Welcome to the first edition of 2013. This particular edition has been compiled differently due to new technology afforded us by Cambridge University Press. In the past, authors have had to wait for their accepted paper to be published when the next edition was due, which could be up to 6 months. However, Cambridge is now able to publish the paper as soon as it is accepted, online, in what is known as First View. When it is time for the printed journal to be published, the articles on First View are selected and reorganised to group papers together and printed. This is a great advantage for those authors wanting their paper to be out there so that their results are publicised. Hopefully, this will make the journal even more attractive for the best possible papers to be submitted.
The first group of three articles in this issue investigate academic concerns of students. The assessment of students with learning disabilities has always been difficult for school psychologists and guidance counsellors. In the first article, Sarah Callinan, Everarda Cunningham and Stephen Theiler discuss the Response to Intervention method and discrepancy theory in assessing these students. The second article by Jeanette Berman and Ian Price follows on from other papers which have been published in the journal about the comparison of intelligence tests. They compared the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scales — Fifth Edition (SB5) and the Das Naglieri Cognitive Assessment System (CAS). They found that the SB5 was approximately 8 points higher than the CAS, with the analysis of the profiles assisting in understanding specific learning abilities and guided interventions. The third article in this section, by Elisabeth Akioka and Linda Gilmore, weighs in with some evidence to the debate about homework.
The next group of three articles looks at student and counsellor behaviour. In the first paper, Annemaree Carroll, Adrian Ashman, Julie Bower and Francene Hemingway present a study examining the experiences of six young people aged 13 to 17 years who participated in Mindfields®, a 6-week self-regulatory intervention aimed at enhancing life skills and goal-setting among youth who present with challenging and/or risky behaviour. Findings showed the importance of participants’ motivation to make life-changing decisions, but this motivation and promising goals could be compromised by factors external to the individual. The following article, by Yalçın Özdemir, Yaşar Kuzucu and Nermin Koruklu, examined adolescent aggression. It was found that social problem-solving was significantly and negatively associated with both depression and aggression and that depression was significantly and positively associated with aggression. When understanding aggression, the factors of depression and social problem-solving also need to be considered. Brett Furlonger and Wendy Taylor investigated the effects of supervision on the management of vicarious traumatisation among telephone and online counsellors on BoysTown Helpline in the next article. While correlations did not prove to be significant between supervision and vicarious traumatisation, the size of counsellors’ trauma caseload proved to be strongly related to both vicarious traumatisation and negative coping style.
In the last group of articles, the first paper by Abdul-Kareem Jaradat investigated perfectionism in high school students. He found that girls were more perfectionistic than boys in both adaptive but also in maladaptive ways. Jaradat suggests that school psychologists and counsellors should design and implement programs for students to set realistically high standards to reduce the discrepancy between personal standards and performance. In the next article, Lionel Nicholas, Maria Damianova and Mzamo Ntantiso examined the preferences for counselling of South African students transitioning to university compared with international students. Differences in preferences for personal and career counselling were observed. The last article for this issue, by P. Law, Monica Cuskelly and Annemaree Carroll, presents and tests a theoretical model of the associations between family, school and peers and their combined impact on students’ adjustment. The authors found that family connectedness is the foundation of social connectedness for older children and adolescents, providing the basis for effective adjustment. Interestingly, school connectedness was found to have a stronger association with children's functioning than did their connectedness to their peers.
I hope you enjoy reading the journal and will contribute to the New Practitioners’ section so we can learn from one another.
