A RCT of peer-mentoring for first-time mothers in socially disadvantaged areas (the moments study)

Objective: Interventions to reduce health inequalities for young children and their mothers are important: involving peers is recommended, but evidence of value for this approach is limited. The authors aimed to examine the effect of an innovative tailored peer-mentoring programme, based on perceived needs, for first-time mothers in socio-economically deprived communities. Design: Randomised controlled trial; parallel qualitative study with purposive samples using semistructured interviews. Setting: Socio-economically disadvantaged areas, Belfast. Participants: Primigravidae, aged 16-30 years, without significant co-morbidity. Intervention: Peer-mentoring by a lay-worker fortnightly during pregnancy and monthly for the following year, tailored to participants' wishes (home visits/telephone contacts), additional to usual care. Main outcome measures: Infant psychomotor and mental development (Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID-II)) at 1 year, assessed by an observer blinded to group allocation. Mothers' health at 1 year postnatal (SF-36). Results: Of 534 women invited, 343(64%) participated; 85%, with their children, completed outcome assessments (140 of 172 intervention; 152 of 171 controls). Intervention and control groups did not differ in BSID-II psychomotor (mean difference 1.64, 95% CI -0.94 to 4.21) or mental (-0.81, -2.78 to 1.16) scores, nor SF-36 physical functioning (-5.4, -11.6 to 0.7) or mental health (-1.8, -6.1 to 2.6). Women valued advice given in context of personal experience of child-rearing. Mentors gained health-related knowledge, personal skills and new employment opportunities. Conclusions: Despite possible longer-term social advantage, this peer-mentoring programme showed no benefit for infant development or maternal health at 1 year. Further rigorous evaluation of important outcomes of complex interventions promoting health for children in socially disadvantaged communities is warranted. Trial registration no: ISRCTN 55055030.

Peer Rating for Feedback in Group Projects

The National Student Survey (NSS) in the UK has since 2005 questioned final year
undergraduate students on a broad range of issues relating to their university experience.
Across disciplines and universities students have expressed least satisfaction in the areas of
assessment and feedback. In response to these results many educational practitioners have
reviewed and revised their procedures and the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) has
produced guidelines of best practice to assist academics in improving these specific areas.
The Product Design and Development (PDD) degree at Queen’s University Belfast is
structured with an integrated curriculum with group Design Build Test (DBT) projects as the
core of each year of the undergraduate programme. Based on the CDIO syllabus and
standards the overall learning outcomes for the programme are defined and developed in a
staged manner, guided by Bloom’s taxonomy of learning domains.
Feedback in group DBT projects, especially in relation to the development of personal and
professional skills, represents a different challenge to that of individual assignment feedback.
A review of best practice was carried out to establish techniques which could be applied to
the particular context of the PDD degree without modification and also to identify areas
where a different approach would need to be applied.
A revised procedure was then developed which utilised the structure of the PDD degree to
provide a mechanism for enhanced feedback in group project work, while at the same time
increasing student development of self and peer evaluation skills. Key to this improvement
was the separation of peer ratings from assessment in the perception of the students and the
introduction of more frequent face to face feedback interviews.
This paper details the new procedures developed and additional issues which have been
raised and addressed, with reference to the published literature, during 3 years of operation.

Racism and young girls' peer group relations: the experiences of South Asian girls

This article draws upon data from an indepth ethnographic study of five- and six-year-old children in an English multi-ethnic, inner city primary school. It focuses on the significance of ‘race’ within young girls’ peer group relations and the ways in which the social dynamics that underlie those relations provide the context for understanding the particular nature and form that racism takes among the girls. This is done through a focus on the experiences of South Asian girls within the group. Within this, the article has two main aims. First, it aims to contribute to the literature within the sociology of education by extending the existing research focus on racism within teacher/pupil interactions to include an understanding of racism as it manifests itself among the children’s peer-group relations. Second, in adapting and applying Pierre Boudieu’s concepts of capital and field, the article also offers a contribution to the literature within the sociology of ‘race’ and ethnicity by suggesting one potentially fruitful way in which racism can be understood within specific social contexts.

Racism, masculine peer-group relations and the schooling of African/Caribbean infant boys

The past decade has witnessed the publication of a growing number of important ethnographic studies investigating the schooling experiences of Black students. Their focus has largely been upon student-teacher relations during the students' last few years of compulsory schooling. What they have highlighted is the complexity of racism and the varied nature of Black students' experiences of schooling. Drawing upon data from a year-long ethnographic study of an inner-city, multi-ethnic primary school, this paper aims to compliment these studies in two ways. Firstly the paper will broaden the focus to examine how student peer-group relations play an integral role, within the context of student-teacher relations, in shaping many Black students' schooling experiences. By focussing on African/Caribbean infant boys, it will be shown how student-teacher relations on the one hand, and peer-group relations on the other, form a continuous feed-back loop; the products of each tending to exacerbate and inflate the other. Secondly, by concentrating on infant children, the paper will assess the extent to which these resultant processes and practices are also evident for Black pupils at the beginning of their school careers - at the ages of five and six.

Estimates of peer effects in adolescent smoking across twenty six European countries

Although it is widely believed that one of the key factors influencing whether an adolescent smokes or not is the smoking behaviour of his or her peers, empirical evidence on the magnitude of such peer effects, and even on their existence, is mixed. This existing evidence comes from a range of studies using a variety of country-specific data sources and a variety of identification strategies. This paper exploits a rich source of individual level, school-based, survey data on adolescent substance use across countries - the 2007 European Schools Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs - to provide estimates of peer effects between classmates in adolescent smoking for 75,000 individuals across 26 European countries, using the same methods in each case. The results suggest statistically significant peer effects in almost all cases. These peer effects estimates are large: on average across countries, the probability that a 'typical' adolescent smokes increases by between.31 and.38 percentage points for a one percentage point increase in the proportion of classmates that smoke. Further, estimated peer effects in adolescent smoking are stronger intra-gender than inter-gender. They also vary across countries: in Belgium, for example, a one percentage point increase in reference group smoking is associated with a.16 to.27 percentage point increase in own smoking probability; in the Netherlands the corresponding increase is between.42 and.59 percentage points. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.

A multiagent network for peer norm enforcement

In a multiagent system where norms are used to regulate the actions agents ought to execute, some agents may decide not to abide by the norms if this can benefit them. Norm enforcement mechanisms are designed to counteract these benefits and thus the motives for not abiding by the norms. In this work we propose a distributed mechanism through which agents in the multiagent system that do not abide by the norms can be ostracised by their peers. An ostracised agent cannot interact anymore and looses all benefits from future interactions. We describe a model for multiagent systems structured as networks of agents, and a behavioural model for the agents in such systems. Furthermore, we provide analytical results which show that there exists an upper bound to the number of potential norm violations when all the agents exhibit certain behaviours. We also provide experimental results showing that both stricter enforcement behaviours and larger percentage of agents exhibiting these behaviours reduce the number of norm violations, and that the network topology influences the number of norm violations. These experiments have been executed under varying scenarios with different values for the number of agents, percentage of enforcers, percentage of violators, network topology, and agent behaviours. Finally, we give examples of applications where the enforcement techniques we provide could be used.

Critical Dialogue in Architecture Studio: Peer Interaction and Feedback

Most tutors in architecture education regard studio-based learning to be rich in feedback due to is dialogic nature. Yet, student perceptions communicated via audits such as the UK National Student Survey appear to contradict this assumption and challenge the efficacy of design studio as a truly discursive learning setting. This paper presents findings from a collaborative study that was undertaken by the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, and Queen’s University Belfast that develop a deeper understanding of the role that peer interaction and dialogue plays within feedback processes, and the value that students attribute to these within the overall learning experience.

The paper adopts a broad definition of feedback, with emphasis on formative processes, and including the various kinds of dialogue that typify studio-based learning, and which constitute forms of guidance, direction, and reflection. The study adopted an ethnographic approach, gathering data on student and staff perceptions over the course of an academic year, and utilising methods embracing both quantitative and qualitative data.

The study found that the informal, socially-based peer interaction that characterises the studio is complementary to, and quite distinct from, the learning derived through tutor interaction. The findings also articulate the respective properties of informal and formally derived feedback and the contribution each makes to the quality of studio-based learning. It also identifies limitations in the use or value of peer learning, understanding of which is valuable to enhancing studio learning in architecture.

Improving attainment across a whole district: school reform through peer tutoring in a randomized controlled trial

Districts are an important unit for administrative purposes, but they vary little in their impact on students’ attainment, at least in the UK. Further, government attempts to raise attainment are often disappointing. The project described in this article aimed to engage schools in reform to change students’ attainment and attitudes in schools across a whole district. The intervention, peer tutoring, has a good research pedigree in small-scale studies, but scaling it up to district-level implementation has not been rigorously evaluated. Over 2 years, 129 elementary schools in 1 Scottish district were randomly assigned to different interventions. The implementation was not perfect, but the results were positive with respect to cross-age tutoring, which had effect sizes of about 0.2. Despite limitations, the study demonstrates that it is possible to carry out a clustered randomized controlled trial (RCT) on a large scale working with districts and suggests that peer tutoring has promise when scaled up.

School-based counseling using systematic feedback: A cohort study evaluating outcomes and predictors of change

The outcomes of school-based counseling incorporating the Partners for Change Outcome Monitoring System (PCOMS) were evaluated using a cohort design, with multilevel modeling to identify predictors of change. Participants were 288 7-11 year olds experiencing social, emotional or behavioral difficulties. The intervention was associated with significant reductions in psychological distress, with a pre-post effect size (d) of 1.49 on the primary outcome measure and 88.7% clinical improvement. Greater improvements were found for disabled children, older children, and where CBT methods were used. The findings provide support for the use of systematic feedback in therapy with children.