Assessing the Mental Health Literacy of Secondary School Educators

Mental health remains to be one of the most pressing concerns across the world, and teachers play an influential role in the lives and learning of students struggling with mental health. Unfortunately, teachers have expressed concerns of feeling overwhelmed and unprepared to handle the mental health needs of their students because of the lack of knowledge, skills, competence, and resources. This research was conducted to provide a systematic appraisal of the mental health literacy among secondary school teachers. Utilizing the Education-modified Mental Health Literacy Scale which was adapted by Kenney from the work of O’Connor, eighty-one (81) teachers from public and private secondary schools were surveyed in six domains, to include: disorder recognition scale, risk factor knowledge scale, self-treatment knowledge scale, available professional help scale, information seeking knowledge scale, and attitudes scale. It was found that overall, the participants manifested a high level of mental health literacy, and are most adept at the attitudes scale. Conversely, it was found that teachers need more knowledge and training in the risk-factor knowledge scale. No statistically significant difference was found in the mental health scale scores when compared between schools and grade level. The researcher recommends using the results of the current study as a springboard for crafting a professional development program that focuses on increasing the literacy of teachers about mental health.

Programming for Teachers: Supporting Participants in Defining Their Learning Path in a Flexible Online Learning Trajectory Course

A fully online and flexible learning-trajectory course for in-service teachers aims to include students with varied programming knowledge, interests, and application needs. The goal is to align the diversity in the target group and flexible learning-trajectories so that every student chooses the right path based on his/her background knowledge and interest. This paper presents a study of helping students reflect on their learning needs and choose the right learning-trajectories in such a course. Students with little or no programming knowledge might find the course content overwhelming, and therefore it might be challenging to find the right learning-objectives/trajectories. We use questionnaires to investigate the prerequisites, competencies, expectations, interests, and needs of each student's local practices. Based on the results, the instructors will support participants through communications channels and webinars to select a learning path that is best fitting each student. Besides, course instructors will identify the "mainstream" in the class and follow them tightly using online webinars. One of the main concerns of providing a flexible learning trajectory course is that many students may struggle to find their learning path and find the course content overwhelming. This paper reflects on how webinars may affect the selection of learning paths for each student.

Students with Emotional Disorders: Are Primary Education Teachers Prepared to Teach Them?

Emotional disorders, mainly manifested in depression and anxiety, are challenges that affect a person's feelings, thoughts, and behaviour. In children, different efforts have existed to prevent emotional disorders that, depending on the case, can occur at different stages of academic development. Nevertheless, these attempts have proven to be ineffective among elementary education students. Since most children spend a large part of their time in schools, various authors argue that academic institutions are the prime location for detecting mental disorders as early as possible, in order to effectively guide students to adequate health services. However, are our teachers prepared for it? Are our academic institutions prepared for it? The close relationship between mental health and the process of learning in schools, justifies investigating that may reveal a real, emergent and unattended problem. These results might raise awareness in the academic society about a topic that should be considered at the moment of planning classes. This paper intends to justify further research on the preparation of teachers to deal adequately with students with mental disorders. In order to do so, it has been gathered different theories that show a problem that needs to be addressed. Besides, interviews applied to professors from elementary levels of Chilean schools included in this work, support this theory.

Interests, Gender Differences, Impulsivity and Reflectivity among Year Three Pupils in London (U.K.) Schools

The achievement of year 3 pupils in the classroom may be influenced by how they are taught familiar topics. That is, it is suggested that pupils may develop interests such as hobbies which are related to academic studies at school. It is therefore hypothesised that the extent to which year 3 pupils are interested in school subjects is a major factor contributing to performances in terms of time taken to complete tasks, errors made during completion and the type of strategies pupils use for successful completion of tasks. The extent to which pupils make errors and the time it takes to complete matching tasks of interest, is used as an indicator of how ‘reflective or impulsive’ pupils are, and this has implications for academic achievement. Thirty girls and thirty boys, (7-8 years old) were recruited for a study across five primary schools in a London Borough (England, U.K.). Interest and lack of interest in things was elicited using an interview and simple matching tasks were used to establish performance on tasks of interest and disinterest. Boys generally made slightly more errors than girls and were quicker when making matches. Girls used ordered strategies to make matches compared with random/global strategies for boys. The implications for this research are: - training of pupils to problem-solve using appropriate strategies; establishing ways of developing students’ subject interests and encouraging teachers to find ways of using suitable styles for individual students’ needs who are either reflective or impulsive.