Comprehensive School (comprehensive + school)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


The BreathmobileÔ: A Novel Comprehensive School-Based Mobile Asthma Care Clinic for Urban Underprivileged Children

JOURNAL OF SCHOOL HEALTH, Issue 6 2006
Otto Liao
Many school-based programs have been funded to improve asthma management, especially for these "high-risk" inner-city children with asthma. Here we report the outcomes of the Children's Hospital of Orange County Breathmobile program, which is a school-based asthma program that combines the use of a mobile clinic and a pediatric asthma specialist. Baseline evaluations included a detailed history and physical, skin prick test to common allergens, spirometry measurements, and asthma severity classification based on the current National Asthma Education and Prevention Program guidelines. From April 2002 to September 2005, a total of 1321 children were evaluated for asthma. Analysis of the 1112 (84%) children diagnosed with asthma showed a population mean age of 7.8 years, 81% Latino ethnicity, and 73% with persistent disease. At baseline, only 24% of children with persistent asthma were on daily anti-inflammatory medications, which increased to 78% by the first follow-up visit. In the year prior to entry into the program, 64% had school absenteeism related to asthma (38% >10 days), 45% had emergency room (ER) visits (28% >1), and 19% had hospitalizations (9% >1). There was a significant reduction (p < .001) in the annual rates of ER visits, hospitalizations, and school absenteeism when comparing pre- and postentry into the program. These data suggest that a mobile asthma van clinic at the school site with an asthma specialist could be an effective model in reducing morbidity in the underserved child with asthma. Further studies are necessary to determine whether this model is applicable to other inner-city settings. (J Sch Health. 2006;76(6):313-319) [source]


SHARE: A superordinate online rural community

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2008
Janet Capps
Comprehensive School Reform in Rural K-8 Schools in the Southeast: Integrative Technologies for Quality Initiatives is a three-year technology intervention funded by the US Department of Education. As part of this project, teachers in eight rural K-8 schools in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama were given access to an online community Web-portal built on Sakai called SHARE (Schools Helping to Advance Rural Education). This Web-portal supports the project's goal to expand teachers' ability to access and exchange information by providing server space for each school community as well as the larger project community. Through SHARE, communities of teachers at the school level can create a new community of information exchange among all project teachers and across all project schools. The exchange at the higher project level creates a superordinate level. Data collected through multiple methods is used to make comparisons between teachers' attitudes and online information exchange practices in base-level communities and in the larger superordinate community established through the SHARE Web-portal. The four-tier pyramid of Hersberger, Murray, and Rioux (2007) is used to inform the evaluation of the teachers' information sharing activities and to assist in the assessment of the overall level of gratification or discontentment of the project's community of teachers. [source]


Sex differences in the estimated intelligence of school children

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY, Issue 3 2002
Adrian Furnham
This study investigated sex differences in estimated general and multiple intelligence in school children, their parents, and their teachers. There were three groups of participants: 285 (149 female, 136 male) pupils of a mixed government-run comprehensive school, between the ages of 13 and 16 years; 93 mothers and 58 fathers of the pupils; and five female and eight male teachers. Children estimated their own and their parents' IQ, whilst the parents estimated their own and their children's IQ; the teachers estimated only the children's intelligence. The aims of this study were firstly to assess whether perceptions of male intellectual superiority were observable in school age children and school teachers, and to make direct comparisons between the children's self-estimations and those of the parents and the teachers. Secondly, this study aimed to replicate previous literature on adult self-estimations of overall and multiple intelligences, and to compare these to estimations by children of these adults (their parents). Fewer sex differences were observed than expected. Teachers' estimations did not follow conceptions of male superiority. The patterns of sex differences in mother and teacher estimations of children were similar to each other, as were those of fathers and children. Verbal and numerical abilities were found to be most closely related to estimations of overall IQ in all three groups. Most striking was the lack of correlation between father and daughter estimations of each other. Reasons why this study failed to replicate findings on adult samples are discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Using School Staff to Establish a Preventive Network of Care to Improve Elementary School Students' Control of Asthma

JOURNAL OF SCHOOL HEALTH, Issue 6 2006
Jean-Marie Bruzzese
To address these problems, Columbia University and the New York City Department of Education and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene undertook a randomized controlled trial to test the efficacy of a comprehensive school-based asthma program. In this intervention, school nurses were trained to facilitate the establishment of a preventive network of care for children with asthma by coordinating communications and fostering relationships between families, PCPs, and school personnel. PCPs also received training regarding asthma management. There was limited support for this model. While case detection helped nurses identify additional students with asthma and nurses increased the amount of time spent on asthma-related tasks, PCPs did not change their medical management of asthma. Few improvements in health outcomes were achieved. Relative to controls, 12-months posttest intervention students had a reduction in activity limitations due to asthma (,35% vs ,9%, p < .05) and days with symptoms (26% vs 39%, p = .06). The intervention had no impact on the use of urgent health care services, school attendance, or caregiver's quality of life. There were also no improvements at 24-months postintervention. We faced many challenges related to case detection, training, and implementing preventive care activities, which may have hindered our success. We present these challenges, describe how we coped with them, and discuss the lessons we learned. (J Sch Health. 2006;76(6):307-312) [source]


,On MSN with buff boys': Self- and other-identity claims in the context of small stories1

JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 5 2008
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
This is a study of self- and other-identity claims such as ascriptions, assessments and categorizations in the classroom interactional data of female adolescent students of a London comprehensive school. The study follows an identities-in-interaction approach and attends to the occurrence of identity claims in stories of recent mediated interactions (e.g. on MSN, by text) between tellers and male suitors, which I collectively call small stories. In a narrative-interactional analysis of such claims in two small stories, I postulate a distinction between taleworld and telling identity claims that allows me to show how the sequential context of the claims has implications for their interactional uptake. I specifically focus on the relational organization of the identity claims in contrastive pairs of positive and negative attributes and on their contribution to the stories' tellership rights and tellability. My main aim is to show how identity claims can be intimately linked with and discursively invoke solidified roles (cf. known, habitual) that hold above and beyond the local context. I argue that the three interactional features of iterativity, narrativity and stylization hold the key to uncovering the links between identity claims with solidified roles. [source]


Ram, Rab and the civil servants: a lawyer and the making of the ,Great Education Act 1944'

LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2001
Ray Cocks
By common consent, the Education Act of 1944 was the most important educational reform of the century for England and Wales. This article seeks to reveal the role of a lawyer in the making of the legislation and thereby to reassess past interpretations of how the Act was put together. It is clear that the person who drafted the Act, Sir Granville Ram, had an impact on the content of certain sections. The article begins with an outline of the Act and competing interpretations of how it came to be made. It explores the context within which Ram, as a Parliamentary Counsel, did his drafting during the war years. It then turns to the making of clauses in four specific areas of reform. First, local education authorities were given the power to create new types of secondary schools, including comprehensive schools. Secondly, there was a new structure for regulating private education. Thirdly, the Minister of Education was given important new powers. Fourthly, women were no longer required to resign from teaching when they married. These four areas provide examples of how Ram could influence the shape of the statute, and they also reveal that on each occasion his influence was felt in a different way. [source]


Equality, Fairness and Rights , The Young Person's Voice

BRITISH JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION, Issue 3 2002
Paul Hamill
This article presents findings from a one,year research project undertaken by experienced researchers and practitioners from the University of Strathclyde. Eleven comprehensive schools in Scotland were involved and the aim of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of in,school support systems for young people who display challenging behaviour. Pupil Support Bases (Pupil Referral Units) had been set up in most of the schools aimed at reducing exclusion rates and these were examined from the perspective of all stakeholders , teachers, parents, young people and key inter,agency personnel. The specific focus of this article is the views of the young people who, although often perceived as disruptive, disaffected and troubled, were surprisingly articulate. They had clear messages for all professionals and, in this article, Paul Hamill, Head of the Department of Educational Support and Guidance, and Brian Boyd, a Reader in the Language Education Department, ensure that their voices are heard. [source]


Cutting to cope , a modern adolescent phenomenon

CHILD: CARE, HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 5 2010
B. Hall
Abstract Background The frequency of young people cutting themselves appears to be increasing, with one review estimating the current prevalence across the UK to be between 1 in 12 and 1 in 15. Aim To identify factors that are associated with self-harm by cutting, and more especially coping strategies that if encouraged might reduce such behaviour. Method Multivariate and exploratory factor analysis were used to analyse the results from a survey of the pupils attending four large comprehensive schools in the North of England where the frequency of cutting behaviour was causing concern. Results Three factors were identified from the analysis , Social & Active Coping, Seeking External Solutions and Non-Productive Coping. The Social & Active Coping was the only factor that significantly correlated with non-cutting behaviour. Conclusions The fostering of the elements that make up Social & Active Coping , namely working successfully and feeling a sense of achievement, together with positive friendship networks and positive diversions, including physical recreation, will help to minimize young people's sense of needing to cope by cutting themselves. [source]