The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between two sets of variables with the first including parental involvement, literacy skills, and socio-economic status and the second including graduation rates, incarceration rates and psychiatric hospitalization rates. The study methodology included three separate multiple regression analyses. Data were collected from archival sources through the Mississippi Department of Education (MDE), Mississippi Department of Mental Health, and the Mississippi Department of Human Services Youth Divisions. The results of this study indicated that socio-economic status has a statistically significant relationship with high school graduation rates and youth psychiatric hospitalization rates in the State of Mississippi.

Yes / Although urgent primary eye care schemes exist in some areas of England, their current safety is unknown. Accordingly, the aim of the present study was to quantify the clinical safety and effectiveness of a COVID-19 Urgent Eyecare Service (CUES) across Luton, Bedford, Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire and Harrogate. Consenting patients with acute onset eye problems who had accessed the service were contacted to ascertain what the optometrist's recommendation was, whether this worked, if they had to present elsewhere and how satisfied they were with the CUES. A total of 27% (170/629) and 6.3% (28/445) of patients managed virtually and in person, respectively, did not have their acute eye problem resolved. Regression analysis revealed that patients who attended a face-to-face consultation were 4.66 times more likely to be correctly managed [Exp (β) = 5.66], relative to those solely managed virtually. Optometrists' phone consultations failed to detect conditions such as stroke, intracranial hypertension, suspected space occupying lesions, orbital cellulitis, scleritis, corneal ulcer, wet macular degeneration, uveitis with macular oedema and retinal detachment. Of referrals to hospital ophthalmology departments, in total, 19% were false-positives. Patients, however, were typically very satisfied with the service. Uptake was associated with socioeconomic status. The present study found that a virtual assessment service providing optometrist tele-consultations was not effective at resolving patients' acute-onset eye problems. The range and number of pathologies missed by tele-consultations suggests that the service model in the present study was detrimental to patient safety. To improve this, optometrists should follow evidence based guidance when attempting to manage patients virtually, or in person. For example, patients presenting with acute-onset symptoms of flashing lights and/or floaters require an urgent dilated fundus examination. Robust data collection on service safety is required on an ongoing basis.

The No Child Left Behind Act (2001) requires schools to increase academic performance and close the achievement gaps between sub-groups of students. As schools work to increase student performance in all academic areas, educators must identify the needs of each sub-group of students they services and determine which instructional practices meet their unique needs. Students living in poverty enter school with a distinctive set of needs and therefore require instructional practices that meet these needs. The researcher in this study strived to identify instructional practices that were being used in high and low performing Title I schools and compared the similarities and differences between the practices. Data reported from the study might inform school leaders regarding what instructional practices are effective when working in schools with high concentrations of students living in poverty. This qualitative study of four Title I eligible schools in an urban district in southeastern Virginia, involved interviews and focus groups. Interviews and focus groups focused on instructional practices (strategies, programs, and other factors) that influence academic achievement of students in high and low performing Title I eligible schools. Findings revealed that high performing Title I schools used student performance data to drive instruction; focused on teaching students enriching vocabulary; used the strategies of note taking, explicit instruction, similarities and differences, nonlinguistic representation, graphic organizers, and cooperative learning; conducted mentorship programs for teachers and students; utilized computer based instructional programs with fidelity; believed in their students and cared about their students; provided professional development to teachers; and implemented student reward/recognition programs. / Ed. D.

Yes / Purpose: Although urgent primary eye care schemes exist in some areas of England, their current safety is unknown. Accordingly, the aim of the present study was to quantify the clinical safety and effectiveness of a COVID-19 Urgent Eyecare Service (CUES) across Luton, Bedford, Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire and Harrogate. Methods: Consenting patients with acute onset eye problems who had accessed the service were contacted to ascertain what the optometrist’s recommendation was, whether this worked, if they had to present elsewhere and how satisfied they were with the CUES. Results: 27% (170/629) and 6.3% (28/445) of patients managed virtually and in person, respectively, did not have their acute eye problem resolved. Regression analysis revealed that patients who attended a face-to-face consultation were 4.66 times more likely to be correctly managed (Exp (β) = 5.66), relative to those managed solely virtually. Optometrists phone consultations failed to detect conditions such as stroke, intracranial hypertension, suspected space occupying lesions, orbital cellulitis, scleritis, corneal ulcer, wet macular degeneration, uveitis with macular oedema and retinal detachment. Of referrals to hospital ophthalmology departments, in total, 19% were false-positives. Patients, however, were typically very satisfied with the service. Uptake was associated with socio-economic status. Conclusion: The present study found that a virtual assessment service providing optometrist teleconsultations was not effective at resolving patient’s acute-onset eye problems. The range and number of pathologies missed by teleconsultations suggests that the service model in the present study was detrimental to patient safety. To improve this, optometrists should follow evidence based guidance when attempting to manage patients virtually, or in person. For example, patients presenting with acute-onset symptoms of flashing lights and/or floaters require an urgent dilated fundus examination. Robust data collection on service safety is required on an ongoing basis. / The full-text of this article will be released for public view at the end of the publisher embargo on 10 Nov 2022.

The purpose which guided the writer in the conducting of this study was a desire to determine the existence of any relationships which might be perceptible among such traits and considerations as socio-economic status, popularity at school, general scholastic achievement, and traits of personality as they were found in a group of fifth-grade pupils enrolled in the public school of Sanger, Texas.

The problem of the present study is to investigate the consequences of an institutional program planned to develop positive interpersonal relations on the educational achievement, mental, health, and attitudes and outlook of a group of dependent and neglected children. The experimental group was composed of children in a home for dependent and neglected children in a large southwestern city. These children were compared to a control group whose parents were in the same socio-economic class, and who attended Sunday School for lower income families in a large Southern Baptist church in the same locality.

School garden-based education programs have become an increasingly popular tool to improve children's nutrition, yet evaluations have found mixed results. This study analyzes three years of student surveys collected before and after one year of participation in the American Heart Association's Teaching Gardens program. Analysis was guided by the Social Cognitive Theory, and measured changes in determinants of healthy eating behavior: preferences for fruits and vegetables, gardening skills, food systems learning, and perceptions of self-efficacy and social norms regarding fruit and vegetable consumption. A total of 755 pre-test and 976 post-test responses were included in the analysis, as well as 173 pre-test and 146 post-test responses from two control schools that did not participate in any gardening activities. Frequencies and crosstabulations were used to analyze pre- and post-test data. Paired t-tests were also used to analyze differences between pre- and post-test when data were collected for the same student before and after Teaching Gardens participation. Paired t-test results indicated improvement in Preferences, Food Systems Learning, and Social Norms for both control and experimental groups and in Gardening Skills for the experimental group, although none of the changes over time were significant. At posttest, significant differences by gender were found in responses across all five indices, with girls answering generally more positively to questions than boys. Crosstab results also indicated significant differences by school minority concentration and socioeconomic status (SES) across all five indices at post-test, as well as a general correlation between minority concentration and SES. However, the effects of these environmental factors were mixed. The second article of this thesis investigates the effects of another environmental factor - the level of integration of the school garden program into the wider school environment - on students' reported knowledge of Gardening Skills. Eight schools and 142 matched pairs of students that participated in the Teaching Gardens program were analyzed. Adult responses from each of the schools were used to create an index of the program's Level of Integration, which was then compared with the students' reported changes in Gardening Skills using bivariate analysis and Paired Samples t-tests. Repeated Measures General Linear Model tests were then conducted to compare the model including the Level of Integration against the more traditional model of school garden evaluation, which focuses on school's minority concentration and SES. Results indicate that students at schools with well-integrated school garden programs gain greater Gardening Skills as a result of one year of participation in the program and confirms previous findings that students from lower SES areas experience greater gains in Gardening Skills than students from higher SES areas.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the world’s poorest regions, governments heavily rely upon donor Aid in order to sustain their national budgets and address the exacerbation of poverty. Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the region is no exception and part of the cause of the poverty is donor aid suspension. The United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP) in Malawi introduced the School Feeding programme in 1999. The intention was to reduce dropout rates, promote regular attendance, increase enrolment, and improve children’s ability to concentrate and learn, and improve government capacity to implement a school meals programme. During the period between 2007 and 2011, the WFP announced the temporary suspension of the programme for half a million children in 10 of the 13 Malawian Districts of which the Chirazdulu district was one. Since the suspension of the programme, no proper study has been conducted to indicate the bearing of the suspension. The purpose of the study was to explore in which ways suspension of Aid provision by the WFP from 2007 to 2011 affected the school meals programme and the socio-economic status of the beneficiaries of the programme in the Chiradzulu district in Malawi. Participants in the study were three teachers at two schools where the programme is offered and four parents from the two schools who were involved in the administration of the programme. A qualitative research approached was used and a case study design was applied at two schools in the Chiradzulu district where the WFP’s school meals programme was implemented. Semi-structure interview schedules that were pre-tested were used during the individual interviews conducted with parents and teachers. The school meals programme is still implemented at the two schools today. The main findings revealed that donor aid suspension affected the continued implementation of the school meals programme and the socio-economic wellbeing of the programme’s beneficiaries. There was a reduction in school attendance by learners, increased absenteeism, evidence of malnourishment amongst learners and increasing pressure on parents to provide breakfast for the learners before they went to school. For the programme to have a sustainable impact it is recommended that its implementation must not be interrupted by aid suspension, the programme must be expanded but remain targeted and not become universal and the Malawi government assume full responsibility of the programme and stop reliance on foreign funding.

This diploma thesis deals with issues of pupils' behavior and discipline at elementary schools. It consists of a theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part deals with basic concepts and general problems of discipline and inexplicably with available literature. The practical part is focused on the research of the frequency of individual manifestations of disruptive behavior, it is determined whether the lack of discipline is associated with one of the selected characteristics of the pupil, such as the type of school, gender, socio - economic situation of the family and the development of the frequency of individual manifestations of disruptive behavior from the sixth to ninth grade. The aim of the thesis is to find out the extent of undesirable behavior in selected schools. The research method used is the statistical analysis of the data and the collection method is in the form of questionnaire. The result is a summary of the most frequently occurring unruly behavior at second level of the elementary school and its comparison within selected characteristics from the pupilś point of view. Self-evaluation is compared with the evaluation of unruly behavior from the point of view of the class and with the assessment of hypothetical person's suggestion. Key words Discipline, school discipline,...

The Video Suggestibility Scale for Children (VSSC) was developed by Scullin and colleagues (Scullin & Ceci, 2000; Scullin & Hembrooke, 1998) as a tool for discriminating between children who have different levels of suggestibility. The scale requires children to view a 5-minute video about a birthday party, and to subsequently participate in an interview consisting of 18 yes/no questions. The VSSC consists of two main subscales; Yield (a measure of children's willingness to respond affirmatively to misleading questions about the video) and Shift (a measure of the children's tendency to change their responses after negative feedback from the interviewer). Preliminary research by Scullin and colleagues suggested that the scale possesses satisfactory internal consistency and that children's scores on the VSSC can predict their performance in another suggestibility paradigm. This thesis presents two studies, which further examine the validity and usefulness of the VSSC in an Australian sample of 3- to-5-year-old children. In Study One, children's performance on the VSSC (N = 77) was compared to their performance using other measures of suggestibility. These measures included children's willingness to assent to a false event as well as the number of false interviewer suggestions and new false details that the children provided in their accounts about an independent true-biased and an independent false (non-experienced) event. An independent samples t-test revealed that those children who assented to the false activity generated higher scores on the Yield measure. This pattern was also observed for the Shift subscale although it was not significant. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that Yield was a significant predictor of the number of false details reported about the false activity, but not the true-biased activity. There was no significant relationship between the Shift Vlll subscale and any of the dependent variables. Overall this study provided partial support for the construct validity of the VSSC. However, it indicated that children's performance on this scale may not be generalisable across different contexts and interview paradigms, and that the Yield subscale is more generalisable than the Shift subscale. Study Two examined whether various group and individual factors that have previously been shown to relate suggestibility (i.e., age, IQ, memory, socio-economic status, gender, temperament) could predict suggestibility as measured by the VSSC. Two hundred and twenty children were recruited from kindergartens, and were divided into two broad socio-economic categories (based predominantly on income). Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that age, intelligence and memory inversely predicted children's Yield suggestibility. Further, children of low socio-economic backgrounds were more suggestible than children of high socio-economic background, and boys were more suggestible than girls on the Yield measure. Although shyness and other internalised and externalised characteristics were explored, no reliable significant relationships were found with Yield. With regard to the Shift subscale, no reliable relationships were found for any of the independent variables except for SES. Overall, results of Study 2 indicated that the VSSC is a potentially useful measure for discriminating between children's suggestibility on the basis on their individual characteristics, although benefits were observed mainly in relation to the Yield subscale. With reference to the findings of these two studies, the potential contribution of the VSSC for research and applied forensic contexts was discussed.