Behaviour disorders and teacher negligence

The purpose of this paper is to examine the legal implications of the continuing rise in the number of school children diagnosed with behaviour disorders. Not only are teachers now subject to a dense grid of legal regulation, they are also increasingly vulnerable to actions in tort. It will be argued here that as more and more children are labelled ‘disordered’, the duty of care become more onerous, and hence harder for teachers to meet. As a consequence, teachers are more likely to face claims of negligence. It is concluded that while the schooling system needs to retain a healthy scepticism about each new pathologising disorder that seeks special status for its sufferers, it also needs to provide greater training and resources for teachers regarding disorder management. It is also concluded that recent changes to negligence law regarding the issue of ‘reasonable foreseeability’ within breach of duty of care, may not be as significant as might have been hoped by the teaching community. Indeed, the elevated standard of care required by the increasing numbers of disordered pupils, places teachers in an ever more difficult legal position.

Setting limits to teacher responsibility

The purpose of this article is to raise some concerns over ongoing changes to the nature and scope of the teaching profession. Teaching is a responsible profession, and teachers have always been charged with the job of turning out the next generation of citizens—educated, healthy in mind, and healthy in body. The question is: how far should this responsibility extend? Just what should schools be responsible for? This article proposes some limits to teacher responsibility.

Behaviour disorders and the negligent teacher

The purpose of this paper is to examine the legal implications of the continuing rise in the number of school children diagnosed with behaviour disorders. Not only are teachers now subject to a dense grid of legal regulation, they are also increasingly vulnerable to actions in tort. It will be argued here that as more and more children are labelled ‘disordered’, then the concomitant duty of care requirements for teachers becomes more onerous. As a consequence, teachers are less likely to be able to defend themselves against claims of negligence. It is concluded that while the schooling system needs to retain a healthy scepticism about each new pathologising disorder that seeks special status for its sufferers, it also needs to provide greater training and resources for teachers regarding disorder management. It is also concluded that recent changes to negligence law regarding the issue of ‘reasonable foreseeability’ within breach of duty of care, may not be as significant as might have been hoped by the teaching community. Indeed, the elevated standard of care, as required by increasing numbers of disordered pupils, place teachers in an ever more difficult legal position.

Synthesis of orchestrators from service choreographies

With service interaction modelling, it is customary to distinguish between two types of models: choreographies and orchestrations. A choreography describes interactions within a collection of services from a global perspective, where no service plays a privileged role. Instead, services interact in a peer-to-peer manner. In contrast, an orchestration describes the interactions between one particular service, the orchestrator, and a number of partner services. The main proposition of this work is an approach to bridge these two modelling viewpoints by synthesising orchestrators from choreographies. To start with, choreographies are defined using a simple behaviour description language based on communicating finite state machines. From such a model, orchestrators are initially synthesised in the form of state machines. It turns out that state machines are not suitable for orchestration modelling, because orchestrators generally need to engage in concurrent interactions. To address this issue, a technique is proposed to transform state machines into process models in the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). Orchestrations represented in BPMN can then be augmented with additional business logic to achieve value-adding mediation. In addition, techniques exist for refining BPMN models into executable process definitions. The transformation from state machines to BPMN relies on Petri nets as an intermediary representation and leverages techniques from theory of regions to identify concurrency in the initial Petri net. Once concurrency has been identified, the resulting Petri net is transformed into a BPMN model. The original contributions of this work are: an algorithm to synthesise orchestrators from choreographies and a rules-based transformation from Petri nets into BPMN.

There is no relationship : service provider staff on how LGBT young people experience policing

There has been an extended engagement with how young people experience policing, with a focus on the intersection between policing and indigeneity, ethnicity, gender, and social class. Interestingly, sexuality and/or gender diversity has been almost completely overlooked, both nationally and internationally. This paper reports on LGBT youth service providers’ accounts about police and LGBT young people interactions. It overviews the outcomes of semi-structured interviews with key LGBT youth service providers in different regions of Brisbane, Queensland. As the first qualitative engagement with these issues from the perspective of service providers, it highlights not only how LGBT young people experience policing, but also how service providers need to ‘work the system’ of policing to produce the best outcomes for LGBT young people.

Two Thai teachers' perceptions of cooperative learning

Over the past decade, the need for educational reform in Thailand has become increasingly apparent. The strong tradition of teacher-directed instruction has been the major teaching and learning style in Thai education. Recent policy changes have focused on expanding education opportunities, the implementation of compulsory education and also on more student-centered pedagogies (Carter, 2006). A suggested way of bringing about the changes necessary to improve the standard of education in primary schools and retention rates is to incorporate cooperative learning into Thai primary school classrooms. The action research in this study proceeded in four stages. There were pre-implementation interviews of teachers, teacher preparation, implementation of program, and post-implementation evaluation. This study focused on the two Thai teachers' perceptions about the benefits of cooperative learning and the roles of the teachers in cooperative learning classroom. The study found that the two teachers had constructed different levels of perceptions about the benefits of cooperative learning and the roles of the teacher. These findings indicated that Thai teachers who are relatively inexperienced, lacking in confidence and with little or no experience with group work strategies such as peer tutoring need alternative, less intense professional development programs conducted over a period of a semester than the professional development program implemented in this study. In addition to being conducted over a longer period of time, the findings also indicate that alternative teacher professional programs need to provide additional workshops to improve their understanding of cooperative learning and the teachers' roles.

An evaluation framework for educational reform projects for teacher quality improvements in developing countries : a case study of Egyptian education reform

The role of the evaluation for Official Development Assistance (ODA) enterprises including educational development has become critical after increasing “aid fatigue” experienced by the international community in the 1990s. To date, however, monitoring and evaluating outcomes of the projects has been limited to the project life. Consequently these have been mainly through the international aid agencies. Furthermore, the monitoring and evaluation led by international aid agencies have paid little attention to aspects of the sustainability of technical cooperation in educational development. To sustain the impact of technical cooperation, the reinforcement of evaluation has drawn increasing attention in light of the emerging modalities in international development. Therefore this research was inspired to investigate alternative evaluation frameworks for an educational reform project for teacher quality improvement that may increase possibilities for long term sustainability. Importantly, the new modalities in international development and educational issues provide new options. In addition, the research reviewed theoretical and practical issues surrounding evaluation in general, and highlighted the evaluation of education reform projects. The research reported explored via case studies, the evaluation processes employed by the Egyptian education reform projects implemented by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The case studies used three data sources (archival and relevant documents, a survey questionnaire and interviews) to illuminate the contextually-embedded evaluation processes. The research found that process evaluation is a potential alternative method since it is likely to be locally institutionalised, which may yield long-term sustainability of the projects.

“I want to see the Queen” : experiences of service use by ageing people with an intellectual disability

People with intellectual disability are a relatively new but growing minority group within Australia's ageing population. Disability policies point to the equal right of people with disabilities to a quality of life similar to that of other citizens. Disability services are increasingly required to provide individualised and responsive services, irrespective of age, for people with lifelong disabilities. The present study explored the everyday lives of older people with intellectual disability in Victoria and Queensland, examining their experiences of using disability services and the ways in which services responded to their ageing. The aim of the study was to inform practice and service development for older people with intellectual disability. The findings suggest that services facilitate important social relationships with other service users and staff. Most older people had a sense of belonging and led busy but directionless lives in two disconnected worlds. Their lives were subject to significant external present-focused control. Yet, despite this, neither services nor family members took responsibility for ensuring their sense of continuity or supporting the development of plans about their future. The experiences described suggest an urgent need for, but significant challenges in the implementation of, holistic indivdualised planning similar to the UK concept of person-centred planning.

A fuzzy neural network approach for contractor pre-qualification

Nonlinearity, uncertainty and subjectivity are the three predominant characteristics of contractors prequalification which cause the process more of an art than a scientific evaluation. A fuzzy neural network (FNN) model, amalgamating both the fuzzy set and neural network theories, has been developed aiming to improve the objectiveness of contractor prequalification. Through the FNN theory, the fuzzy rules as used by the prequalifiers can be identified and the corresponding membership functions can be transformed. Eighty-five cases with detailed decision criteria and rules for prequalifying Hong Kong civil engineering contractors were collected. These cases were used for training (calibrating) and testing the FNN model. The performance of the FNN model was compared with the original results produced by the prequalifiers and those generated by the general feedforward neural network (GFNN, i.e. a crisp neural network) approach. Contractor’s ranking orders, the model efficiency (R2) and the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) were examined during the testing phase. These results indicate the applicability of the neural network approach for contractor prequalification and the benefits of the FNN model over the GFNN model. The FNN is a practical approach for modelling contractor prequalification.

Decision support system for contractor pre-qualification : artificial neural network model

The selection criteria for contractor pre-qualification are characterized by the co-existence of both quantitative and qualitative data. The qualitative data is non-linear, uncertain and imprecise. An ideal decision support system for contractor pre-qualification should have the ability of handling both quantitative and qualitative data, and of mapping the complicated nonlinear relationship of the selection criteria, such that rational and consistent decisions can be made. In this research paper, an artificial neural network model was developed to assist public clients identifying suitable contractors for tendering. The pre-qualification criteria (variables) were identified for the model. One hundred and twelve real pre-qualification cases were collected from civil engineering projects in Hong Kong, and eighty-eight hypothetical pre-qualification cases were also generated according to the “If-then” rules used by professionals in the pre-qualification process. The results of the analysis totally comply with current practice (public developers in Hong Kong). Each pre-qualification case consisted of input ratings for candidate contractors’ attributes and their corresponding pre-qualification decisions. The training of the neural network model was accomplished by using the developed program, in which a conjugate gradient descent algorithm was incorporated for improving the learning performance of the network. Cross-validation was applied to estimate the generalization errors based on the “re-sampling” of training pairs. The case studies show that the artificial neural network model is suitable for mapping the complicated nonlinear relationship between contractors’ attributes and their corresponding pre-qualification (disqualification) decisions. The artificial neural network model can be concluded as an ideal alternative for performing the contractor pre-qualification task.

Redefining the student-teacher relationship through online sharing activities

The student-teacher relationship should be a critical factor for successful teaching and learning in design education. In tradition, the relationship is defined as a master-apprentice, so design teachers’ visual assessment capability and technical standards significantly affect students’ quality of learning and achievements. However, there are some negative aspects of the master-apprentice relationship in design education that it may restrict student experiences to cultural diversity and interdisciplinary learning through various interactions with other students. A visual design subject was designed to adapt a new learning method that is to share students’ work and assessment through an asynchronous communication tool. This method was expected to reduce the negative aspects of the master-apprentice relationship and enhance peer-to-peer interactions and individualistic collaboration. A survey with two types of student groups in terms of their levels of participation was conducted to evaluate student experiences to this method. The outcomes implicate that online peer assessment is helpful to reduce the negative aspects of master-apprentice relation and can be useful for achieving the ultimate purpose of design education.

Augmenting web service discovery by cognitive semantics and abduction

We argue that web service discovery technology should help the user navigate a complex problem space by providing suggestions for services which they may not be able to formulate themselves as (s)he lacks the epistemic resources to do so. Free text documents in service environments provide an untapped source of information for augmenting the epistemic state of the user and hence their ability to search effectively for services. A quantitative approach to semantic knowledge representation is adopted in the form of semantic space models computed from these free text documents. Knowledge of the user’s agenda is promoted by associational inferences computed from the semantic space. The inferences are suggestive and aim to promote human abductive reasoning to guide the user from fuzzy search goals into a better understanding of the problem space surrounding the given agenda. Experimental results are discussed based on a complex and realistic planning activity.