The importance of school connectedness in adolescent risk taking and injury prevention

Background: Injury is the leading cause of mortality for young people in Australia (AIHW, 2008). Adolescent injury mortality is consistently associated with risk taking behaviour, including transport and interpersonal violence (AIHW, 2003), which often occurs in the context of alcohol and other substance use. A rapid increase in risk taking and injury through early to late adolescence highlights the need for effective school based interventions. Aim: The aim of the current research was to examine the relationship between school connectedness and adolescent risk and injury, in order to inform effective prevention approaches. School connectedness, or students’ feelings of belongingness to school, has been shown to be a critical protective factor in adolescence which can be targeted effectively through teacher interventions. Despite evidence linking low school connectedness with increased health risk behaviour, including substance use and violence, research has not yet addressed possible links between connectedness and a broader range of risk taking behaviours (e.g. transport risks) or injury. Method: This study involved background data collection to inform the development of an intervention. A total of 595 Year 9 students (aged 13-14 years) from 5 Southeast Queensland high schools completed questionnaires that included measures of school connectedness, risk taking behaviour, alcohol and other substance use, and injuries. Results: Increased school connectedness was found to be associated with fewer transport risk behaviours and with decreased alcohol and other substance use for both males and females. Similarly, increased school connectedness was associated with fewer passenger and motorcycle injuries for male participants. Both males and females with increased school connectedness reported fewer alcohol related injuries. Implications: These results indicate that school connectedness appears to have protective effects for early adolescence. These findings may also hold for older adolescents and indicate that it may be an important factor to target in school based risk and injury prevention programs. A school connectedness intervention is currently being designed, focusing on teacher professional development. The intervention will be implemented in conjunction with a curriculum based injury prevention program for Year 9 students and will be evaluated through a large scale cluster randomised trial involving 26 schools.

The research pathway to developing a health promotion intervention for the high school curriculum

Introduction: Schools provide the opportunity to reach a large number of adolescents in a systematic way however there are increasing demands on curriculum providing challenges for health promotion activities. This paper will describe the research processes and strategies used to design an injury prevention program.----- Methods: A multi-stage process of data collection included: (1) Surveys on injury-risk behaviours to identify targets of change (examining behaviour and risk/ protective factors among more than 4000 adolescents); (2) Focus groups (n= 30 high-risk adolescents) to understand and determine risk situations; (3) Hospital emergency outpatients survey to understand injury types/ situations; (4) Workshop (n= 50 teachers/ administrators) to understand the target curriculum and experiences with injury-risk behaviours; (5) Additional focus groups (students and teachers) regarding draft material and processes.----- Results: Summaries of findings from each stage are presented particularly demonstrating the design process. The baseline data identified target risk and protective factors. The following qualitative study provided detail about content and context and with the hospital findings assisted in developing ways to ensure relevance and meaning (e.g. identifying high risk situations and providing insights into language, culture and development). School staff identified links to school processes with final data providing feedback on curriculum fit, feasibility and appropriateness of resources. The data were integrated into a program which demonstrated reduced injury.----- Conclusions: A comprehensive research process is required to develop an informed and effective intervention. The next stage of a cluster randomised control trial is a major task and justifies the intensive and comprehensive development.

Australian school leadership today : conclusions

The evidence provided in this book allows us to conclude that the context of 'new managerialism', which embraced managerial efficiency and effectiveness through bureaucracy and accountability as key levers for meeting higher community expectations and reforming schools, has failed. It also allows us to conclude that it is time that the professionals, the school leaders, ensure that what happens in schools, now and in the future, is what they want to happen. The professionals need to re-establish their individual and collective educational agency. The major professional challenge for any school leader is overcoming the gap between dependence in, or a feeling of, the inevitability of political, system or bureaucracies being the means of achieving what they want, and actively working to implement their preferred model of schools as social centres, learning organisations or professional learning communities (see chapters in this book and Mulford, 2008).

The passionate critic

It's hard to be dispassionate about Reyner Banham. For me, and for the plethora of other people with strong opinions about Banham, his writing is compelling, and one’s connection to him as a figure quite personal. For me, frankly, he rocks. As a landscape architect, I gleaned most of my knowledge about Modern architecture from Banham. His Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, along with Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City and Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture were the most influential books in my library, by far. Later, as a budding “real scholar”, I was disappointed to find that, while these authors had serious credibility, the writings themselves were regarded as “polemical” – when in fact what I admired about them most was their ability and willingness to make rough groupings and gross generalizations, and to offer fickle opinions. It spoke to me of a real personal engagement and an active, participatory reading of the architectural culture they discussed. They were at their best in their witty, cutting, but generally pithy, creative prose, such as in Rowe’s extrapolation of the modern citizen as the latest “noble savage”, or Banham railing against conservative social advocates and their response to high density housing: “those who had just re-discovered ‘community’ in the slums would fear megastructure as much as any other kind of large-scale renewal program, and would see to it that the people were never ready.” Any reader of Banham will be able to find a gem that will relate, somehow, personally, to what they are doing right now. For Banham, it was all personal, and the gaps in his scholarship, rather, were the dispassionate places: “Such bias is essential – an unbiased historian is a pointless historian – because history is an essentially critical activity, a constant re-scrutiny and rearrangement of the profession.” Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future, Nigel Whiteley’s recent “intellectual biography” (the MIT Press, 2002), allowed me to revisit Banham’s passionate mode of criticism and to consider what his legacy might be. The book examines Banham’s body of work, grouped according to his various primary fascinations, as well as his relationship to contemporaneous theoretical movements, such as postmodernism. His mode of practice, as a kind of creative critic, is also considered in some depth. While there are points where the book delves into Banham’s personal life, on the whole Whiteley is very rigorous in considering and theorizing the work itself: more than 750 articles and twelve books. In academic terms, this is good practice. However, considering the entirely personal nature of Banham’s writing itself, this separation seems artificial. Banham, as he himself noted, “didn’t mind a gossip”, and often when reading the book I was curious about what was happening to him at the time. Banham’s was an amazing type of intellectual practice, and one that academics (a term he hated) could do well to learn from. While Whiteley spends a lot of time arguing for his practice to be regarded as such, and makes strong points about both the role of the critic, and the importance of journalism, rather than scholarly publishing, I found myself wondering what his study looked like. What books he had in his library. Did he smoke when he wrote? What sort of teaching load did he have? He is an inspiration to design writers and thinkers, and I, personally, wanted to know how he did it.

Examining the issues and dynamics of ethical dilemmas faced by school leaders

The roles and responsibilities of school leaders in most countries across the world have become more complex and challenging in recent years. In large part, this complexity has resulted from the discontinuously changing contexts and day-to-day dynamics within which principals lead their schools. Indeed, principals are now faced with having to make a plethora of decisions in an environment of competing priorities, and with consideration for the interests of students, teachers, parents and the school and wider community. Many of these decisions present as dilemmas for school leaders, where the choices for action often involve not just choosing from ‘right’ versus ‘wrong’ alternatives but also frequently from ‘right’ versus ‘right’ alternatives (Kidder, 1995). Underlying many such decisions are issues of values, principles and ethics. Dilemmas of an ethical nature arise such that principals enter a complicated ‘minefield’ of decision-making (Dempster & Berry, 2003) where significant implications results not only for those at the core of the particular decisions but also potentially for the wider school community and beyond.

The future face of school guidance and counselling : what will it look like in 25 years?

The author undertook a qualitative and quantitative survey of 130 guidance counsellors and primary school principles focusing on perceptions of what school guidance and counselling will be like in 25 years. Generally the participants held similar beliefs and were bullish about employment prospects.

Self-esteem and self-talk enhancement in upper primary school children

Not all programmes aimed at enhancing children's self-esteem have been successful. This article evaluates the impact of two programmes and offers activities which can be used in the classroom.

Measuring school-related stressors in adolescents

Some 1620 high school students responded to 68 items that measure adolescent stressors. Thirty-five of the items were based on J. P. Kohn and G. H. Frazer's Academic Stress Scale [1(1986) An Academic Stress Scale: Identification and Rated Importance of Academic Stressors, Psychological Reports, Vol. 59, pp. 415–426] developed in the United States, while the remaining 33 items were developed from P. Strutynski's [(1985) A Survey of Queensland Year 10, 11 and 12 Student Attitudes to Schools and Schooling, State Planning Committee, International Youth Year, Brisbane] lists of the most frequently named problems of 2336 Australian high school students. Confirmatory Factor Analysis was used to test and develop a measurement model developed from an extensive review of previous scales. The High School Stressors Scale emerged from the analytic process and measures nine school-related stressors. For researchers focusing on school-related problems and stressors among adolescents, the HSSS promises to be a very useful instrument. It has sound construct and predictive validity and adequate reliability, as demonstrated by the goodness-of-fit indices the squared multiple correlations.

Gender and grade differences in upper elementary school children’s descriptive and evaluative self-statements and self-esteem

Gender and developmental differences in self-description, self-evaluation and self-esteem were investigated using 957 elementary school children in grades 3 to 7. Gender differences were found for six of the seven descriptive statements and for five of the seven evaluative statements. The major gender stereotypical findings from previous studies were replicated. Boys reported higher scores than girls on descriptive and evaluative statements about their physical abilities and mathematics, while girls reported higher scores on descriptive and evaluative statements about reading. Declines over time were noted for all self-evaluations except having good relations with peers and for global self-esteem, providing some support for the notion that the decline in self-concepts and self-esteem may be attributed to the children's perceptions of themselves becoming more accurate and less egocentric in line with their cognitive capacity to integrate external feedback realistically.

Self-talk in upper primary school children : its relationship with irrational beliefs, self-esteem and depression

Self-talk, irrational beliefs, self-esteem and depression were measured in a sample of 105 elementary school children in Grades 4 to 7. Sex and grade differences in positive self-talk were found. The pattern of correlation coefficients for positive self-talk supported the substantive position that positive self-talk is positively related to self-esteem and negatively related to irrational beliefs and depression in a non-clinical sample of children. However, the same support was not forthcoming for the reverse relationships for negative self-talk. Therapeutic implications are outlined as are suggestions for future research in the area of children's self-talk.

Self-concept and self-esteem in elementary school children

Confusion exists with regard to the empirical and substantive link between self-concept and self-esteem in elementary school children and their relationship to self-description, self-evaluation, and global beliefs and feelings about oneself as a person. This study reports the results of investigating the relationships between these self-constructs using 957 elementary school children in Grades 3 to 7. The evidence suggests that self-concept is comprised of both descriptive and evaluative beliefs that children hold about certain characteristics, whereas self-esteem can be viewed as the global feelings and beliefs that children have about themselves as people.

From surfboard wax to salient health inequity : School programs to develop globally aware and active citizens

During the past century, significant improvements in the prevention, detection and treatment of infectious disease have positively impacted upon quality and quantity of life for many people worldwide. Despite this progress, there are large numbers of people currently living in developing regions of the world where infectious disease continues unabated. SurfAid International is a humanitarian organisation that has brought significant health improvements to the people living on the Mentawai and Nias islands of Indonesia. The SurfAid International Schools Program aims to develop global citizenship and social responsibility by providing a bridge between school settings and the critical work of SurfAid International. This paper provides a rationale for the development of contextualised school based programs and identifies potential impact upon the thoughts and actions of young people in schools.