Grade 7 children's attitudes to high school were assessed through their drawings of how they perceived high school prior to making the transition from primary school. Seven categories were used to analyse the drawings. The results revealed a preponderance of negative features in the drawings, especially amongst the boys. Anxieties such as vulnerability in the new school environment were suggested. A follow-up, once the adolescents had been in high school for six months, revealed more positive features in the drawings indicative of adjustment to the new school environment, and no sex difference in the ratio of positive to negative features was recorded.

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.

Although consultation is increasingly becoming the preferred method of psychological service delivery in schools there appears to be many unresolved issues. As more empirical evidence is gathered about psychological interventions the issues raised have become specific. Initial questions of intervention effectiveness are replaced by questions about the problems and clients suitable for such interventions and the conditions under which they are most effective. Consultation research is in its infancy methodologically but already questions apart from those about effectiveness are being asked. The complexity of the process of consultation, even within one model (e.g. behavioural consultation), is such that the specification of suitable problems, clients and conditions is a difficult task. Examination of recent outcome and review literature suggests such questions are still a long way from being satisfactorily answered.

This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of the conditions which underly the functioning of young Greek-Australians in their society, and the relationship between their ethnic background and identity. Questions relating to ethnic background and identity were administered to 1,029 Greek-Australian pupils from 25 secondary schools in the south-east, inner west and central areas of Sydney (439 males and 590 females). Principal components analysis of fifteen items from the survey was used to explore individual variations in responses. The largest correlation was 0.56 between the importance of Greek origin and feelings about being Greek. Six components with eigen values > 1.0 accounted for 59% of the total variance. The six patterns of response were characterised as : I. Cultural involvement-media contact, II. Ethnic Identity, III. Ethnic Background IV. Bipolar Greek cultural factor, V/VI Specific Factors. There was a general tendency for ethnic background and internalisation-of-identity responses to be separated as components.

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 majority of psychological assessment measures used with children rely on the use of U.S. normative data in their interpretation. Recent studies have brought into question the validity of equating Australian children with their U.S. peers, with findings of different normative values across the two cultures for some behavioural measures. This study reports data from three commonly used child self-report questionnaires, namely the Children's Depression lnventory (CDI), the Fear Survey Schedule for Children—Revised (FSSC-R) and the Children's Action Tendency Scale (CATS). The Australian sample reported very similar results for the CDI and FSSC-R to those found with U.S. samples. Differences in scores across grades were found for the CATS which have not been reported in U.S. studies, suggesting that local norms should be used in its interpretation.

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.

Portage is a home-based educational service for families with pre-school children with special educational needs. The services gained its name fortuitously as Portage just happened to be the small town in Wisconsin, U.S.A., where the project was first developed. The town is a crossover, or ‘portage’, between two rivers and as such symbolises the essence of the service: a ‘bridge’, transferring knowledge and expertise from professionals to parents; closing the gap between deficits exhibited by young children and skills needed for success in school and later life.

The Portage Scheme was developed in 1969 as one of hundreds of projects in the Head Start Programme in the U.S.A. aiming to provide early education for children with special needs. Children living in rural communities were the focus of this particular project. The originators David & Marsha Shearer (1972) felt it inappropriate for these children to travel long distances into a centre. Instead they broke with the traditions of their day and developed a service that was taken to the children in the familiar environment of their homes where their own parents were helped to become their teachers. The decision to do this was based on a conviction that parents are potentially the child's best teachers, particularly in the early years.

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.