Welcome to this edition of the Australian Journal of Guidance and Counselling. As you will noticed we have had another change for the journal — we have a new publisher. We are very fortunate that the journal will now be published by the prestigious Cambridge University Press. We hope to have a long and productive relationship with them. I trust you find this issue interesting and informative for your practice.
The first article, by Kimberley Wilson and Linda Gilmore, gives us food for thought about assessing intelligence in young adolescents. The WISC-IV and Stanford-Binet 5 were administered to 30 typically developing 12- to 14-year-olds. The results showed a significant difference between the full-scale IQ scores on the two measures, with scores being higher on the WISC-IV, and the conclusion that these measures of intelligence are not interchangeable. In the second article Robyn Anderson discusses the practice of repeating children in Prep classes in Queensland. She maintains that although the rate of ‘keeping children back’ has halved since the introduction of a full prep year in 2007 it is still considered to be an educational intervention that exists despite all the research which says it does nothing to boost academic achievement or alleviate the social stigma associated with it. The practice of repeating more boys and Indigenous children is still evident in Queensland.
In the next article, Huseyin Uzunboylu and colleagues show the latest findings of young people and computer games. He found that in 15- to 18-year-olds that almost half played computer games 3–4 days a week, with girls preferring to play simulation games and boys, fight and strategy games. Students who played computer games for 2 or more hours a day reported more anger than those who played less. It could be that angry students prefer to play violent games, or the violent games cause students to become angry.
The next three articles examine perfectionism, adaptability and attributional style in high school students. The first article by Bing Zhang and Taisheng Cai examined the nature of perfectionism. While adaptive perfections involving neatness and order were found, maladaptive perfectionism of unrealistically high standards, the inability to accept mistakes and doubting one's ability to accomplish a task was also found. Self-esteem partially mediated the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and depression in students. The next article, by Andrew Martin and colleagues, investigated adaptability in high school students as a construct of an individual's capacity to constructively regulate their behaviour, cognitions and affect in response to new and changing circumstances. The study provides psychometric findings of an adaptability scale. The following article by Lay See Yeo and Kayce Tan examines attributional style and self-efficacy in Singaporean high school students. Attributional style, or the way people explain events, was different for boys and girls and for different academic ability groups. Females were more optimistic and hopeful than males, while higher-ability students reported greater optimism than lower-ability students. No gender or ability differences were found for academic self-efficacy.
Annemaree Carroll, Francene Hemingway, Adrian Ashman and Julie Bower have written an interesting paper on the Minefields Assessment Battery, which is a comprehensive test battery for evaluating treatment outcomes for juvenile delinquent populations. Not only is it psychometrically sound, but it is based on a robust conceptual framework of self-regulation and treatment amenability. I am sure all who work in this area will find this battery extremely useful.
The last two articles investigate school bullying. The first, by Rosalind Murray-Harvey, Grace Skrzpiec and Phillip Slee, looked at whether or not students who had been bullied generally used effective or ineffective coping strategies as determined by informed professionals. It was found that these high school students considered it to be their personal responsibility to find ways of coping, without talking to an adult. The last paper by Gerald Wurf looks at an evaluation of high school anti-bullying interventions. Similar to Ttofi and Farrington's (2011) meta-evaluation, Wurf found that high school bullying can be significantly reduced through a whole school approach that consists of multiple component interventions.
