curriculum placement and instructional procedures. CBA procedures and instrumentation can be developed to assess skills within either a broad domain or a narrow domain.
CBA is divided into two subgroups: general outcome measures (GOMs) and subskill mastery measures (SMMs). GOMs are used to assess the level and rate of student achievement within a broad range of skills. GOMs are typically used to assess the achievement within the annual curriculum and instruction. A consistent set of procedures and instrumentation are used throughout the academic year. For example, mathematics computation in second grade might be assessed with tasks that span two-digit addition without carrying through four-digit subtraction with borrowing. The stimulus set and task demands are heterogeneous and representative of the annual curriculum. In contrast, SMMs are used to assess the level and rate of student achievement within a narrow range of skills and, usually, within a narrow range of time, which might be defined by an instructional unit. Procedures and instrumentation might change for each instructional unit so as to assess a specific and distinct set of skills that are aligned with the curriculum and instruction. For example, mathematics computation assessments might be narrowed to include only two-digit by two-digit subtraction without borrowing. The stimulus set and task demands are homogeneous and representative of the short-term instructional goal.
The variety of CBA procedures is broad. The following sections review a subset of available procedures. These include curriculum-based measurement, CBA for instructional design, criterion-referenced CBA, curriculum-based evaluation, and informal reading inventories. There are many other CBA procedures, which include end-of-chapter assessments that come along with curriculum materials. The selected procedures are a representative sample of those with the most prominence.
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Curriculum-Based Measurement
Curriculum-based measurement (CBM) is a standardized assessment procedure that is used to index the level and rate of academic growth in four basic skills: reading, mathematics, written expression, and spelling. CBM is generally classified as a GOM because it is used to assess student achievement within the annual curriculum. It is defined as stan-dardized procedure and not as a standardized test. This distinction is necessary because the instrumentation is not standard across applications.
CBM was developed by Stanley Deno and col-leagues in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. More than 200 research studies of CBM are published in peer-refereed journals, and technical development continues through the present day. CBM oral reading fluency (CBM-R) is the most prominent of the available procedures. In CBM-R, the student reads aloud for one minute as the administrator (usually the teacher) follows along on another copy of the passage. The administrator notes errors made and tallies up the number of words read correctly. This yields the student's reading rate, which is reported in units of words read correctly per minute. Error rates and accuracy are also reported sometimes.
CBM was designed to serve as an "academic thermometer" to monitor students' growth in four basic skill domains. The procedures are sometimes described as "dynamic indicators of basic skills." CBM is dynamic in that assessment outcomes are useful to evaluate the effects of instruction over the short term. Outcomes are useful to guide either summative or formative decisions. Summative decisions require one-time evaluations of the level of academic achievement. Formative decisions require ongoing evaluations of the level and rate of academic achievement, which are usually evaluated to estimate the effects of instruction. CBM is an indicator in that it provides a general assessment of academic health within each domain. That is, although CBM-R yields outcomes in words read correctly per minute, that level of oral reading fluency is useful to estimate the general reading achievement and predict performance on large-scale assessments (e.g., statewide tests). CBM targets basic skills in that there are procedures in each of the four fundamental basic skill domains (reading, writing, math, and spelling).
Formative assessment can inform intervention and determine the effectiveness of an intervention. Here is an example: Nick, a second-grade student was referred to the school psychologist for low CBM scores in reading. Nick reads 30 words correctly per minute, compared to the expected 60 words per minute by second grade. The school psychologist or teacher implements an intervention of paired reading for half an hour a day. The following week, Nick completes another CBM at 35 words per minute. Now the discrepancy between Nick's score and the expected score has decreased, signifying that Nick is responding to the intervention. If the discrepancy continues to decrease, Nick will continue with paired reading until he reads at the expected second-grade level. Should the discrepancy remain the same or increase, the intervention will be modified until the desired level of growth is achieved.
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CBA for Instructional Design
CBA for instructional design (CBA-ID) was developed to match the student to the appropriate instructional and curriculum level and focuses on individualizing instruction to ensure mastery learning of all students. A good instructional match maximizes student learning and engagement by fitting the student's needs. Research has found that students are most successful when they are able to respond correctly to material 93% to 97% of the time. This is called the instructional level. CBA-ID starts by finding the student's instructional level and then tests for areas of skill deficits.
CBA-ID has four steps. The first is to choose an appropriate passage for the student to read and test for the student's instructional level by asking them to read 20 to 30 randomly chosen words from the passage. If the student gets five or fewer words wrong, then he or she moves on to the next step. If more than five errors are made, then the student is retested in a passage at a lower level. The second step requires the student to read the passage. As the student reads, the examiner records the student's errors. Afterward, the student is asked questions about the passage to assess how well the student comprehends what he or she read. The last two steps of CBA-ID are to use the assessment information to match the student to appropriate reading instruction and curriculum. Progress monitoring continues as the student is instructed and necessary changes are made.
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Criterion-Referenced CBA
Criterion-referenced CBA (CR-CBA) is similar to CBA-ID in that it was developed to determine appropriate instructional materials and strategies. The methods differ, however, in that CBA-CR determines an acceptable level of performance by comparing student scores to a locally normed sample of average peers. Students are tested on items from the curriculum in order of easy to difficult within a reading series. The teacher or examiner constructs reading tests by using 100-word passages from the beginning, middle, and end of the reading series. Students are tested across 3 days on nine passages; three from the beginning, middle, and end each. As the student reads, the examiner records student errors and then calculates the student's accuracy level (percentage of words read correctly across the entire 100-word passage) and rate of reading (the product of accuracy and 60 divided by total seconds it took the student to read the passage). Next, the student is asked six comprehension questions. Finally, the median scores for the 3 days of assessment are summarized. Assessment decisions are made based on the student's performance compared to the mastery criteria.
Curriculum-Based Evaluation
Curriculum-based evaluation (CBE) is used to determine the student's general whereabouts in the curriculum to identify specific areas of skill deficit. Administration begins with survey level assessment to identify if the student's performance meets expected goals. The initial survey level assessment is developed by sampling a broad domain from the curriculum. In the case of reading, for example, broad skills such as decoding and comprehension are tested. If the results show that the student has a deficit, a skill-specific criterion-referenced test is administered. This second test focuses on specific skills such as segmenting words, rhyming, intonation, and other reading-related sub-skills. Results are used to adapt instruction to the student's needs.
Informal Reading Inventories
Informal reading inventories (IRIs) are similar to CBE in that they identify specific subskill deficits. There is much variance among the increasing number of published IRIs; however, most follow a typical assessment method. First, the student is asked to read from a graded word list. Depending on the student's accuracy, he or she moves up or down a grade level in word lists until the student's instructional level is found. The definition of this level varies among IRIs but usually falls around 90% words read correctly. Second, the student reads a passage from his or her instructional level. As the student reads, the examiner records the student's errors, or miscues. This yields the student's accuracy and reading rate. Next, the miscues are grouped into categories like omissions, substitutions, low fluency words, and repetitions. Attention is also paid to the types of words that are miscued. This allows the examiner to identify specific areas of weakness. For example, a student may struggle with words with a silent e. IRIs determine not only which level of curriculum to place students in but also specific areas of weakness.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online Education And Degree. Part 15. Agression-2.

2009-09-25T08:30:00.000-07:00

Subtypes
Despite the general findings regarding aggression and victimization reviewed above, not all acts of aggression are the same. Instead, aggressive behavior can be distinguished in terms of the form that it takes, the function that it serves, and the relationship context in which it occurs.
Forms
Historically, attention has been directed primarily toward studying overt forms of aggression, such as hitting, pushing, or teasing. More recently, however, researchers have realized that aggression also occurs in a more covert form. This type of aggression, variously called relational, social, or covert aggression, includes behaviors such as gossiping, spreading rumors, excluding the victim from groups, and manip-ulating relationships in a hurtful manner.
Overt versus relational forms of aggression and victimization differ according to age, sex, and context. Developmentally, physical aggression occurs most commonly during early childhood, and verbal forms emerge with increasing language capacities during early to middle childhood; in contrast, relational forms of aggression become more common during adolescence as knowledge of social structure, time spent with peers, and importance placed on peer relations all increase. The historical focus on overt forms of aggression has led to the notion that boys are more aggressive than girls, but more recent considerations of the various forms of aggression have shown that girls and boys are approximately equal in the amount of relational aggression enacted and in the amount received. Finally, there is evidence that different contexts support different forms of aggression, with overt aggression being more commonly enacted on playgrounds and similar areas without adult supervision, whereas relational forms, which might be more difficult for adults to detect, occur more commonly in classrooms.
Despite these differences, there exist high correlations between the two forms of aggression and the two forms of victimization—children who enact high levels of one form tend to also enact high levels of the other, and children who are the victims of one form tend to also be the victims of the other. This has made it difficult for researchers to detect distinct antecedents or consequences of the different forms of aggression or victimization. In other words, the empirical evidence does not provide a clear picture of whether overt versus relational forms of aggression have distinct origins or outcomes, nor whether the victims of these two forms have distinct risk factors or consequences.
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Functions
Aggressive behavior can also be distinguished according to the function it serves. Most distinctions by function separate instrumental aggression from reactive aggression. Instrumental aggression (also called proactive aggression) is that which is intended to obtain resources or social status; for example, a child who pushes a peer in order to take a toy. Reactive aggression (also called defensive aggression) is a response, often in an angry, emotionally dysregulated manner, to a perceived offense or threat; for example, the child who throws a temper tantrum and hits a peer during a dispute.
There are two reasons that this distinction according to form is important. First, the two functions of aggressive behavior are believed to have distinct social-cognitive underpinnings. Instrumental aggression is believed (and there is empirical evidence to support this) to be driven by biases in the behaviors considered and evaluations of aggressive behaviors; for example, instrumentally aggressive children tend to believe that positive outcomes will result from aggression and value these outcomes obtained through aggressive behavior. Reactive aggression, on the other hand, is supported by biases in encoding and interpreting social information; for instance, reactively aggressive children tend to interpret others' ambiguous behavior as hostile. A second reason this functional distinction is important is because instrumental aggression and reactive aggression are differentially related to maladjust-ment. Although both are associated with delinquent behavior, reactive aggression is more strongly related than instrumental aggression to internalizing problems (e.g., depression, anxiety), ADHD symptoms, low prosocial behaviors, and low peer status. It is worth noting that aggressive-only children more often enact instrumental aggression, whereas aggressive-victims more often enact reactive aggression, although the overlap between subgroup classification and functions of aggression is far from complete.
Although the distinction between instrumental and reactive aggression has been important in the study of aggressive children, there has been little attention to how the function of the aggression affects the victims. It seems plausible that distinct characteristics might place children at risk for victimization via instrumental versus reactive aggression, but these distinct risk factors have not been identified. It is also unclear whether victimization by instrumental versus reactive aggression predicts greater maladjustment.
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Relationship Contexts
Although researchers have typically considered the characteristics of aggressors and victims in isolation, there is an increasing awareness that aggression often occurs within specific aggressor-victim dyads (i.e., pairs in which a specific child aggresses against another specific child; for instance, Adam aggressing against Billy). For example, one group of researchers observed boys in small play groups and found that more than 50% of aggressive incidents occurred within just 20% of the dyads. These researchers also found that dyads in which aggression was evident on one day tended to be the same dyads that contained aggression on subsequent days. Together, these findings suggest the existence of aggressor-victim dyads in which aggression is especially frequent and persistent across time. The implication of this and related research is that a better understanding of aggression and victimization might be gained by considering the specific dyadic relationships of aggressors and victims.
Although there is very little research adapting this dyadic approach, the limited results demonstrate the importance of considering this relationship context. For instance, it has been found that aggression occurred more commonly within relationships based on mutual disliking (i.e., antipathetic relationships) than within friendships or acquaintanceships with neutral peers. Moreover, victimization within antipathetic relationships was more strongly predictive of maladjustment than was victimization within other relationships, suggesting that victimization within certain relationship contexts (i.e., antipathetic relationships) is more hurtful than victimization within other relationship contexts.
This focus on aggressor-victim relationships is relatively understudied, but it represents a fruitful approach for future research and consideration of occurrences of aggression. Several questions arise from such a consideration: Is there a differential in personal (e.g., physical strength) or social (e.g., popularity) power in aggressor-victim relationships, and does the amount of this power differential predict the form of aggression or outcomes for the aggressors or victims? To what extent are aggressor-victim relationships unidirectional or bidirectional in the enactment of aggression, and what characteristics of the individuals and relationship predict this directionality? Are aggressor-victim relationships relatively stable (i.e., the same aggressors targeting the same victims) or unstable (i.e., aggressors targeting different victims) over time, and what predicts this stability or instability? These questions represent just some that can be asked regarding aggressor-victim relationships; considering and answering these (and similar) questions represent important future directions for research and considerations for those working in applied settings.
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Future Directions
Aggression is a common phenomenon in children's lives, resulting in serious maladjustment for both aggressors and victims. The evidence for this statement is conclusive, and the dismissal that such behaviors are just "kids being kids" is incorrect and arguably irresponsible.
Fortunately, research has identified several risk factors for aggression and victimization, providing a point of prevention or intervention for these pro-blems. Unfortunately, translation of this research into application has been rather slow, and the existing intervention efforts have not proven as effective as would be desired. The refinement and widespread implementation of effective prevention and intervention of aggressive behavior represents an important task of educational psychologists (indeed, all profes-sionals working with or studying children).
Part of the difficulty in developing effective interventions may be that for too long, aggression has been viewed as a homogeneous construct. Recent work has identified distinct forms and functions of aggression, as well as expanded consideration of the problem to one of an aggressor-victim relationship. Each of these approaches offers promise in better understanding and treating aggressors and victims.
Recognition and understanding of aggression and victimization holds much promise for reducing these problems. In schools where teachers are aware of school policies on aggressive behavior and have received training to deal with these problems, students tend to view teachers as more approachable and willing to take action and, more importantly, experience lower rates of aggression and peer victimization. In other words, the first, and perhaps most important, step is simply in recognizing the problem and resolving to do something about it.

Noel A. Card and Abha S. Rao

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online Education And Degree. Part 14. Agression.

2009-09-23T06:08:00.000-07:00

Aggression is a common problem among schoolchildren and results in negative psychological, educational, and social outcomes for both aggressors and victims. This entry considers this aggression from both sides, that is, the side of the aggressors and the side of their victims. More specifically, it defines the terms aggression and peer victimization and reviews prevalence estimates of each. It also reviews the consequences of aggression for both aggressors and victims, as well as the antecedents or risk factors for each. This entry then moves beyond these generalities to discuss some of the subtypes of aggression and victimization. Finally, it offers some conclusions that can be drawn from the existing research and describes likely future directions for studying aggression.

Definitions and Prevalence
Aggressive behavior can be defined as any act that is aimed at harming another individual. More specifically, the study of childhood aggression often involves aggressive behaviors among peers, that is, children of similar ages (excluding aggression toward or from adults). Using this definition, attention is placed both on aggressors, who frequently enact aggression toward their peers, and on victims, who are often the targets of aggression by peers. It is important to note that some children may be considered both aggressors and victims; these aggressive-victims often have outcomes and risk factors that are distinct from children who are only aggressors or only victims.
Prevalence estimates of aggressors, victims, and aggressive-victims vary widely across studies because of different measurement strategies (e.g., reliance on children's self-reports or nominations of peers, teacher reports, observations) and criteria for classifying children (e.g., many studies define a child as a victim if they are targeted about once a week or more, but others will consider entire school years or lifetime incidents). Despite this variability across studies, it appears that about 10% to 20% of children can be considered aggressors, 10% to 20% can be considered victims, and 5% to 10% can be considered aggressive-victims. These prevalence estimates are remarkably consistent across countries, so it appears that aggression is a problem among schoolchildren worldwide. It is also worth noting that although these prevalence estimates would suggest that most children (50%-75%) are not directly involved as aggressors and/or victims, most children play some role in aggressive incidents, often serving as assistants or reinforcers to aggressors or as defenders of victims.
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Consequences
The substantial prevalence of aggression and victimization is especially alarming when one considers the serious negative consequences of each. Aggressive children are often disliked by their normative (nonag-gressive) peers and affiliate with delinquent peers who may solidify and expand the child's antisocial tendencies. Aggressive children are also often disengaged from school, either by their own choice or through negative teacher reactions, suspensions, and expulsions. These negative consequences of childhood are often exacerbated over time, leading to further delinquency, substance use, and school dropout during adolescence and to criminal behavior, poor marital relations, and unemployment/underemployment during adulthood. Of course, these associations are not perfect, and most aggressive children will discon-tinue, or at least decrease, their use of aggression with time and lead normal, well-adapted lives (in fact, there is evidence that most early adolescents will engage in some antisocial behavior, generally with few long-term consequences). At the same time, these long-term associations suggest that childhood aggression places individuals at increased risk for negative trajectories, and such behavior should certainly not be dismissed as "kids being kids."
As might be expected, victims of peer aggres-sion suffer in numerous ways as a consequence of being abused. Victimization often leads to diminished self-esteem and increases in internalizing problems (depression, anxiety, social withdrawal). Victims also tend to have poorer academic adjustment, including lower grades, disliking of school, and truancy; these consequences are intuitive if we imagine, as adults, how we would perform at work if we expected that someone might assault us on our next break. Victimization also leads to poor social outcomes, in the forms of having fewer friends, having friendships of poorer quality, and being disliked by most peers. This is unfortunate because the psychological consequences of victimization are diminished for victims who have good social support (e.g., friendships). Although the empirical evidence is limited, that which is available indicates that these negative consequences are long-lasting and persist as increased rates of depression and problematic romantic relationships, for example.
Children who are both aggressors and victims tend to suffer even more serious adjustment difficulties than children who are only aggressors or only victims. The additive risks alone of being both aggressive and victimized suggest negative adjustment, and these aggressive-victims do indeed appear to suffer the short- and long-term consequences of both aggressors and victims. Moreover, there is some evidence that these aggressive-victims suffer even worse outcomes than would be predicted by the additive effects of aggression and victimization. It is unclear if the dual roles of aggressor and victim are especially detrimental, or if the same risk factors that predict children becoming aggressive-victims (e.g., neurological deficits, histories of parental abuse) also contribute to their long-term maladjustment. Nevertheless, these children represent a special cause for concern.
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Risk Factors
Given the prevalence and negative consequences of aggression and victimization, researchers have sought to identify factors that place children at risk for enacting and/or receiving aggression.
Predictors of aggressive behavior can be found in both home and peer contexts. Specifically, the home environments of children who enact aggression tend to be characterized by marital conflict and frequent aggression (e.g., domestic violence). Furthermore, aggression is predicted by parenting styles of inappropriate permissiveness or lack of monitoring of children's behavior, negative or rejecting behaviors toward children, and of physical punishment and/or inconsistent discipline of children's behavior. In the peer context, research has shown that experiences of peer rejection and victimization predict increases in aggression, as do group social norms encouraging aggressive behavior and affiliation with aggressive and/or delinquent peers. It is worth noting that some of these peer-group risk factors for aggression are also consequences of aggression; thus, initial home environment may contribute to children's aggressive behavior, which results in peer relations that further solidify and exacerbate aggressive tendencies.
Victims of peer aggression are more often physically weak, suffer internalizing problems (i.e., depression, anxiety), and have lower self-concept than nonvicti-mized peers; each of these factors might make children less likely or less able to behave assertively or defend themselves, which may contribute to them being viewed as "easy targets" by potential aggressors. Similar to aggression, risk factors for peer victimization can also be found in both home and peer contexts. Parents who provide little support or responsiveness to their children's needs tend to have children who are more likely to be victimized by peers. Other parenting risk factors differ by gender; for instance, overprotectiveness and enmeshment predict victimization for boys (presumably leading to the failure to develop age-appropriate assertiveness), whereas coerciveness and threats of rejection are more predictive for girls (presumably leading to low self-concept). For both boys and girls, peer rejection, lack of friends, and engagement in antipathetic relationships (e.g., enemies) in the peer group place children at risk for victimization. Again, it should be noted that these peer-group risk factors are also con-sequences of victimization, suggesting the vicious cycle between peer victimization and poor peer relations in which children can become trapped.
Although aggressive-victims often have risk factors similar both to aggressors and to victims, there is also evidence of distinct risk factors. In the home context, rates of parental abuse and physical punishment are dramatically higher for aggressive-victims than for other children, and aggressive-victims tend to be rejected more and have fewer friends than either aggressors or victims. Although this entry has not focused on biological origins, it is worth noting that aggressive-victims have high rates of neurological deficits and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as well. It is believed that these home and peer-group experiences (and possibly the biological risk factors) lead to hostile attribution biases (i.e. tendencies to interpret ambiguous behavior by others as hostile in intent), which contribute to aggressive-victims' behavior and further maltreatment by peers.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

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Online Education And Degree. Part 13. African americans.

2009-09-16T11:42:00.000-07:00

Health Disparities
As with the achievement gap, there are disparities in health between African Americans and White Americans across the life span. African Americans are either first or second with regard to infant mortality rates, low birthweight infants, and teenage pregnancies. African Americans also have the highest death rates in the United States, both generally and from specific causes such as heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, female breast cancer, and homicide. African Americans make up a substantial proportion of males (34.7%), females (60.5%), and children (61%) dying from AIDS. With regard to mental health issues, African Americans have less insurance and are also less willing to seek treatment, resulting in lower access to mental health care. The dearth of African American providers also contributes to an unwillingness to seek treatment.
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Research Agenda
African Americans make up a substantial portion of the U.S. population. They are a group with a unique place in the history and current sociopolitical context of the United States, and their academic achievement relative to members of the majority culture represents one of the most intractable problems facing educational psychology. Educational psychologists need to develop a comprehensive research agenda on this issue. Although efforts to close the achievement gap continue apace, it is perhaps time to rethink the approach to African American achievement. Data from the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate that Whites and Asian/Pacific Islanders in the fourth and eighth grades had higher reading achievement scores, 22 to 29 points higher, than their Black, Hispanic, and American Indian counterparts. Moreover, these scores have remained relatively unchanged for much of the past decade.
Beginning in 2002, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act required school districts to disaggregate student performance data on the basis of demographic variables, including ethnicity, gender, race, and socioeconomic status. One result of this requirement was to highlight the disparities in educational performance among groups at the local level, disparities heretofore seen only in national data. NCLB also proposes eliminating the achievement gap by 2014. However, there are still no explanations of the achievement gap that are accepted as definitive by large segments of the research community. Genetic, biological, environmental, demographic, and psycho-social explanations have both proponents and critics, and there are no studies in which combinations of all of these variables have been systematically examined.
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Educational research indicates that effective interventions (e.g., Sesame Street) often have positive consequences for those who need them as well as for those who could have done without them. Thus, in the absence of interventions targeted specifically at and solely to African Americans, it may be difficult to close the achievement gap. However, the achievement gap between African Americans and Whites may not be the only issue that merits attention. An alternative perspective suggests focusing attention at the achievement levels that African Americans attain. From this perspective, educators should be concerned with ensuring that all African Americans attain at least basic proficiency in the core academic subjects and the skills to pursue advanced educational opportunities.
Research indicates that effective teachers make a difference in student performance and that the impact is cumulative over multiple school years, but it is not clear how these findings relate to African American student achievement. Nor is it clear how teacher education programs need to change to prepare teachers to not only be effective but also convey appropriate messages to African American students. Effective teacher training needs to counter the increased susceptibility of African American students to negative messages conveyed by teachers and help teachers counter aversive racism. More research is needed on the relationships between African American collective identity and psychosocial variables that are proximally related to academic achievement (e.g., self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and anticipation of success) and on the mechanisms that are effective in supporting these variables in African American students. Finally, researchers need to assess how much variance in African American student achievement is attributable to racial identity attitudes, oppositional identity, and stereotype threat, and which behaviors and attitudes are compatible with high academic achievement and African American ethnic heritage.
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As should be clear, there are many questions that remain unanswered with regard to African Americans and schooling in the United States. Effectively addressing the educational issues related to African Americans will require a focused research agenda and collaboration between researchers and school districts with large numbers of African Americans. Educational researchers concerned with equity, and with African Americans specifically, have a challenging and worthwhile task that requires urgent attention.
Frank C. Worrell

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online Education And College Degree, part 12

2009-09-14T07:13:00.000-07:00

Educational issues
African Americans comprise approximately 17% of the enrollment in public schools. However, they constitute about 20% of the students in special education, 30% of the students in vocational education, 23% of the students in alternative schools, and only 12% of the students in gifted and talented programs. African Americans also make up 10% of the private school enrollment. Overrepresentation in special education is greatest in the categories of mental retardation, developmental delay, emotional disturbance, deaf-blind, autism, and multiple disabilities. In contrast with the school population nationally, which is concentrated in suburban schools, more than 50% of African American students attend urban schools. On average, African Americans attend schools of lower quality with higher levels of segregation than other groups, even though it is 50 years after the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision. In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court indicated that schools that were separate were inherently unequal. African American students report concerns about violence and the availability of drugs, alcohol, and weap-ons in the schools that they attend in substantially greater percentages than do other ethnic and racial groups.
One of the more persistent problems in the education arena is the achievement gap between African Americans, Latinas/os, and Native Americans on the one hand, and Whites and Asian Americans on the other. On average, African American students enter elementary school with weaker math, vocabulary, and reading skills than their White counterparts, even after controlling for parents' education levels, and this gap in achievement widens from Grades 1 to 12. Significantly fewer African American preschoolers and kin-dergartners can identify all the colors and alphabet letters, and twice as many African Americans in this age group are diagnosed with learning disabilities compared with their White counterparts. The event dropout rate (i.e., the percentage of students who dropped out of high school in a given year) for African American students is about 6%, and the status dropout rate (i.e., the percentage of individuals in the population from a certain age group who are not enrolled in school and have not earned a high school diploma) for African Americans aged 16 to 24 is approximately 13%. Dropout rates for African Americans declined substantially from the 1970s, but they stabilized in the late 1990s. In some urban districts, African American graduation rates are below 50%.
Data from longitudinal studies of school-age adolescents indicate that African American students miss more days of school than the aggregate U.S. student population and have the highest suspension and expulsion rates. African American students also report spending more time watching television on weekdays and weekends. African American males are overrep-resented in both incarcerated youth and youth on probation. These disparities are also reflected in both educational and occupational attainment. African Americans have lower college enrollment and graduation rates than do White and Asian students, and the percentages of African American workers decrease as one moves from clerical up to professional positions.
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Explanations of African American Achievement Patterns
Several explanations have been advanced for African American underachievement, although it is likely that no single factor provides a complete explanation of this complex issue. Many of the initial arguments focused on environmental deficits. For example, it was assumed that African American homes were culturally deficient in ways that precluded academic achievement. However, differences related to academic achievement (e.g., quantity and quality of language in the home) were related more closely to class than to racial group. Deficits in the segregated schools that African Americans attended were also identified as a major concern, and one of the major legal accomplishments of the civil rights era was the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision in 1954. This decision led to decades of desegregation plans by school districts, some of which are still in place.
Another long-standing argument has been based in biology and genetics—that is, African Americans have lower scores on measures of g (general intelligence) and consequently lower academic achievement. However, this explanation has been criticized for ignoring data on the increase in IQ scores over the past century (the Flynn effect), the reciprocal relationship between effective schooling and IQ, and the differential contributions of IQ to the variance in achievement across socioeconomic groups. There have also been suggestions that African Americans have different cultural styles than Whites and that there is a mismatch between Black cultural styles and the common methods of teaching in the school system. However, this suggestion has not been supported in empirical studies, in part due to the failure of researchers to adequately define and operationalize culture.
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Socioeconomic status has also been put forward as a reason for African Americans' underachievement, as there is a moderate relationship between poverty and academic achievement. African Americans are one of the poorer groups in the United States, with 25% of African American adults and 33% of African American children living below the poverty line. In addition, more than 40% of the African American population live in households with annual incomes of less than $25,000, and African Americans comprise about 40% of the homeless population. Black males also have the highest unemployment rate, and only 12% of all African American households report incomes of more than $75,000. Although socioeconomic status plays a role, there are data indicating that the achievement gap is present at all socioeconomic levels.
Although there are consistent positive relationships between academic achievement and several psychoso-cial variables across racial and ethnic groups, including academic self-concept, academic self-efficacy, self-regulation, motivation, and future time perspective, there have been few studies of these constructs in African American populations, and the studies that exist have been of limited utility in explaining the achievement gap. African American students consistently report higher self-concept scores and educational and occupational expectations, despite lower academic achievement. There is a growing consensus that the motivation and future orientation of African Americans may be affected by the marginalized status of African Americans in society. African American role models in the public sphere are more frequently entertainers and athletes than academics.
Another set of explanations for African American achievement is psychosocial and implicates African Americans' collective or social identity, also referred to as their reference group orientation. Perhaps the best-known of these explanations is the cultural ecological theory proposed by the late educational anthropologist, John Ogbu. This model has been used to explain achievement differences across racial and ethnic groups around the world, including Australia, Great Britain, Japan, and the United Kingdom, and has also been used to explain achievement differences among racial and ethnic groups in the United States. In brief, cultural ecological theory suggests that one of the ways in which African American educational success is compromised is due to the group eschewing attitudes and behaviors that are conducive to educational attainment if the attitudes and behaviors are seen as "acting White."
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Another explanation involving reference group orientation is the stereotype threat phenomenon proposed by Claude Steele, a social psychologist. This argument focuses on the pervasiveness of stereotypes in the populations and suggests that the strong negative stereotype about African Americans' intellectual capacities in the population can have a detrimental impact on African American performance in situations (e.g., academic evaluations of performance) where the stereotype is salient. Some researchers suggest that African Americans who care the most about doing well and have a strong sense of bonding to their racial group are potentially at greater risk for stereotype threat. Although much of the early research on stereotype threat was conducted with college-age samples, recent studies have demonstrated the negative impact of stereotype threat on school-age African Americans.
More recently, researchers have found that African American college students who are high in race-based rejection sensitivity are less likely to seek assistance in predominantly White institutions and more likely to be socially isolated, potentially decreasing their chances of persisting until graduation. Finally, researchers who study racial and ethnic identity in African Americans have hypothesized that some racial identity profiles may be more compatible with schooling outcomes than others, although there are limited data in support of this hypothesis. In addition, there are data that indicate that African Americans do not have to abandon their racial identity to be successful in school.
Several other theoretical perspectives implicate atti-tudinal and personal identity variables in academic performance. Self-worth theory suggests that students who are concerned with protecting their academic self-concept may choose not to study for examinations or engage actively in learning, thus providing a clear rationale for poor performance (i.e., not studying), rather than studying and taking the chance that they fail and be perceived as unintelligent. Another motivational perspective suggests that African American adolescents may have to choose between belonging to their racial group or being high achievers, leading many capable African American students to resist showing their true academic potential (i.e., / can, but do I want to?). Other researchers have reinvigorated the literature on teacher expectation effects by demonstrating that students can recognize differential behaviors by teachers toward high and low performers from the early elementary years onward. These findings suggest that the differential treatment of students perceived as more capable and less capable has direct effects on students' classroom functioning. The findings also indicate that minority students, who can recognize that they are members of stigmatized groups from the elementary school years, may be especially sensitive to the messages that teachers are communicating.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

AFRICAN AMERICANS. Online Education And Degree. Part 11.

2009-09-12T06:18:00.000-07:00

AFRICAN AMERICANS
This entry provides a summary of issues related to African Americans. It begins with a brief overview of the history and geographical distribution of African Americans in the United States. This is followed by brief descriptions of attitudes affecting African Americans, including their attitudes toward the majority culture, religion and politics, racial identity, and African Americans in society. Next is a summary of the schooling experiences of, and educational outcomes for, African Americans and an overview of some of the major explanations for the achievement patterns of African American students. Despite decades of educational research, African Americans continue to have achievement levels that are substantially below their White and East Asian counterparts, on average, and this achievement gap has been the subject of consider-able research in the field of educational psychology.
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African Americans in the United States
At 12.3% of the population, African Americans are the second largest minority group in the United States, behind Hispanics who make up 12.5% of the U.S. population. Also commonly referred to as Black Americans, African Americans are still the single largest racial minority group in the country. Many Black biracial individuals and foreign-born Blacks also self-identify as African American. However, both of these groups are quite small, constituting less than 1% and 5% of the Black population, respectively. Black immigrants to the United States are from three primary regions: the Caribbean, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa.
In the early 1600s, some of the first Africans were brought to the United States as indentured servants. However, by the mid-1600s, the status of Africans in the United States had been changed to slaves. By the end of the legal slave trade in 1808, more than 500,000 Africans had been brought into the United States, primarily to work on the plantations in the southern states. Until the Great African American Migration (1910-1920), 90% of the African American population lived in the South, and less than 25% lived in urban areas. This early 20th-century migration of African Americans eventually yielded settlement patterns that are reflected in the United States today, with substantial concentrations of African Americans in the urban centers of the northeastern and midwestern United States.
The South still has the largest concentration of African Americans in the country, with more than 50% of the Black population. Nonetheless, African Americans constitute less than 20% of the South's population. African Americans make up about 11 % of the populations in the Northeast and Midwest and about 5% of the population in the West. The top 10 residential areas for African Americans include the following metropolitan areas, in descending order: New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles/Long Beach, Houston, Baltimore, and Dallas. Although there have been declines in segregation over the past three dec-ades, African Americans still live in highly segregated neighborhoods, and the metropolitan areas with the largest concentrations of African Americans also have the highest levels of residential segregation. Affluent African Americans also live in areas with high levels of residential segregation, and children experience the highest segregation levels at home and in school.
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Attitudes Affecting African Americans
African Americans report a substantial amount of mistrust of Whites, and a majority of African Americans report experiencing racial discrimination at least once a year. African Americans report marked mistrust of the police and are more likely than other ethnic groups to believe in conspiracy theories. Thus, many African Americans believe that the majority culture does not want positive outcomes for their group. The increasing numbers of legal challenges to affirmative action, alongside media accounts of police brutality, reports of discrimination in housing and bank loans, and concerns about the disenfranchise-ment of Black voters in recent national elections, are seen as providing support for this hypothesis.
There is some evidence that African Americans' beliefs are not wholly without merit. Although overt negative attitudes toward African Americans have decreased in the broader society, recent research suggests that racist attitudes have become more covert over time and that aversive (unconscious) racism still plays a major role in the lives of African Americans. Thus, although fewer than 5% of Americans endorse negative stereotypes of African Americans, social psy-chology research reveals differential responses to African Americans in several circumstances. For example, in bystander intervention studies, individuals respond equally to Whites and Blacks when an emergency occurs only if they are the only witness; they are less likely to assist Blacks when there are multiple witnesses. Also, people report the same number of negative characteristics for Whites and Blacks but report significantly more positive characteristics for Whites. Similarly, in evaluating job candidates, Black and White candidates with comparable weak and moderate skills are rated equally, but White candidates with strong skills are rated substantially higher than Black candidates with equally strong skills.
African American racial identity attitudes have also received considerable research scrutiny. Black racial identity was first conceptualized as a stage theory, with African Americans moving from an anti-Black stage to a pro-Black stage, with concomitant increases in self-concept. Recent theorizing conceives of Black racial identity as consisting of a set of multidimensional attitudes. Studies have provided support for several Black racial identity attitudes, including low salience attitudes, high salience attitudes, pro-Black attitudes, anti-Black attitudes, anti-White attitudes, and multicultural attitudes. Recently, researchers have demonstrated generalizable racial identity profiles in the population, although it is not yet clear how these will affect functioning. Several scholars have suggested that in the social context of the United States, many African Americans will have some minimal level of negative attitudes toward Whites.
Religion continues to play a major role in African American life, and the church has been one of the most important forces in the African American community. Estimates indicate that there are more than 60,000 Black churches in the United States, and African Americans have considerable membership numbers in several Christian and Islamic denominations. From a religious point of view, African Americans are generally conservative. However, on the political spectrum, African Americans are generally aligned with the Democratic Party. Initially strong supporters of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party after the American Civil War, African American political allegiance shifted as the Republicans compromised with southern states on issues of civil rights. For much of the past 30 years, more than 80% of African American voters have been affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the 109th Congress included 43 African Americans (1 senator and 42 representatives), all of whom were Democrats.
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EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online Education, part 10. Theories and Concepts in Adult Learning.

2009-09-10T11:16:00.000-07:00

There is no single theory or model that explains adult learning. This should come as no surprise, as adults engage in learning for myriad reasons and in virtually unlimited settings. Adults become involved in learning for such wide-ranging purposes as work/career-related learning and training, literacy and basic skills development, earning credentials or degrees, social change or online education and e-learning, and personal growth, enrichment, and enjoyment. Adult learning takes place in such diverse settings as colleges and universities, public schools, business and workplace settings, health and human services agencies, churches, civic organizations, and government agencies, including the military. Although there is no single theory or model that can fully explain online education, there are nonetheless several theories or concepts that illustrate the scope of what is known about e-learning online degree. Five of these are described in the following sections.
Andragogy
Andragogy is a concept that can be traced back to the 19th century. However, it came into prominence in adult learning during the late 1960s and early 1970s through the work of Malcolm Knowles. Knowles was looking for a framework to distinguish adult learning from learning in childhood (pedagogy). Later, Knowles suggested that pedagogy and andragogy are not limited to children and adults, respectively, but are more matched to the maturity and experience of the learner in a given setting. Though andragogy is sometimes described as a theory, it is probably more accurate to describe it as a set of assumptions about how people learn online degree. According to andragogy, as learners mature,
1. their self-concept moves from being dependent to
increasing levels of self-directedness;
2. the role of the learners' experience becomes an
increasingly valuable resource, and adult learning
is optimized when learners are able to tap into their
experience;
3. readiness to learn in adulthood is increasingly based
on real-life needs and situations;
4. there is a shift from learning for future application
toward learning to address immediate needs;
5. intrinsic motivators become increasingly more
important than extrinsic ones; and
6. before learning something, adults typically need to
know why they need to learn it.
Although some critics have challenged andragogy because its focus is largely on the individual learner and does not directly address the social context in which learning takes place, andragogy retains an important place as a set of practices that have value when working with adult learners.
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Self-Directed Learning
Closely related to the first assumption of andra-gogy, self-directed learning emerged in the early 1970s as one of the most systematic areas of research and scholarship on adult learning. Much of this interest grew out of the research of Allen Tough, which was mentioned earlier in this entry, on adults' learning projects. Subsequently, two individuals who have played a key role in developing this work, both through their own writings and through their many doctoral graduates, are Roger Hiemstra and Huey Long. They earned online degrees. Though there are many definitions, models, and conceptualizations of self-directed learning, it is essentially where the learners assume primary responsibility for and control over their learning. In 1991, Ralph Brockett and Roger Hiemstra synthesized ideas from several previous authors to present a model that describes self-direction as the product of two factors: the teaching-learning situation and internal characteristics of the learner. Out of this body of research, several ideas have emerged: first, self-directed learning is the most frequent way in which adults choose to learn; second, self-directedness has a strong connection to how learners feel about themselves as learners; third, several personality and social characteristics seem to have a connection to self-directedness; and finally, research on self-directed learning has probably contributed to a more holistic understanding of adult learners' potential.
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Transformative Learning
Experience lies at the heart of adult learning. In most approaches to learning in adulthood, experience is acknowledged to be an important resource for the learner. However, it is not merely having an experience that matters; rather, it is the way in which the learner makes meaning of the experience and is changed by the experience that is important. In the 1970s, Jack Mezirow reported on a study of women who had returned to college. He described a process similar to consciousness-raising that took place for many of the women. Instead of simply acquiring knowledge, the experience of returning to college often resulted in a transformation that transcended the college experience and led to a redefining of the self. Initially, Mezirow referred to this process as perspective transformation and laid the foundation for a theory that has evolved over the ensuing three decades. Mezirow cited several key influences including Jiirgen Habermas (critical theory), Roger Gould (psychoanalytic psychology), Paulo Freire (conscientization), and Thomas Kuhn (paradigm shifts). Through exchanges with various scholars who challenged aspects of Mezirow's theory, particularly those related to the emphasis on social change, Mezirow and these scholars refined the theory over time and began to use terms such as transformation theory, transformational learning, and transformative learning to describe this concept.
Transformative learning typically begins with a disorienting dilemma that makes it necessary for a person to examine existing assumptions and frames of reference online degree. Examples of a disorienting dilemma include job loss, diagnosis of an illness such as cancer or diabetes, loss of a spouse or partner through death or divorce, or some sort of spiritual awakening. The dilemma, by its nature, redefines this aspect of one's life in a way that cuts across one's roles, responsibilities, and identity. Transformative learning involves a process of challenging assumptions in a way that helps one redefine oneself. An example of this would be an adult who returns to higher education and finds oneself immersed in study in a way that the person becomes socialized in an academic or professional field, and this new identity emerges as a vital part of who the person becomes.
In recent years, the literature on transformative learning has snowballed as various scholars have expanded on Mezirow's original ideas. John Dirkx, for example, has online degree and he distinguished among four types of transformational learning. He describes Mezirow's view as a "cognitive-rational" perspective, which shares con-structivist theoretical underpinnings with Freire's "emancipatory" approach but differs from Freire by emphasizing the process of reflection and rational thought. A third approach is the "developmental" perspective of Larry Daloz, which is holistic and contextually based and emphasizes how individuals negotiate developmental transitions in their lives. Finally, Dirkx describes a "spiritual-integrative" approach that extends beyond the rational approach to focus on feelings and images emerging from e-learning and online education. The point here is that Mezirow's work is seminal to understanding transformative learning, and subsequent work by various individuals, including work published in such sources as Adult Education Quarterly and the more recent Journal of Transformative Learning online degree, demonstrates that this topic has assumed a central place in current scholarship on adult learning.
Humanism and Behaviorism
As with the field of educational psychology in general, humanism and behaviorism have held an important place in the conceptual foundations of adult learning. Humanism, with its view of human nature as basically good and the belief that individuals have virtually unlimited potential for growth, is particularly attractive to those seeking to bring out the best that adult learners can achieve online degree. In humanistic adult education, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are among the seminal thinkers. The humanist perspective underlies many of the tenets of andragogy and self-directed learning and is most often reflected in adult learning activities directed toward personal growth or improvement.
Behaviorism has also had a strong influence in the area of adult learning. With emphasis on reinforcement, learning for mastery, and helping people achieve competency in what is being learned, behaviorism has been especially influential in settings where performance and measurable outcomes are of primary importance. The influence of behaviorism is perhaps strongest in adult learning situations such as training in business and industry and adult literacy settings, where achieving measurable outcomes is deemed central to the success of learning. It can also be found where learning is designed to help people change specific behaviors, such as weight loss, smoking cessation, and substance abuse learning efforts.
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E-learning knowledge is socially constructed outside of the individual learner, these approaches are especially compatible with learning for social change. However, those who approach online education from critical and postmodern orientations tend to reject or minimize the importance of theories and research derived from a psychological orientation. For those interested in online degree and the psychology of adult learning, critical and postmodern theories pose a challenge in terms of the degree to which emphasis should be placed on individual and social dimensions of learning.
Ralph G. Brockett
EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online Education And College Degree, part 9. Adult learning.

2009-09-09T06:11:00.001-07:00

Intelligence, Memory, and Cognition
Central to the study of adult learning, especially in the realm of psychology and gerontology, has been the body of scholarship on the related areas of intelligence, memory, and cognition. Paul Baltes has described the aging mind as having both potentials and limits, resulting in age-related gains and losses. Whereas some areas of functioning show decline, other areas remain stable and, in some cases, show improvement with age.
To understand changes in intelligence, memory, and cognition over the adult life span, it is important to recognize that much of what has been reported is influenced by the types of research design that have been utilized. Cross-sectional studies measure different age cohorts at a single point in time. These studies make it possible to look at age differences on the vari-able(s) being studied; however, they do not accurately describe age changes. Longitudinal studies, on the other hand, measure the same cohort over time, making it possible to study changes that take place over time, but not cohort differences. Most of the early studies on intellectual functioning relied on a cross-sectional approach, and in such cases, researchers often incorrectly identified age-related declines when, actually, what they were observing were cohort differences. As is easy to picture, longitudinal research is difficult to carry out because it requires researchers who can envision and remain committed to a study over many years and even decades. Other problems with longitudinal studies are attrition of participants and instrument decay resulting from changes in the social context that can make earlier instruments irrelevant over time.
One way to minimize the limits of cross-sectional and longitudinal designs is to use an approach that combines both approaches in a single study. Here, longitudinal data are collected over time with a single cohort. During each measurement, however, a new cohort of younger participants is added. Eventually, this design will generate enough data to address age changes over time as well as cohort differences. Perhaps the most influential study of this type is the Seattle Longitudinal Study, developed by K. Warner Schaie. Begun in 1956, with additional cohorts added every 7 years, the Seattle Longitudinal Study has focused on five mental abilities:
(1) verbal meaning, which refers to the ability to understand ideas as expressed in words;
(2) spatial orientation, the ability to visualize, manipulate, and perceive connections among objects;
(3) inductive reasoning, the ability to recognize or make sense of new concepts and the ability to analyze and solve problems and situations;
(4) numeric ability, which refers to understanding
numbers and figures and the speed and accuracy with
which a person can solve numerical problems; and
(5) word fluency, involving ability to recall words in
writing and speech. Basically, this study has presented
evidence that in normal aging, there is little or no dis-
cernable decline in primary mental abilities until the
mid-to-late 60s and this decline is slow until the 80s.
An area of debate related to intelligence in adulthood centers on whether intelligence is a general factor, as is typically defined in IQ tests, or whether there are different kinds of intelligence that account for a wide range of abilities. The view that there is more than one type of intelligence was introduced by Raymond Cattell and John Horn, who distinguished between fluid and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is a biologically based form of intelligence that is innate and involves reasoning ability. Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, is largely depen-dent on education and experience. Thus, in this view, there is evidence that whereas fluid intelligence is characterized by age-related decline, crystallized intelligence, by building on past experience, typically increases over the life span.
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In recent years, two theories have proposed that intelligence comprises multiple factors. Robert Stern-berg has proposed a triarchic theory of successful intelligence, which holds that intelligence comprises a mix of analytical, creative, and practical abilities. The first of these is the more traditional view of academic intelli-gence. Creative intelligence centers on how well one addresses new and unfamiliar situations. Practical intelligence has to do with how effectively one is able to adapt to and solve everyday problems. A second approach to the multifactor view of intelligence is Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. According to Gardner, there are eight intelligences that address a wide range of abilities. These intelligences include linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, and two forms of personal intelligences that involve understanding oneself and others.
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The eighth intelligence, naturalistic, has been added recently and is based on an understanding of the natural environment. The theories proposed by Sternberg and Gardner have relevance to adult learning because they recognize and value types of intelligence that extend beyond the more traditional IQ-based approach to intelligence. Because adult learning typically has a practical bent, emphasizing different kinds of abilities, the notion of multiple intelligence holds much potential for future research and practice with adult learners.
Memory is closely linked to intelligence. It involves the acquisition, retention, and recall of information. Although there are many schema for distinguishing among different kinds of memory, the distinction between short-term and long-term memory serves well to illustrate how information is retained and recalled in adulthood. Short-term memory, which typically covers a period of 10 to 30 seconds, can be further broken down into primary memory and working memory. Primary memory is more passive and involves holding information for immediate recall (e.g., remembering a phone number long enough to go to the phone and dial it or remembering information on a road sign when driving long enough to follow the desired direction). Working memory is more active and centers on the amount of information that can be held in memory long enough to perform some other operation on it. Research evidence suggests that whereas the changes in primary memory are small and gradual over time, there is a major decline in working memory with age. This decline has been attributed to a host of factors, including (a) a decline in mental energy that can result in overloading with increasingly complex tasks, (b) a weakened ability to use strategies related to working memory, and (c) a decline in speed of memory processing.
Long-term memory involves how facts are stored (semantic memory) and the ability to recall events from the past (episodic memory). Semantic memory is typically stable into the 70s and then declines gradually. On the other hand, episodic memory tends to decline with age although it is possible to compensate for some of this loss. Declines in long-term memory have variously been attributed to how material is acquired, how it is retrieved, and how fast it can be processed. At the same time, some researchers have suggested that memory training activities can help adults retain the ability to use knowledge, strategies, and skills.
Cognition involves all forms of knowing and awareness, including, but not limited to, information processing, problem solving, perceiving, abstract reasoning, and judging. Much of the work on cognition in adult learning acknowledges the work of Jean Piaget as a starting point; however, because Piaget focused primarily on early development, subsequent work on cognitive development in adulthood has attempted to move beyond Piaget's original ideas. One model of cognitive development that is often adapted to the adult learning context is William Perry's intellectual development scheme. Based on data from male Ivy League college students, Perry found that as learners develop, they move from dual-istic thinking, where "right and wrong" answers are presented by authorities, to relativistic thinking, where understanding the context is as important as the knowledge itself. An important response to Perry's scheme is the work of Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule, who looked at "women's ways of knowing." They identified five categories of knowing, ranging from "silence," where women lack voice and are subject to what is expected from authority figures, to "constructed knowledge," where women perceive themselves able to create knowledge and to recognize all knowledge as contextual. This important study offered evidence of ways in which the experiences of women can differ from those of men.
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A question that lies at the heart of cognition centers on whether knowledge is discovered or constructed. Whereas many views of cognition emphasize knowing as an internal process of uncovering knowledge that goes on within the individual learner, the literature on adult learning has increasingly focused on the social context in which learning takes place. This approach to understanding knowledge is often referred to as situated cognition. In situated cognition, knowledge cannot be separated from the context in which learning takes place. Thus, learning involves the construction of knowledge within the social milieu in which it occurs. Because it emphasizes learning in social context, situated cognition is characterized as having an inherently social or political element to knowledge and a connection to the importance of power in relation to cognition.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online Education And College Degree, part 8.

2009-09-08T05:18:00.000-07:00

ADULT LEARNING
Adult learning is a complex phenomenon. Although there are many commonalities between how adults and children learn, development and change that take place across the life span play a definite role in understanding why adults learn, as well as how they learn. In educational psychology, an understanding of adult learning and the adult learner is crucial to a commitment to lifelong learning. Major challenges facing those who work with and study adult learners include questions about the extent to which knowledge is discovered or constructed and where one locates oneself in terms of focusing on individual and social aspects of online education.
History
In the early 1900s, the psychology of adulthood and aging received scant attention, largely due to the strong influence of psychologists such as John Watson, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Piaget, whose work emphasized the view that adulthood could be understood as simply an extension of development or learning in the early years of life. However, as psychologists such as Erik Erikson, G. Stanley Hall, Charlotte Biihler, and Sidney Pressey began to extend their theories and research to address the adult years, a greater understanding of the psychology of adulthood began to emerge.
Probably the first major study of adult learning was published by E. L. Thorndike and his colleagues in the 1928 book Adult Learning. As a seminal effort to provide empirical evidence related to learning in adulthood, these authors concluded that learning ability peaks at about age 45, rather than age 20 as previously believed. This study set in motion an effort to understand adult learning ability; this effort has continued to grow over nearly eight decades. Today, most of the research and writing on adult learning come from three fields: psychology, adult education, and gerontology. The field of psychology has offered a necessary, though not sufficient, foundation for understanding adult learning. Adult education and gerontology, through their professional literature, have also made important contributions to learning in adulthood. Although there is some overlap across these areas, each field brings a different framework and importance to the understanding of earning online degree.
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Participation in Adult Learning
One of the most extensively studied areas of online education relates to the nature of participation in adult learning. This involves three questions: Who participates in online education? Why do adults engage in learning? What are some of the factors that deter or limit adults from participating in learning? Online course and college degree. In 1965, William Johnstone and Ramon Rivera reported on a major national study of adult learning participation and found that 22% of all adults in the United States participated in some form of learning activity during the previous year.
Beginning in 1969, the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics began to collect data about participation in adult education. These studies have been conducted every several years and have offered insight into some major trends. Unfortunately, because different data collection procedures and definitions were used at different times, direct comparison across studies is not feasible. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify certain trends in participation. Earn college degree online.
Data from 2000-2001 indicate that 46% of all adults participated in some form of adult education activity during the previous 12 months. This compares with participation rates of 40.2% in 1995 and 33% in 1991. In terms of demographic breakdown, those in the 41-to-50 age group had the highest participation rate (55%), followed by the 16-to-30 and 31-to-40 age groups (53% each). Female participants outnumbered males (49%-43%), and in terms of race/ethnicity, Whites had the highest participation rate (47%), followed rather closely by African Americans (43%) and Hispanics (42%). As might be expected, those with higher educational attainment and income levels also had the highest participation rates. Finally, people who were employed during the previous 12 months had over twice as high a participation rate as those unemployed during the same period (54% compared with 25%).
The way in which participation is defined has an impact on the actual rates of participation. In the data cited in the previous paragraph, participation was defined as some form of online education bachelor degree online class. However, in the early 1970s, Allen Tough used a structured interview process to assess involvement of adults across the entire range of learning activities. In doing so, Tough found that as many as 90% of the participants in his study engaged in some form of learning activity over the previous year. Even more important is that he found the vast majority of learning projects (68%) were planned by the learners themselves, as opposed to a teacher/instructor, tutor, or nonhuman resource such as technology. Tough used the metaphor of an iceberg to illustrate what he found: Most adult learning lies beneath the surface and is not easily visible to those who only study participation in organized courses or other activities. This finding played a key role in stimulating research on self-directed learning, which became one of the most widely studied topics in the adult education literature of the last decades of the 20th century.
To a large degree, participation in adult learning is linked to life transitions. These transitions often serve as "triggers" for adults to recognize that learning can help them negotiate such transitions. In today's world, job-related transitions (e.g., job loss, promotion, new responsibilities, retirement) are the most frequently identified reasons for participation. Other examples of transitions that can trigger the need for learning include family issues like marriage, divorce, and parenthood; health issues such as wellness, coping with a life-threatening illness, or being diagnosed with a chronic condition; enrichment opportunities such as leisure, art, or religion/spirituality.
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One particularly influential study is Cyril Houle's The Inquiring Mind, which was originally published in 1961. Houle interviewed 22 adults deemed to be active learners and from these interviews, he identified a typology of orientations toward learning. Goal-oriented learners viewed learning as instrumental to achieving some other purpose; in other words, learning was seen as a means to another end. Activity-oriented learners sought out learning activities for their social value, as a way to meet new people and socialize. Learning-oriented adults were identified as those who engaged in learning for its own sake.
Many factors can serve as barriers or deterrents to participation in getting degree online. These have been conceptualized according to several different categories. In essence, the major factors that limit participation are (a) reasons linked to the life circumstances of adults, which are often outside the control of the person, such as lack of time, money, transportation, and family responsibilities; (b) reasons related to institutional policies and practices that limit participation, such as scheduling of classes, information about offerings, limited offerings, and policies that discriminate directly or indirectly against adult learners; and (c) reasons related to attitudes and values of learners, such as low self-concept, fear of failure, negative past experiences, and lack of interest. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Gordon Darkenwald and his colleagues, Craig Scanlon, Thomas Valentine, and Elisabeth Hayes, reported on the development of several forms of the Deterrents to Participation Scale. This instrument has made it possible to isolate and identify many of the factors that contribute to nonparticipation in adult learning.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online degree, online education, part 7. ACCULTURATION

2009-09-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

Acculturation is a complex process that includes those phenomena that result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous firsthand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups. The study of acculturation was originally of interest to the fields of anthropology and sociology, focusing on changes occurring at a group level. However, acculturation incorporates changes at the social, group, and individual levels. Later, other fields such as psychology examined acculturation at an individual level. The concept of individual acculturation is also referred to as psychological acculturation, which is explained as a change in attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, and values. In relation to acculturation, scholars have identified six areas of functioning that are directly affected by acculturation: language, cognitive styles, personality, identity, attitudes, and acculturative stress. Although acculturation is usually linked to cross-cultural relocations, as with immigrants and refugees, it may take place in numerous sociocultural contexts among a variety of groups. Acculturation is not restricted to those who embark on geographical movement; it can occur in stationary communities, such as in the case of indigenous or native people and ethnic groups in pluralistic societies.
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Dimension of Acculturation
Whereas many scholars and research studies have focused on acculturation at a behavioral dimension, it is important to recognize that acculturation can affect other areas as well. Spoken language preference, television program preference, and participation in cultural activities are all ways in which acculturation can be experienced at a behavioral level. Additionally, online education can be experienced at a cognitive level, which may influence values and knowledge. The influence that acculturation has on the values may influence attitudes and beliefs about social relations, cultural customs and traditions, gender roles, online degree and attitudes and ideas about health. Knowledge may be influenced by acculturation in the manner in which we recognize or know about culture-specific information, such as names of historical figures belonging to the culture of origin and the dominant culture and the historical significance of culture-specific activities. Lastly, cultural identity has been proposed as a dimension of acculturation. Cultural identity refers to the attitudes an individual has about his or her culture, such as feelings of comfort, pride, or shame toward the culture of origin or the host culture.
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Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks
Medicine and psychiatry had a major influence in the study of online degree, and early theories of acculturation assumed a clinical viewpoint on matters corresponding to culture contact and change. Much of the early work on online degree focused on anxiety occurring during cross-cultural transition.
Assimilation
The assimilation model of acculturation characterizes individuals that are highly acculturated; assimilated individuals strongly identify with the dominant or host culture, resulting in the loss of the original cultural identity. The assimilation model of online degree has come to be known as cultural shift. Assimilated individuals that no longer identify with their culture of origin may behave in a manner that no longer reflects the behaviors of the original culture. For example, assimilated individuals may no longer speak the native language, listen to native music, take part in native dances, or follow the native culture's dating process. Along with behavioral changes, assimilated individuals shift their beliefs, values, and attitudes to match those of the dominant or host culture.
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Separation
In the separation model of acculturation, also referred to as cultural resistance, an individual will maintain a strong identification with the culture of origin and does not accept the behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, or values of the dominant or host culture. Although an individual may be presented with opportunities to acculturate, the individual consciously chooses to maintain an allegiance with the culture of origin. In this model the individual only displays the behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and values of the culture of origin.
integration
The integration model of acculturation, also referred to as cultural incorporation and bicultural-ism, is exactly what the term implies. The integration model is a merge and combination of two cultures: the culture of origin and the new dominant or host culture. Individuals in this model may successfully display behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and values from both cultures. Individuals in this model identify with both cultures and have a level of comfort within both cultures.
Marginalization
The fourth model of acculturation is marginalization; the marginalization model is described as a rejection or nonacceptance of the behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and values of both the culture of origin and the new dominant or host culture. It is important to keep in mind that a marginalized individual can maintain cultural competence with both groups and have marginal traits as well. Additionally, a degree of acculturation or identification with both cultures must occur before marginalization takes place.
Acculturative Stress
One potential outcome or response of acculturation is acculturative stress, which may result from differences in language, perceived cultural incompatibilities, and cultural self-consciousness. Some stress behaviors that have been associated with acculturation are anxiety, depression, feelings of alienation, and identity confusion.
It is important to note that some research has shown that acculturative stress is not related to the level of acculturation. Thus, one cannot assume that less acculturated individuals experience more acculturative stress than more acculturated individuals. Scholars have also suggested that acculturative stress can stem from the demands to maintain or learn one's cultural heritage while at the same time feeling pressured by the dominant culture to assimilate.

Miguel Angel Cano
EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online degree, online education, part 6.

2009-09-06T05:06:00.000-07:00

A Model for Academic Acceleration
It is important to see academic acceleration not as a single intervention but rather as an ongoing, holistic, whole-school process necessarily involving the student, the student's caregivers, and his or her teachers.
Accordingly, Peter Merrotsy has developed an acceleration model that recommends six steps toward a better curriculum for gifted students: identification, communication, a negotiated curriculum, academic acceleration, access to advanced courses while still at school, and support.
Identification
Identification of a gifted student should imply that educational action will take place. It needs to be remembered that identification is notoriously unreliable, especially for gifted students from a background of disadvantage (e.g., low socioeconomic status or forced cultural minority status). That is one of the reasons why it is important to have a broad, inclusive curriculum and to have students involved in making decisions about getting online degree.
Communication
Each gifted student has a right to know the curriculum options and pathways to earn online bachelor degree available to him or her. Information about enrichment programs, extracurricular activities, meeting outcomes in alternative ways, high-level courses, senior courses, academic acceleration, and access to advanced-level courses online degree while still at school should be clearly communicated to gifted students, and indeed to all students and their caregivers.
A Negotiated Curriculum
Gifted students are in a position to make informed decisions about their education. They should be actively involved in decision-making processes concerning their curriculum. Gifted students should be empowered to negotiate their curriculum.
Academic Acceleration
Academic acceleration appears to be the best and most feasible method for providing a challenging, rewarding, and continuous education which matches a gifted student's academic ability and comes closest to meeting his or her educational—intellectual, social, and emotional—needs. In order to earn online bachelor degree it may be necessary to change the organization of the school's curriculum and, in some cases, to change systemic policy.
Advanced-Level Courses
Access to advanced-level courses while still at school is an appropriate and natural progression for a gifted student who has academically accelerated. It is important to remember that an accelerated student could choose instead to study a greater number of secondary subjects, complete fewer secondary subjects but in greater depth, or take a year off, perhaps as an exchange student in another country. Whichever option is pursued, careful long-term planning, clear communication, and a negotiated curriculum are needed.
Support for Gifted Students
To help their intellectual, social, and emotional development, academically accelerated students need appropriate support, in terms of policy, administration, coordination of courses, enriched educational experiences, access to high-level courses, access to specialist teachers, tutors, counselors and mentors, and resources. In particular, gifted students from dis-advantaged backgrounds, and from rural and isolated settings, need financial support so that they have access to resources and to educational experiences and opportunities enjoyed by others.
Guidelines for online bachelor degree
The Iowa Acceleration Scale offers a thoughtful and careful objective guide for whole-grade, academically accelerated progression and is supported by research and many repetition studies. There are four critical items: If a student's measured IQ is below 120, if a sibling is either in the same grade from which the student will accelerate or in the new grade to which the student will accelerate, or there is any antipathy by the student, then whole-grade acceleration is not recommended. School history; an assessment of ability, aptitude, and achievement; academic and developmental factors; interpersonal skills; and attitude and support by the school and family are then taken into account in order to give, or not give, as the case may be, a recommendation for whole-grade acceleration. If whole-grade acceleration is not recommended, then advice is available on the suitability of other forms of acceleration or on enrichment and extension online degree programs.

Ongoing Issues
Two key issues need to be addressed worldwide if gifted students are to gain adequate access to a curriculum that includes options for online bachelor degree. These issues need to be addressed to overcome the impact of social and cultural disadvantage and to give equity of access to appropriate educational programs for gifted students.
First, the findings of research concerning the academic and affective benefits of well-administered acceleration online bachelor degree programs need to be accepted by educational administrators, communities, and teachers. System-organizational patterns of social grouping and the lockstep method of promotion constitute an effective barrier to the development of giftedness, suggesting the deep and urgent need for more flexible forms of school organization that ensure continuity of experience based on criteria other than age or years of attendance and that permit student progression based on individual development and performance.
Second, the end result or consequence of acceleration must be appropriately supported and managed by the education system. For example, with respect to advanced-level subjects studied while still at school, clarification is needed concerning equity of access, which can only be maintained through flexible forms of delivery and alternative modes of study; recognition that they constitute a formal component of secondary school studies, with continuity and articulation of curriculum; the status of secondary students who have completed advanced level units of studies, inter alia that they are still eligible for university entrance scholarships; and credit transfer.
Peter Merrotsy

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online degree, part 5.

2009-09-05T10:22:00.000-07:00

Types of Academic Acceleration
Grade skipping is but one example of academic acceleration. In practice, the range and types of academic acceleration also include early entrance to school, continuous progression, self-paced instruction, correspondence courses, combined classes, multiage classes, curriculum compacting, curriculum telescoping, extracurricular programs, mentorships, content acceleration, subject acceleration, credit by examination, concurrent enrollment, advanced placement (an American practice with few equivalents elsewhere), early access to advanced-level studies while still at school, and early entrance to university.
Academic acceleration, therefore, refers to any of the ways by which a gifted student engages in the study of new material that is typically taught at a higher grade level than the one in which the child is currently enrolled, covers more material in a shorter time, and accordingly is seen to be vertical provision for gifted students. Implicit is the assumption that gifted students, who perform, or reflect the potential to perform, at advanced skill levels should be studying new material at levels commensurate with their levels of ability. Because a common characteristic of gifted students is their ability to learn at a fast rate, acceleration is seen to be a fundamental need of a gifted student and, in some form, should be an integral part of every gifted program.
A model for academic acceleration may refer to service delivery, whereby a standard curriculum experience is offered to a gifted student at a younger age or earlier grade than usual. Or it may refer to curriculum delivery, which involves increasing the pace of presentation of material, either in the regular classroom or in special classes. In either case, programs for academic acceleration allow the examination of content in greater depth, give access to subject matter at levels of greater conceptual difficulty, and should provide instruction that individually and explicitly matches the achievement levels, ability, interests, and learning style of the gifted student.
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Benefits of Acceleration
Academic acceleration has several administrative benefits. It is a readily available and inexpensive educational option. It is a way of giving recognition for a student's advanced abilities and accomplishments. It increases learning efficiency, learning effectiveness, and productivity; it gives a student more choice for academic exploration; and it may give increased time for a career.
The report A Nation Deceived presents an excellent summary of recent research supporting the academic and affective benefits of well-administered acceleration. From this research come four important findings that are strong and clear and unequivocal.
First, acceleration is consistently and highly effective for academic achievement. No studies have shown that enrichment programs or provisions give more benefits to gifted students than methods of acceleration. Academic benefits do arise from ability grouping accompanied by a differentiated curriculum, but the greatest benefit comes from academic acceleration. That is, accelerated gifted students, regardless of which form of acceleration is used, significantly outperform students of similar intellectual ability who have not been accelerated.
Second, there is no research to support the claim of maladjustment from acceleration. Despite the preponderance of evidence in favor of academic acceleration, concern about the social and emotional adjustment of accelerated students persists. This concern is cited by both teachers and administrators as the primary reason for opposition to academic acceleration. However, research finds no evidence to support the notion that social and emotional problems arise through well-run and carefully monitored acceleration programs.
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Third, acceleration is usually effective in terms of affective adjustment. For many students, it removes them from difficult social situations and from unchal-lenging and inappropriate educational contexts. It exposes the student to a new peer group and, in fact, significantly increases the chances of a gifted student forming close and productive social relationships with other students. That is, academic acceleration goes a long way to meeting the social and emotional needs of the gifted student who uses it.
Fourth, a gifted student who is not accelerated when it is appropriate may well experience educational frustration and boredom; have reduced motivation to learn; develop poor study habits; have lower academic expectations, achievement, and productivity; express apathy toward formal schooling; drop out prematurely (there is at least some anecdotal evidence to support this); and/or find it difficult to adjust to peers who do not share advanced interests and concerns. That is, rather than expressing concern over potential socioemotional maladjustment arising from acceleration, teachers and administrators need to be concerned about the probability of maladjustment effects resulting from inadequate intellectual challenge.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online degree, part 4. ACCELERATION.

2009-09-04T05:01:00.000-07:00

The classical understanding of the term acceleration is progress through an educational program at a rate faster, or at an age younger, than conventional. This is now referred to, more appropriately, as academic acceleration and is based on the premise that each child has a right to realize his or her potential.
Academic acceleration is valid pedagogy, is grounded in and supported by research, and is an appropriate response to the educational and social needs of a student whose cognitive ability and academic achievement are several years beyond those of their age-peers. Yet worldwide it is an educational option little used. Even though the research on acceleration is so uniformly and distinctly positive and the benefits of well-administered acceleration are so unequivocal, educators are reluctant to accelerate children, and some educational systems proscribe its transparent use.
This entry presents an outline of current theory of academic acceleration through a discussion of a curriculum for gifted students, the benefits of acceleration, a model for acceleration, guidelines for implementing an acceleration program, and ongoing issues related to the practice of acceleration.
Curriculum for Gifted Students
The literature is adamant: Gifted students are exceptional students who have three basic educational needs. They require the provision of a curriculum that is substantially and qualitatively differentiated; that is prescribed, planned, articulated, permanent, ongoing, and defensible; that is based on students' exceptionality; and that is predicated on the needs of each student. Gifted students require accelerated, enriched, and challenging learning experiences, with carefully planned, relevant enrichment and with content acceleration to the level of each student's ability. They also require counseling and guidance to foster cognitive and affective growth. Whereas most teachers and researchers involved with the education of gifted students agree that gifted students do require a differentiated curriculum, there is passionate debate concerning the form that this provision should take.
Counseling certainly is important for the social and emotional development of the gifted student and should be part of the framework for any program devised for gifted students.
Academic enrichment is worthwhile for most students and should not be offered to gifted students only. Relevant academic enrichment requires the provision of a program specifically designed for the individual. For gifted students, this will naturally entail advanced material and higher-level treatment of topics within their area of special aptitude, and the more relevant and excellent the enrichment is, the more it calls for acceleration of subject matter or grade placement later. Indeed, acceleration may well be the most appropriate form of enrichment.
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The notion of academic acceleration is evidently contentious, with an enormous hiatus existing between what research has revealed and what most practitioners believe and do. The literature uniformly emphasizes that academic acceleration should form an integral component of a school's program for gifted students, complementing enrichment programs and provisions and following relevant enrichment. Resistance to academic acceleration, especially through concerns for the social and emotional development of the accelerated student, is not grounded in research. Clearly, educators need to be aware of the empirical research on the positive effects of academic acceleration. Moreover, the literature carefully points out that academic acceleration appears to be the best and most feasible method for providing a challenging, rewarding, and ongoing education that matches a gifted student's academic and intellectual ability and comes closest to meeting his or her educational, social, and emotional needs.
Whatever the status of the debate, if service delivery is predicated on a gifted student's precocious development and educational needs, then a differentiated curriculum should be challenging and educationally relevant and should be adapted by acceleration, enrichment, sophistication, and novelty. Such an eclectic approach to programming for the gifted will be employed within an integrative framework, adaptable to the cognitive and affective needs of the individual.
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The issue may be placed in perspective by cor-rectly noticing that a gifted student is already accelerated and that what is accelerated through academic acceleration is simply the student's progress through the formal school curriculum. The key point is that matching the curriculum to the student's abilities is not acceleration per se, but rather it is a developmentally appropriate teaching practice.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Abstinence Education pt.2 - Federal Funding

2009-09-03T05:30:00.000-07:00

The first federal funding of abstinence programs was created in 1981 with the Adolescent Family Life Act as Title XX of the Public Health Service Act. According to the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs, the Adolescent Family Life (AFL) program supports demonstration projects to develop, implement, and evaluate program interventions to promote abstinence from sexual activity among adolescents and to provide comprehensive health care, education, and social services to pregnant and parenting adolescents.
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The program supports two basic types of demonstration projects: (1) prevention demonstration projects to develop, test, and use curricula that provide education and activities designed to encourage adolescents to postpone sexual activity until marriage; and (2) care demonstration projects to develop interventions with pregnant and parenting teens, their infants, male partners, and family members in an effort to ameliorate the effects of too-early-childbearing for teen parents, their babies, and their families. The AFL program also funds grants to support research on the causes and consequences of adolescent premarital sexual relations, pregnancy, and parenting. The Title XX funds not only help the teens and families they serve directly, but they also provide valuable information and evaluation findings that can serve as a basis for future strategies. Every program that receives AFL grant funds is required to include an independent evaluation component. This ensures that the lessons learned by each community will benefit others in the future.
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In 1996, federal abstinence education programs narrowed the definitions of abstinence when Section 510(b) of Title V of the Social Security Act, P.L. 104-193 was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The abstinence-only federal funding was created as part of "welfare reform," or the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act (TANF). This third funding stream provides grants to states for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. The absti-nence-only-until-marriage educational or motivational programs must adhere to the following eight criteria as established by law:
1. Has as its exclusive purpose teaching the social,
psychological, and health gains to be realized by
abstaining from sexual activity
2. Teaches abstinence from sexual activity outside
marriage as the expected standard for all school-age children
3. Teaches that abstinence from sexual activity is the
only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually
transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems
4. Teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship
in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity
5. Teaches that sexual activity outside of the context
of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological
and physical effects
6. Teaches that bearing children out-of-wedlock is
likely to have harmful consequences for the child,
the child's parents, and society
7. Teaches young people how to reject sexual
advances and how alcohol and drug use increases
vulnerability to sexual advances
8. Teaches the importance of attaining self-sufficiency
before engaging in sexual activity
As of 1997, all abstinence projects funded under the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention must adhere to the eight criteria. The funded projects must be evaluated, and the curricula must be medically accurate.
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Title V grantees cannot provide educational programming that goes against any one of the criteria listed previously in this section, but the states have the latitude to focus on only a few of the criteria. The states can direct the funding to schools, community-based organizations, health districts, media campaigns, or faith-based entities. Each state has the discretion to decide who receives the funding, how programs are delivered, and if and how they will be evaluated.
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In October 2000, the federal government expanded the abstinence-only projects and created Special Projects of Regional and National Significance-Community-Based Abstinence Education (SPRANS-CBAE). The SPRANS grants are awarded to states and community organizations and can fund only abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. In 2005 oversight of the SPRANS-CBAE grants was moved from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau to the Adminis-tration for Children and Families (ACF); both are within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This program is now known as Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE). The program requirements have been tightened; to receive funding, each program now must adhere to all eight criteria. Process evaluation is now required for new grantees, but programs do not have to measure impact on program participants. So how does one select an abstinence program?
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Selecting and Evaluating Programs
Abstinence education programs are evolving, and the types of programs offered are vast in terms of quality, cost, and effectiveness. When choosing a program, educators can look for teacher training, medical accuracy, evidence of effectiveness with similar populations, costs, whether the program is theoretically based, and how it fits with community guidelines. Other considerations include whether the program is taught by a teacher or peers and how much time can be devoted to the program. Programs can range from a single 1-hour presentation to 25 sessions over 5 weeks. The curricula and desired learning outcomes should coincide. A final component is the effectiveness of the program; currently, long-term research on the effectiveness of abstinence education is limited to a few programs, and the results are mixed.
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Few rigorous, long-term studies focusing on behavioral outcomes have been conducted on specific abstinence-only programs. The Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs (OAPP) does require all of its abstinence programs to be evaluated, and most of the published abstinence evaluations are former OAPP projects. Most of the programs have shown immediate differences in attitudes and intent to remain abstinent. One problem with the evaluations of many abstinence programs is the limited ability to assign students to experimental or control groups, the presence of follow-up evaluations, and the limited sample sizes.

Research is needed to determine the long-term impacts on behavior.
Caile E. Spear

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

ABSTINENCE EDUCATION

2009-09-02T05:42:00.000-07:00

Abstinence education advocates abstinence as the 100% sure way to prevent pregnancy and the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The U.S. teen pregnancy rates have been decreasing since the 1990s, but of all of the developed countries in the world, the United States still has the highest teen pregnancy rates. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that approximately 19 million new STDs occur each year, almost half of them among young people ages 15 to 24. Teens with STDs are impacted emotionally and physically, and the annual medical cost directly attributed to STDs in the United States is well over $13 billion. Communities are looking for answers on how to address the complex issues of teen pregnancy and STDs. Abstinence education is seen as one such answer.
The premise of abstinence education is that abstinence is the best choice for youth when it comes to making sexual decisions. Schools and communities can decide what type of programming to provide to their young people. The current federal initiatives are driving the abstinence-until-marriage initiatives, and anyone receiving federal funding must adhere to specific guidelines. The evaluation of these programs shows some short-term impacts on attitudes and behavioral intent,
but long-term studies on behavior are mixed. This entry provides a general overview of sexuality education, abstinence education, federal funding for abstinence programming, guidelines for selecting programs, and evaluation of abstinence programs.
Sexuality and Abstinence Education
Parents are the primary educators of their children. Some parents may not feel comfortable broaching the topics with their children, may not have the factual knowledge to share with their children, or may not know how to talk to their children in a developmen-tally appropriate manner. Who else can teach the children? The vast majority of children attend public school, and schools are a logical place to provide sexuality education. Programming may be taught by teachers, health educators, nurses, doctors, or other credentialed professionals. No matter who is teaching the children, it is important for the school to verify the accuracy of the curriculum, evaluate the credentials of the provider, and be sure the curriculum meets with school district policies.
Sexuality education guidelines are typically established at the state level and carried out at the local level. Almost every state mandates sexuality education, and some mandate abstinence education. Districts and communities may choose from a range of programs, from comprehensive sexuality education programs—which may cover birth control, a range of sexual behaviors, gender identity, life skills, and anatomy and physiology—to abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, which only discuss sexual activity within the context of marriage. School districts typically create policies delineating what type of sexuality education will be taught in what grades and what topics will be covered. Most school districts allow students, with parental permission, to opt out of sexuality education.
Sexuality education has changed from the broader ranging comprehensive sexuality education in the 1970s to the current, more narrowly focused, federally funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs of the late 1990s and today. The change in program focus can be attributed to a concern among some parents and communities that comprehensive sexuality education was teaching students how to have sex or was sending the mixed message "Do not have sex— but if you do, be sure to use protection." Some of the disfavor arose from not clearly delineating what could and should be taught in the schools, that is, concerns over what was developmentally appropriate and what was the purview of the parent. Some people felt absti-nence education was a means of establishing moral purity and strengthening marriage.
Abstinence education proponents support the one message of abstinence from sex and do not want students to receive the mixed message "Yes, remain abstinent—but if you are not abstinent, then remember to use birth control." Many abstinence education programs do not discuss birth control except to describe their failure rates. Components of abstinence education programs can vary, but generally the focus is on the harm that comes from sexual intercourse and early sexual involvement. Depending on the school district, curricula components vary and may or may not include anatomy and physiology, life skills, communication skills, or refusal skills components.
The curricula are created by a variety of people, including teachers, school districts, health educators, faith-based groups, private businesses, or community members.
Abstinence-plus proponents believe abstinence is the best choice for young people when it comes to making decisions about sex. The "plus" in abstinence-plus often includes life skills components such as goal setting, life planning, communication, anatomy and physiology, and information on contraception. The plus component refers to the ability of the teacher to answer student questions, provide information about contraceptives, or possibly refer the student for information on contraceptives.
The philosophy of the current abstinence-only-until-marriage, also known as abstinence-only, programs is that sexual intercourse and sexual activity should happen only between a man and woman and only when they are married. There is no discussion of contraception except to discuss failure rates, and no programs may advocate for the use of contraceptives. Each program adheres to a set of guidelines as established by law in 1996. The next section discusses federal funding of abstinence-only programs and the program guidelines.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

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How To Get Online Degree - Education Online

2009-08-31T05:17:00.000-07:00

Online education is now very popular. Let's find out how educational psychology can help you in receiving online colledge degrees. Just read all our posts in this blog and you can easely start your online education.

Educational psychology is a special field of endeavor because it strives to apply what is known about many different disciplines to the broad process of education. In the most general terms, you can expect to find topics in this area that fall into the categories of human learning and development (across the life span), motivation, measurement and statistics, and curriculum and teaching. More specifically, the educational psychologist studies such topics as aggression, the relationship between poverty and achievement in schools, lifelong learning, quantitative methods, and emerging adulthood. Online education is truly a diverse and fascinating field of study and unlike other social and behavioral sciences. Its significance for application to the real needs of both children and adults cannot be overestimated.
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The importance of all these topics is not limited to the college classroom or academic lecture circuit. Rather, the ability to understand complex issues such as vouchers, early intervention, inclusion, cultural diversity, and the role of athletics in the schools (to mention only a few examples) carries important implications for public policy decisions. The encyclopedia includes some technical topics related to educational psychology, but for the most part, it focuses on those topics that evoke the interest of the everyday reader.
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Although there are hundreds of books about different topics in education and online degrees and there are thousands of university and private researchers pursuing more information about these topics, most of the available information tends to be found in scholarly books and scholarly journal articles—usually out of the reach of the everyday person. In fact, there are few comprehensive overviews of the field of online education, and the purpose of this multivolume Encyclopedia of Educational Psychology is to share this information in a way that is, above all, informative without being overly technical or intimidating.
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Through more than 275 contributions, experts provide overviews and explanations of the major topics in the field of educational psychology.
How were these topics selected to be included in this encyclopedia? The underlying rationale for topic selection and presentation comes from the need to share subjects that are rich, diverse, and deserving of closer inspection with an educated reader who may be uninformed about educational psychology. Within these pages, the contributors and I provide the overview and the detail that we feel is necessary to become well acquainted with topics that fairly represent the entire field.
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EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.