Contextualising Youth Justice Interventions: Making the Case for Realist Synthesis

This article examines the problematic reductionism and decontextualising nature of hegemonic youth justice intervention evaluation and offers a way ahead for a realistic, context-sensitive approach to intervention evaluation in the youth justice field. It opens by considering how the development of risk-based youth justice interventions in England and Wales flowed from and fed into the modernisation and resultant partiality of the ‘evidence-base’, which shaped youth justice practice. It then moves to a critical review of the emergence and continued influence of risk-based interventions and the ‘What Works’ intervention evaluation framework in youth justice. In the closing discussion, this article envisages the potential of taking a realist approach to the evaluation of youth justice interventions to mitigate the limitations of current approaches to intervention selection and the evaluation of their ‘effectiveness’.

Epistemic Emotions and Co-inquiry: A Situated Approach

This paper discusses the virtue epistemology literature on epistemic emotions and challenges the individualist, unworldly account of epistemic emotions. It argues that epistemic emotions can be truth-motivating if embedded in co-inquiry epistemic cultures, namely virtuous epistemic cultures that valorise participatory processes of inquiry as truth-conducive. Co-inquiry epistemic cultures are seen as playing a constitutive role in shaping, developing, and regulating epistemic emotions. Using key references to classical Pragmatism, the paper describes the bridge between epistemic emotions and co-inquiry culture in terms of habits of co-inquiry that act as the scaffolding of epistemic emotions. The result is a context-sensitive and practice-oriented approach to epistemic emotions that conceives of those emotions as being shaped by co-inquiry epistemic cultures.

Neural Dynamics of Context-Sensitive Adjustments in Cognitive Flexibility

To adaptively interact with the uncertainties of daily life, we must match our level of cognitive flexibility to contextual demands—being more flexible when frequent shifting between different tasks is required and more stable when the current task requires a strong focus of attention. Such cognitive flexibility adjustments in response to changing contextual demands have been observed in cued task-switching paradigms, where the performance cost incurred by switching versus repeating tasks (switch cost) scales inversely with the proportion of switches (PS) within a block of trials. However, the neural underpinnings of these adjustments in cognitive flexibility are not well understood. Here, we recorded 64-channel EEG measures of electrical brain activity as participants switched between letter and digit categorization tasks in varying PS contexts, from which we extracted ERPs elicited by the task cue and alpha power differences during the cue-to-target interval and the resting precue period. The temporal resolution of the EEG allowed us to test whether contextual adjustments in cognitive flexibility are mediated by tonic changes in processing mode or by changes in phasic, task cue-triggered processes. We observed reliable modulation of behavioral switch cost by PS context that was mirrored in both cue-evoked ERP and time–frequency effects but not by blockwide precue EEG changes. These results indicate that different levels of cognitive flexibility are instantiated after the presentation of task cues, rather than by being maintained as a tonic state throughout low- or high-switch contexts.

Innovations in Teacher Professional Development

The professional development needs of teachers have changed dramatically over the last 25 years. When constructed to reflect best practices evidenced in the research literature, micro-credentials and other 21st century innovations provide accessible, meaningful, professional learning experiences for educators. This chapter discusses two cases that affected personal transformation and pedagogical change for in-service teachers by an institution of higher education (IHE). A preliminary analysis of these alternative experiences established that when teacher professional development is founded on the context-sensitive integration of social and cultural competencies, meaningful, empowering, and enduring learning can take place.

A systematic review of key contextual challenges facing school principals: Research-informed coping solutions

The function of school leadership has been significantly changed by the multi-layered school context to meet the demands of stakeholders. Increasing autonomy and accountability pressures have made it difficult to maintain the balance of principals’ tasks, which gives rise to a variety of challenges. This study adopted a descriptive quantitative form of a systematic review to analyse 169 related studies about the challenges faced principals and research-informed coping solutions for such challenges published in the international journals indexed by the WoS, SCOPUS, and ERIC databases between 2001 and 2020. This analysis identified 734 contextual challenges, including challenges related to principals’ roles and actions (31%) influenced by institutional contexts (24%), socio-cultural contexts (11%), stakeholders (3.4%), and parents (5.2%). Additional contextual challenges were related to the leading staff (6%) and teachers (7.9%). Finally, 11.2% of the contextual challenges corresponded with concerns about student performance. This research highlights the need for modifying leadership preparation programs in a context sensitive manner, active participation of all stakeholders in setting school targets and methods for achieving them, and creating a supportive culture that encourages mutual progressive trust between governments, local communities, and school principals.

Disjunctive Answer Options Complicate Communication – A Linguistic Analysis of the Danish EQ-5D (5L) Version

Background: EQ-5D is an internationally acknowledged tool for assessing health-related quality of life. Our aim was to examine how pragmatic dynamics may influence answers to the EQ-5D-5L and how the logical structure of answer options affects the communication of the questionnaire.Methods: We performed a 3-step linguistic analysis building on the seminal work of Grice, including 1) examination of the lexical meanings of the answer options, 2) considerations of how conversational maxims might affect the respondent’s interpretation of answer options when two or more answer options in an item are compatible, and 3) analysis of how the questionnaire’s context might counteract the problem of omissions of answer options by shifting the meaning of context-sensitive expressions. Results: All items exhibit compatibilities and omissions. In items 1 and 3, ordinary conversational norms provide sufficient guidance to determine how a respondent should decide between compatible answer options. In items 2, 4, and 5, the available answer options complicated the communicative task for some respondents. Conclusions: In items where answer options have a disjunctive structure, respondents relying on Gricean maxims of conversation will have to depend on their individual understanding of fine-grained details concerning the questionnaire’s purpose and may have to weigh how conflicting norms should be balanced.

Diversity in “Cause”

This chapter applies the diagnostic lessons of the previous chapter to familiar philosophical controversies with respect to causation, in which the word “cause” appears to highlight different forms of physical circumstance depending upon the context in which it is employed. By examining the modeling of billiard ball behavior from a multiscalar point of view, it becomes easy to appreciate why “cause” must naturally adapt its referential attachments in a variable manner, for essentially the same “division in linguistic labor” reasons that lead the word “force” to distinct forms of applicational attachment. Often we fail to notice the tacit structural safeguards that render such context-sensitive patterns of usage effective within our everyday employments. This chapter then argues that conceptual analyses of this “division of labor” character supply better answers to many of the standard “small metaphysics” issues that arise whenever a natural language gradually increases it applicational scope. From this perspective, the standards of “ersatz rigor” associated with theory T conceptions of philosophical analysis rest upon a faulty diagnosis of how the conceptual tensions of everyday life should be remedied, in a manner analogous to Hertz’s mistaken embrace of single-leveled axiomatics.