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In recent years, violence has been a major concern for human service professionals and increasingly, to child and youth care workers particularly as they have served in schools where major violent events have occurred. Most often violence prevention and intervention efforts ignore the systemic aspects of violence and are too narrowly focused. This article proposes that a consideration of violence in schools be based on dynamical systems theory. This theory offers rich possibilities for generating a useful model for mediating school violence and for suggesting ways in which child and youth care workers can use their competencies to address the multiple factors related to school violence. The article includes an overview to the concepts of dynamical systems theory, offers the dynamical systems model for mediating school violence and presents implications for the roles and functions of child and youth workers particularly in the emerging area of school based child and youth care work. © 1999 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

This paper examines the effect of ritual in different elementary subjects. Lessons in math, language arts, and social studies were observed in public, private, and home school first and fifth grades. In observing these classes, this researcher noted that in all contexts, math lessons were taught very differently from social studies and language arts, confirming earlier work by Stodalsky. The rituals in how concepts were taught, and in how students and teachers related to each other, were very different in math lessons from in the other two subjects. In language arts and social studies lessons, students and teachers routinely shared personal out-of-school experiences, whereas they rarely did so in math lessons. Drawing on Bernstein's description of the sacredness of subjects and linking it to theories in economic anthropology, the author attempts to explain the isolation of school math and to question the level of intimacy and community in current math classes. © 1997 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

Basic skills in reading and spelling and supporting metalinguistic abilities were assessed in ninth and tenth grade students in two school settings. Students attending a private high school for the learning disabled comprised one group and the other comprised low to middle range students from a public high school. Both the LD students and the regular high school students displayed deficiencies in spelling and in decoding, a factor in reading difficulty that is commonly supposed to dwindle in importance after the elementary school years. Treating the overlapping groups as a single sample, multiple regression analysis was used to investigate the contribution of nonword decoding skill and phonological and morphological awareness to spelling ability. The analysis revealed that decoding was the major component, predicting about half of the variance in spelling. The effect of phonological awareness was largely hidden by its high correlation with decoding, but was a significant predictor of spelling in its own right. Morphological awareness predicted spelling skill when the words to be spelled were morphologically complex. An additional study showed that differences in decoding and spelling ability were associated with differences in comprehension after controlling for reading experience and vocabulary. Even among experienced readers individual differences in comprehension of text reflect efficiency of phonological processing at the word level.

Children's rule-governed, scientific reasoning in relation to the physical principles involved in balance has been studied by many, for example, Inhelder and Piaget (1958), Karmiloff-Smith and Inhelder (1974), as well as Siegler (1978). Although Siegler criticized the Genevan research on both methodological and conceptual grounds, his work can be criticized for being narrow in scope thus making his data a result of his task and design, rather than a true representation of the rules children employ naturally as they develop an understanding of balance. The work described herein is an attempt to integrate the methodologies of the Piagetian School and Siegler by making use of current video technology to naturalistically assess children's rule-governed behaviors but to also empirically validate them. The first part of this study (N=128, ages 4-9 years) used video to microanalytically assess the strategies children used as they attempted to balance a set of symmetrical, asymmetrical, and weighted blocks on a fulcrum. After validating on ordinal progression of strategies, the study used stop-action video feedback, in a predict-consequence paradigm, to focus reflection on (a) the action of the block, (b) the placement of the block, and (c) the episode in general. A two-way interaction between entering level and type of video feedback was significant. The results are interpreted in terms of Piaget's theory of equilibration suggesting that reflection and cognitive conflict can improve understanding if the child assimilates the feedback to the confirmation or refutation of an initial assimilatory scheme regarding balance. © 1988.

This paper is a version of the seventh ECTJ/ERIC-IR Young Scholar Paper, an annual award initiated to stimulate writing by young professionals in the field of instructional technology. Preparation of the paper was supported by the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information Resources at Syracuse, NY. - Ed. © 1984 Association for Educational Communications and Technology.

A methodology is developed for combining mean value forecasts using not only all the important statistics related to the past performance and the dependence of the individual forecasts, but also a rank ordering of the individual forecasts representing the belief of a decision maker about the future performance of the forecasts. The maximum likelihood combination of the forecasts turns out to be a weighted linear combination of the individual forecasts, where the weights are a function of the rank order of the forecasts, correlation coefficients between the forecasts, and relative entropy information measures between the individual forecasts and the actual values. These weights are assessed once in the most general case and once in a special case where the forecasts are normally distributed. The sensitivity of the weights is also investigated. A sample application of this method for predicting U.S. hog prices is also presented.

This paper presents a methodology for producing a probability forecast of a turning point in U.S. economy using Composite Leading Indicators. This methodology is based on classical statistical decision theory and uses information-theoretic measurement to produce a probability. The methodology is flexible using as many historical data points as desired. This methodology is applied to producing probability forecasts of a downturn in U.S. economy in the 1970-1990 period. Four probability forecasts are produced using different amounts of information. The performance of these forecasts is evaluated using the actual downturn points and the scores measuring accuracy, calibration, and resolution. An indirect comparison of these forecasts with Diebold and Rudebusch's sequential probability recursion is also presented. It is shown that the performances of our best two models are statistically different from the performance of the three-consecutive-month decline model and are the same as the one for the best probit model. The probit model, however, is more conservative in its predictions than our two models.

Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression is relatively sensitive to the presence of outliers in a data set. In this paper, a robust estimation method, least median of squares (LMS) is used to identify outliers in land value data. Once the outliers are identified, are the land value equations re-estimated. The results show that a few observations can have a significant effect on the estimated coefficients. Finally, the observations which were identified as outliers were examined in more detail. One cause of outliers is an omitted variable. In this case, a large fraction of the outliers were found to be observations with high development potential.

This paper examines the effect of a zoning change on the land market in McHenry County, Illinois. One question addressed is whether zoning `'follows the market.” It is found that, for agricultural land, zoning does tend to follow the market. In addition, the effect of land prices on land use is examined. The results here, however, are mixed. In the initial years after the zoning change, a high relative price of residential land increases the probability that a parcel will be zoned residential. However, several years later, a high relative price of residential land decreases the probability that a parcel is zoned residential. This result suggests that it may take some time for a zoning change to have a significant impact on the local land market.

Does the formation of a customs union reduce and eventually eliminate tariffs among member countries to provide mechanisms or regional institutions for social, economic and political development? The literature examined suggests that, although many problems of trade liberalization continue to occur, greater benefits could be obtained by reducing tariffs on a non‐discriminatory basis, or by removing protection from domestic enterprises altogether, and by importing domestic requirements of the products of displaced industries from outside at world market prices. The literature also provides a valid case for protecting certain activities in ECOWAS — particularly trade and industrial enterprises — either for the purpose of increasing income or the rate of economic growth, or in order to achieve certain non‐economic objectives. The implications of economic integration in these terms can best be examined within a broader theoretical framework of developmental theory of trade liberalization. Copyright © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd