The present study examined the effects of repetition on the social/emotional adjustment of students in grades one to five. Subjects (n = 122) were all selected by their schools for repetition at the end of the school year. Of these, 74 repeated the grade and the remaining 48 proceeded to the next grade because these students' parents rejected the schools' recommendations to repeat their children. All children were pre- and post-tested on a range of educational, behavioural and attitudinal measures from multiple perspectives (i.e. teachers, parents and students) to determine the social/emotional effects of repetition on students.

Although the repeated group showed a significant improvement in place in grade, analysis of variance yielded very few differences between repeated and promoted students on the academic measures. However, on the social/emotional measures, repeated students were judged by teachers to have better fine and gross motor control, to be achieving better, to be more socially adjusted and more emotionally mature than promoted students. Parents of repeaters rated achievement and attitude towards school as showing more positive change than parents of promoted students. It was concluded that, while repetition is of limited benefit in enhancing academic performance, the gains were sufficient to allow favourable comparisons of repeated students with their new peer groups, and to enhance repeated students' sense of competence and mastery which, in turn, positively influenced ratings on other aspects of social/emotional adjustment.

Australian tertiary training programs in educational psychology were surveyed to determine whether each program included each of nine coursework areas. Common to all courses were training in psychoeducational assessment and research methodology. Half of the surveyed programs included training in either counselling or behavioural techniques, but not both. The paper advocates a closer relationship between the content of training courses and the development of a “school psychologist” identity among practitioners.

With advances in medical knowledge, increasing numbers of very small and very sick infants are surviving. Only a small percentage of these infants have severe disabilities. However, the risk of more subtle handicapping conditions such as learning disabilities, behaviour problems and recurrent illness needs to be assessed. The prevalence of these conditions in a population of 88 high risk infants was investigated when these children reached nine years of age. In general, the children were found to be in good health, although there was an increased risk of asthma. In contrast, a high percentage were experiencing learning difficulties or exhibiting behaviour problems. Thus, the medical problems of infancy appeared to have been replaced with educationaland behavioural problems in the school years. The perinatal, developmental and social antecedents of these problems require further investigation.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether any personality characteristics, as measured by the Holland Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI), influenced the efficacy of the Jobclub programme. The study used 25 voluntary subjects to assess the relationship between personality profiles and training outcomes, in order to determine whether certain personality factors predisposed subject receptiveness to training success. The results indicated that no relationship existed between personality profiles, as measured by the VPI, and outcomes to the Jobclub training programme. The implications of this finding is that programmes that employ techniques used by Jobclub can be applied in a wide variety of situations, such as in schools or among specifically targeted populations.

The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale has a long history of successful usage as the foremost psychometric instrument for the assessment of cognitive ability. Early versions of the instrument were concerned primarily with the prediction of school achievement and academic learning on the basis of an overall IQ score. The present fourth edition of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (Thorndike, Hagen & Sattler, 1986) is greatly advanced in design and construction over the previous Form L-M. It is, in this regard, both exhaustively comprehensive and concomitantly rather tedious and slow to administer, particularly when a detailed assessment is required. While the test authors claim that the full range of subtests takes only 60–90 minutes (no more than 13 of the 15 subtests can be given to any one individual and in practice, probably only six or seven may beadministered in any particular testing situation), the actual testing time may be significantly greater than this, depending on individual circumstances.