Introduced initially in relation to drug policy, ‘zero tolerance’ has become a catchphrase to describe attitudes and policies relating to drug use, violence and a range of antisocial behaviours. It has been used particularly within schools in the United States as a disciplinary policy since the 1980s. While broadly ascribed, zero tolerance is designed to send a message that targeted behaviours are not tolerated and will be punished. Zero tolerance assumes that swift and uncompromising action aimed at punishing the offender will result in ‘sending a strong message’ to other would-be offenders and deter others from similar antisocial behaviours. However, thirty years of research has shown zero tolerance policies to have failed the individual and the community, resulting instead in increased rates of misbehaviour and early referral to the juvenile and criminal justice systems. This has the potential to negatively impact on the person's mental health and future outcomes.

The results of independent field trials of the Individualised Classroom Environment Questionnaire are presented based on testing nearly 1500 high school students in NSW schools. The findings from this study are very similar to those originally presented by Fraser (1990) and hence constitute independent confirmatory evidence supporting its more widespread use in classroom research.

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.

The purpose of this report is to provide some data on the interests of primary school pupils. Year 3 6 pupils (N=240) responded to the Inventory of Children's Activities, a 30-item general interest questionnaire based on the hexagonal interest and personality typology of Holland. Responses to a 5-point scale were dichotomized and were analysed using a Rasch model (RUMM2010). Items conformed partly to the measurement model and the six scales were characterised by moderate separability (.586 to .690). It was considered that children's interests did not conform to an adult typology; that interests may be idiosyncratic; and, an alternative hypothesis of a general interest dimension comprising all 30 items was also explored. This resulted in a dimension with 0.897 separability and Cronbach alpha of 0.828 but still with the interests of some pupils not covered appropriately.

This study compared perceptions of the school environment, coping and enacted support between Year 10 students identified as educationally at risk (n = 31) and a comparison group of students in the same year level (n = 97), at two periods in the school term. At-risk students perceived the school environment to show significantly less concern for students and used problem-focused coping less frequently than did comparison students. Regardless of risk status, girls used social support more frequently than boys did. At-risk girls accessed peer support more than family support ond also frequently contacted school counsellors to discuss problems. At-risk boys rarely sought support from anyone. Implications for school support programs are twofold. Teachers may need additional professional training in how to employ socially supportive practices. In addition, school counsellors may need to foster informal opportunities for social participation, in order to connect vulnerable boys to peers and adults.

Educational psychologists typically respond to child referrals for problematic behaviour by focusing on the problem. Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) provides an alternative that eliminates the time-consuming task of assessment of the “problem.” This application of SFBT involved three groups of primary school teachers, each focused on one child’s behaviour. The participants reported favourable outcomes of reduced problematic behaviour in the three children and increased collegial support.

Nine children meeting DSM-III-R criteria for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and eighteen normal children participated in this study. A screening assessment revealed significantly more behavioural and academic problems in the ADHD group. Subjects performed a low demand visual vigilance task (the reference task) and the AX version of the continuous perfonnance task (CPT), while the steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP) was continuously recorded from 64 scalp electrode sites. The topography of the SSVEP amplitude difference between the reference and AX tasks was examined. In the 3.5 second interval between the appearances of the “A” and the “X” normal children showed transient reductions in right prefrontal SSVEP amplitude and a sustained reduction in right parieto-occipital SSVEP amplitude. These reductions in SSVEP amplitude were not seen in ADHD subjects. These results suggest that the presentation of a priming stimulus is associated with increased activation of right prefrontal and parieto-occipital regions in normal children, whereas the absence of this pattern of activation suggests a deficit in these processes in ADHD.

The importance of phonemic awareness knowledge in learning to be literate his wellestablished. One dimension of its acquisition, the developmental trend from an implicit awareness of rimes to an explicit awareness of phonemes, has attracted substantial interest.A second dimension, a trend in the amount of phonemic knowledge that can be manipulated, or phonemic awareness span, is examined in the present study. One hundred and sixty children from Preparatory (Prep) to Grade 3 completed five phonological tasks: rhyming, onset-rime segmentation, initial sound recognition, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme substitution. Each task involved words ranging in length from three to five phonemes. Phoneme segmentation and substitution tasks involved words with six phonemes. Over this grade range, phonemic length influenced performance for each task. The nature of the influence varied with grade level; performance for the developmentally simpler tasks was affected at the lower grade levels, whereas the more complex tasks were affected at the higher grades. These trends supported gradual differentiation of phonological knowledge into a network of phonemic units. There are implications for dyslexia subtyping, for reading disabilities diagnosis, and for instructional design.

The Rasch measurement principles espoused in the Bond & Fox (2001) volume reviewed elsewhere in this journal are routinely adopted by Australia's major educational measurement projects (e.g., by Australian Council for Educational Research, Educational Testing Centre). Yet those ideas are yet to have their full impact in smaller research projects in educational and developmental psychology. A number of quantitative analytical techniques used in our disciplines are able to help us to draw conclusions like “Betty is better than or more developed than Bob”, but Rasch measurement is uniquely placed to help us conclude that “Betty is this much better than or more developed than Bob.” In educational and psychological statistics, we regularly presume the “interval” nature of our research data, but only the Rasch model sets about to ensure that the units of measurement maintain their unit value across the whole achievement or development scale.

Typically, asking people to reinstate the context of events increases their recall of those events; however, research findings have been mixed with children. We tested whether the principle underlying context reinstatement applies to children as it does to adults. This underlying principle, encoding specificity, suggests that the greater the overlap between study context cues and retrieval context cues, the more information that people should recall. In the current experiment, four age groups (7-year-olds, 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds and adults) took part in an encoding specificity procedure. At study, participants saw cue–target word pairs in which the cue word was either a strong or a weak associate of the target word (e.g., ice–COLD; blow–COLD). During an immediate cued recall test, participants were presented with the same strong or weak cue words and new, extra-list cue words. Overall, children and adults recalled more targets when they were presented with the same cue words at study and test, regardless of whether the cues were strong or weak. This finding suggests that encoding specificity applies to children as well as adults. We discuss the implications of these results.

This paper reviews the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale 4th Edition (SB-4) and compares and contrasts it with the instrument it supersedes, the Stanford-Binet 3rd Edition (L-M) (SB-3). Specific emphasis is placed on the use of the SB-4 with children and adolescents with intellectual disability. It can differentiate between intellectually disabled children and adolescents who have Down syndrome, and those who have other etiologies.

This article discusses the efficacy of different methods of referring children for educational psychological services from the perspective of resilience theorising and research. Four referral systems are considered, and they are intake, patch, screening, and cross-agency referrals. It is argued that the intake system, where referrals are received by a central agency from a number of sources, is problematic from a practice as well as a theoretical perspective. The patch approach is where an educational psychologist works in a defined geographical area, and this system is recommended instead because it promotes an in-depth understanding of the particular circumstances of children, parents, and teachers. It is also suggested that geographical patches, plus the screening of students at several developmental points, is the most useful referral approach because it combines comparative standards and local knowledge. As well, cross-agency referrals, which are referrals from other social service agencies, can function as useful sources of clients for psychological services

Guidance Officers have traditionally been seen as having different aims, goals and outcomes to those of schools. In fact, guidance officers have been seen as having a vested interest in maintaining this separation. We propose that for guidance officers to become more potent in effecting change, and in order to derive maximum benefit for their clients they need to become much more closely asociated with the goals and programs of mainstream education.

Fifteen per cent of Australian couples now experience fertility problems and many turn to assisted reproductive technology such as in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to conceive their child. This study investigated gender differences in relationship satisfaction during the transition to parenthood, and the effects of gender and age on relationship and psychological adjustment at six–nine months postpartum, in a sample of IVF conceiving couples initially recruited from a private fertility treatment clinic in Sydney. The results revealed different patterns of adjustment for mothers and fathers, whereby mothers showed a significant decline in relationship satisfaction from pregnancy to early parenthood while fathers did not. However, fathers exhibited more consistent relationship concern than mothers in both pregnancy and parenthood, and also reported greater parenting stress related to interaction with their child. There were negligible differences between older and younger parents, suggesting comparable adjustment across age groups. While the outcomes of this research do not indicate problematic adjustment, for those professionals who might be working with families conceiving through IVF they do highlight some specific adjustment issues for mothers and fathers during the postpartum period.

Neuropsychological assessement of children with ADHD is reviewed in the light of recent research and clincial practice. Traditional psychometric approaches may fail to reveal dificiencies in such children and perfomance levels have to be considered with care due to teh potential confounding effects of attention deficit. Examination of qualitative features of preformance and extension of the range of assessment instruments to include those more sensitive to frontal systems dysfunction are proposed. The distinction between ADHD and specific learning disorders on the basis of neuropsychological assessment and the application in educational management is discussed.

In Victoria Guidance Officers provide school psychology and guidance services to families and schools. Most are located throughout Victorian centres which service local school communities and these by and large provide a generalist service which is supplemented by the service of statewide specialists.

New recruits are drawn from the teaching service and those teachers with the necessary combination of experience, qualifications and personal qualities are eligible to apply. There is usually a new intake each year and this number varies according to staff ceilings and vacancies. In 1983 the intake was 45 trainee Guidance Officers which was the largest number of teachers ever recruited. These trainees were allocated to local centres where they would undertake their supervised apprenticeship, which together with the compulsory central training, would make them eligible in two years to become registered Guidance Officers.

As our society becomes increasingly aware of the alarmingly high rates of sexual crimes in the community, it is also “facing up to” the unpleasant truth that adolescents perpetrate a significant proportion of these crimes. During the last 20 years, there has been a trend toward the provision of early intervention programs for adolescents who have committed sexual offences.The most recent of these programs in Australia is the Griffith Adolescent Forensic Assessment and Treatment Centre. The centre is a joint initiative of Grifith University and the Queensland Department of Families. The program is a community safety initiative aimed at reducing the level of sexual assault in the community through effective intervention and supervision ofyoung people who hove committed sexual offences. This article describes the program, the treatment philosophy thot underpins it, and the potential that the program has for research into this disturbing and complex phenomenon.