Until now the revised March reading, along with January’s index, had been consumer confidence’s lowest level since December 1991, said Chris McCarty, director of UF’s Survey Research Center at the Bureau of Economic and Business Research.

“Consumer confidence in Florida is now at the same recessionary levels as it was during the 1990-91 recession,” McCarty said. “Unlike the relatively mild recession of 2001, the recession of 1990-91 resulted in a longer time to recover. This is a likely scenario for the current economy.”

Most economists believe the economy will pick up by late 2008 or early 2009, but the question remains whether it will get worse and follow the pattern of the 1973-75 recession, he said.

“The causes of lower consumer confidence are well-known to Floridians,” McCarty said. “Falling housing prices, stricter guidelines for all forms of credit, and rising gasoline and food prices are hitting consumers all at once. This has raised the possibility of ‘stagflation,’ a circumstance where gross domestic product retracts while inflation rises.”

Four of the five components that make up the index fell this month. The largest decrease was in perceptions of personal finances a year from now, which fell nine points to 79, a record low for that component. Perceptions of U.S. economic conditions over the next year fell six points to 52, perception of personal finances now compared with a year ago fell five points to 59, a record low for that component, and perceptions of U.S. economic conditions over the next five years fell four points to 72. Perceptions as to whether it is a good time to buy big-ticket consumer items rose three points to 67.

Nationally, consumer confidence as measured by the University of Michigan has fallen to a 26-year low, McCarty said. Hardest hit are low-income households that have a far more difficult time with higher energy and food prices, he said.

In Florida, consumer confidence hit a record low of 64 in December of 1991, McCarty said. Last month’s preliminary index was 68 but was revised up to 70 when the final results were in, he said.

“The question on everyone’s mind is how we are going to get out of this slow economy?” McCarty said. “The answer is probably time. Median house prices have been falling here in Florida since late 2006, and we expect prices to bottom out in much of Florida by July.”

Many homeowners have dealt with their adjustable rate mortgages being reset at higher rates by refinancing, making the required higher payments or leaving their home altogether, McCarty said. Most banks that made bad loans have reduced the book value of assets that are overvalued compared to their market value, and investors are adjusting to these write-downs, he said.

The economic stimulus package, though a welcome relief for many households, will probably not do much to change the course of events, he said.

The research center conducts the Florida Consumer Attitude Survey monthly. Respondents are 18 or older and live in households telephoned randomly. The preliminary index for April was conducted from 533 responses.

Consumer confidence is designed to help predict buying patterns by measuring the mood of consumers toward purchasing. Although other economic indicators also predict buying patterns, consumer confidence tends to be available sooner. The index is benchmarked to 1966, so a value of 100 represents the same level of confidence for that year. The value of the index is in comparing changes over time rather than looking at an isolated month.

Now, thanks to a $600,000 donation by Fred and Christine Shewey of Gainesville, the university’s College of Education is creating an endowment to support new research and programs aimed at middle school reform and enhancement. The gift is eligible to receive matching state funds that could raise the total value of the gift to $1 million.

Fred Shewey said their donation was made as a tribute to their daughter-in-law, Kathy Shewey, a longtime Alachua County educator who is married to their son, Robert. Christine Shewey, the family matriarch, died in October at age 88, while the couple’s gift was being finalized, but the endowment creating the Shewey Excellence in Middle School Education Fund has been established in both of their names.

“Christine and I wanted to do something special for middle school teachers and students. I was on the school board of Mingo County, West Virginia, for 18 years and noticed that middle school kids were truly caught in the middle between elementary and high school in so many ways,” said Fred Shewey, 91, who owned several construction and coal companies in his West Virginia home state before retiring to Gainesville. “We watched Kathy work hard for so many years with middle school teachers and this age group. We wanted to do something to support her efforts.”

Yearly interest earned on the Shewey endowment will fund a bevy of activities and programs designed to improve middle-grades instruction and help educators solve the many hurdles they face while teaching young adolescents.

“Middle school teachers must work with young adolescents at a very precarious time in the students’ lives,” said Nancy Dana, director of the college’s Center for School Improvement, who will steer the activities supported by the Shewey fund. “Research and professional development programs generated by this endowment will support middle-grades teachers in their quest to continually improve their instruction and understand the unique issues facing young adolescents. The results will directly impact hundreds of teachers and their students each year.”

Dana heads an advisory group that will plan and oversee the Shewey Fund programs. The group also includes: Kathy Shewey, who is supervisor of staff development for Alachua County public schools; Paul George, a UF distinguished professor emeritus in education who has been identified by Middle School Journal as the nation’s “number-one ranking scholar” in middle grades education; and Diane Yendol-Hoppey, an associate professor of education specializing in teacher leadership and professional development.

Kathy Shewey’s career as a middle school teacher, researcher, team leader and district administrator spans four decades. She has educated Alachua County students for more than 37 years — at Kanapaha Middle School and Lincoln Middle School in Gainesville, Spring Hill Middle School in High Springs, and one year at Santa Fe High School in Alachua. The National Middle School Association (NMSA) in November awarded her its Distinguished Educator Award for her significant contributions to middle school education.

While UF scholars — including Paul George — were among the first, some 40 years ago, to campaign for the creation of separate schools to meet the needs of children in early adolescence, they also are among the first to publicly call for reform and a reexamination of middle schools in today’s school system. George recently headed a panel of Florida educators that produced an assessment of critical issues for middle school reform in Florida.

“Many middle schools are no longer serving their original function,” said George, who retired from teaching last year but continues to conduct research in his specialty field. “Many schools are too large and too focused on standardized testing to meet the special developmental needs of adolescents. We will look at ways to improve instruction that is appropriate for students in their early teens.”

Paul George and Kathy Shewey are no strangers. Shewey studied under George while earning her master’s degree in secondary education at UF in 1977.

“The University of Florida pioneered the original middle school movement, and now we’re leading modern reform efforts to enhance effective middle school practices and reintroduce some of these practices into schools where they may have lost momentum over the years,” Dana said. “The Sheweys’ gift will ultimately benefit thousands of middle school teachers and their students.”

The findings were presented today (Nov. 5) at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

“What we found was quite concerning, particularly in light of the fact that levels of sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancies continue to rise in Florida and the state ranks second in the nation in terms of annual incident HIV infections,” said lead investigator Brian Dodge, formerly of the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions.

Florida’s rates of gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis have risen from 307 cases per 100,000 residents in 1997 to 399 in 2006, a 23 percent increase, according to the Florida Department of Health.

Previous national studies have consistently shown that most parents want some form of sex education to take place in schools, said Dodge, who is now associate director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University Bloomington.

Although Florida is technically one of 23 states that require schools to teach sex education and HIV prevention classes during the course of the students’ academic careers, it is unclear whether scientifically accurate and comprehensive information regarding the risks and benefits of sexuality is being offered to students, he said. There are no requirements or standards for the course content and, until the study, little was known about what topics are typically covered.

To find out, in 2006 the research team performed the first statewide assessment of sex education in Florida’s public middle and high schools, funded by The Picower Foundation. Data were collected from surveys completed by instructors who are most commonly responsible for sex education — those teaching health, science, physical education or family and consumer sciences.

The survey was developed with input from a six-member scientific advisory committee and a 20-member community advisory committee that included teachers, public health workers, nurses, doctors and school administrators from across the state.

“Given the sensitive nature of this topic, it was essential that the study had guidance from the people who really understood how Florida school systems work, and how state and local policies impact the teachers’ ability to educate their students,” said researcher Ellen Lopez, an assistant professor in UF’s department of behavioral science and community health. “It was also important to gain insight from people who had different views about sex education.”

The results of the study, based on 479 respondents, showed that 87 percent of the teachers surveyed acknowledged that sex education, in some form, took place in their schools in the 2005-06 school year. However, sex education was a requirement for all students in only 16 percent of the respondents’ schools, and most teachers reported that parents or caregivers were able to control whether their children participated in the classes. In a third of the schools, parents need to opt in, rather than opt out, for their child to receive sex education.

The sex education course content overwhelmingly fell in line with the state of Florida’s official “abstinence-only until marriage” policy for sex education and instruction on HIV/AIDS. Nearly every educator who responded to the survey stated they taught abstinence from sexual activity as the only way to avoid unintended pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and other associated health problems.

The researchers found regional differences in program content in Florida’s public schools. Teachers in North Florida were twice as likely as teachers in Central Florida and three times as likely as those in South Florida to teach an abstinence-only curriculum, which typically does not cover the risks and benefits of contraceptives, said research team member Frank Bandiera, a graduate of UF’s Master of Public Health program and a doctoral student in epidemiology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

“Most people are aware that there are major cultural differences between, say, Miami and Tallahassee,” Bandiera said. “What we found in terms of sex education, though, is that these places may as well be on different planets.”

The investigators also discovered many differences in the source of Florida teacher’s sex education curriculum.

“More than half of sex educators used a ‘locally developed curriculum,’” Dodge said. “In reality this could be anything. Respondents to our survey reported using everything from formal state guidelines to random Internet information and outdated county curricula. In short, there appears to be no uniformity in terms of underlying value systems or philosophical foundations for sex education in Florida.”

In addition, the teachers reported that less than one-quarter of overall classroom time was devoted to sex education and that it was most often taught as part of another course, such as family and consumer sciences or health.

“This is an important study,” said Theo Sandfort, a research scientist at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies and an associate professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. “While unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections in young people form a great concern, little seems to be in place to actually promote responsible sexual behavior. Education has a major role to play in promoting young people’s sexual health, but it cannot be effective if supportive policies, skills and resources are lacking. Hopefully this study will not be without consequences.”

The results of the UF study are currently in press and will appear in the peer-reviewed journals “Sex Education” and “American Journal of Sexuality Education.”

In Florida, larger school districts are more likely than smaller ones to have mandatory expulsion policies for students who bring guns to schools and to impose mandatory suspension for the possession of knives and drugs, as well as bullying, said Brian Schoonover, who completed the research for his doctoral dissertation in education at UF.

“Children are increasingly being sent to judges and jails for offenses that traditionally were dealt with in the principal’s office and after-school detentions,” said Schoonover, who is scheduled to present his findings Tuesday at the National Conference for Safe Schools and Communities in Washington, D.C. “Thirty years ago it would have been unusual to see a child handcuffed by a police officer. Today it is part of a growing trend that is commonly referred to as the ‘schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track’ or the ‘school-to-prison pipeline.’”

Perhaps the biggest disparity between the different sized districts is that more than half of the state’s small districts — 53 percent — have no alternative educational setting for students who are expelled, compared to only 3 percent of large districts, Schoonover said.

“These are children who are no longer being given the opportunity to continue their education,” he said. “When these kids get kicked out of school and have nowhere to go, they are at risk for breaking into homes and vandalizing neighborhoods while people are at work.”

A mandatory 365-day expulsion is required under zero tolerance policies that became effective with 1994 passage of the federal Gun-Free Schools Act, Schoonover said. Because Florida school districts respect each other’s expulsions, expelled students have no classroom to attend unless their parents can afford to send them to a private school that will take them, he said.

Parents generally support zero tolerance policies as a way to rid schools of students who bring guns, knives and drugs to class, until the time their child is caught committing an offense, which may be unintentional, he said.

Currently, all 50 states have zero tolerance policies mentioned in their state laws, but Texas is the only state that requires schools to investigate intent before expelling a student from school for a violation, Schoonover said. “Zero tolerance policies, originally meant to keep guns out of schools, have evolved into a series of broad, all-encompassing policies that in extreme cases expel students as young as 5 years old for having temper tantrums or bringing a toy ax to their classroom Halloween party,” he said.

Of the 26,990 school-related referrals to the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice during the 2004-05 school year, 76 percent were for misdemeanor offenses such as disorderly conduct, trespassing or assault and battery, which includes fights, he said.

It raises the question of whether students, some of whom are quite young, are best disciplined by youth resource officers who take them to detention centers or principals and teachers who instruct them how to change their behavior at school, he said.

Schoonover analyzed student conduct codes from Florida’s 67 county public school districts, classifying the 33 districts with more than 15,000 students as large and the 34 with fewer than 15,000 students as small.

He found that all of Florida’s large districts had mandatory expulsion policies for possession of a gun, compared with 85 percent of small districts. Differences were more pronounced for knives, with 88 percent of large districts having mandatory suspension policies, compared with 47 percent of small districts.

Next to guns, policies citing drugs were the most common, with 88 percent of large districts and 74 percent of small districts having mandatory suspension. Bullying was far less common, with only 27 percent of large districts and 15 percent of small districts requiring suspension for students who engage in such behavior, he said.

“As a researcher and a parent, I am anxious for schools to revise their codes of conduct to make them more useful in helping schools to deal with and change inappropriate behavior, rather than abandoning these students to the possibility of even worse behavior in our communities,” said Reece L. Peterson, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln special education professor who directed the “Safe and Responsive Schools” federal violence prevention project.

The center, named after one of the most influential supporters of European integration throughout most of the 20th century, will be entirely dedicated to EU topics and will support an annual visiting scholar program, additional special topic classes and a yearly workshop. It will be housed within the UF Center for European Studies.

The visiting scholars, who will spend a minimum of two weeks in Gainesville working with UF faculty and teaching a special two-week intensive course, can be either academics from European Union universities or current practitioners in the field of European integration, such as EU government officials.

There are currently 107 such centers at universities worldwide, and the vast majority are in EU member or candidate countries. This year, Japan was the only other non-European country to receive a grant from the EU to create a new center, said Amie Kreppel, director of the UF Center for European Studies.

The grant will provide the university with approximately $205,000 over three years and present the possibility of future grants and center renewals.

The Jean Monnet center is proof of the increasing international recognition of the strength of UF’s European studies programs, Kreppel said. Growing student interest, the efforts of the Center for European Studies and the strength of other Europe-focused groups such as the France-Florida Research Institute and the Center for Greek Studies are the driving forces behind the rapid growth of EU scholarship at the university, she said.

The center’s mission of educating non-Europeans about the EU is vital for Americans and Floridians in today’s world, Kreppel said.

“The EU is America’s largest trading partner and our most important political ally,” she said. “And for Florida, the EU is our biggest foreign direct investor. Their investments account for more than 145,000 jobs.”

UF’s successful bid to start a Jean Monnet center has a significance that reaches far beyond Gainesville, Kreppel said.

“For America, it encourages other universities to continue to apply for them,” she said. “I think that a lot of people assume that just because it’s never happened before, Jean Monnet centers are not for America.”

Thanks to UF, that is no longer the case.

You may have been crowded out of that class by a “course shopper” – a student who repeatedly drops and adds classes right up to the last minute. According to a recent University of Florida study, more than one out of every three college-level students qualifies as a course shopper, and they are taking a toll on their colleges and fellow students.

“Administrators have historically considered course shopping a benign behavior,” said Linda Serra Hagedorn, a professor at UF’s College of Education and lead author on the study, which appeared in the July/August issue of The Journal of Higher Education. “We’re finding, however, that leaves empty seats in classrooms and students who can’t enroll in the courses they want.”

Course shoppers are students who try to maximize their academic success by sampling courses prior to settling on a final schedule.

Some students “shop” in a cyclic manner by registering for a normal course load – but dropping any classes that look too tough after the first class session, or swapping those classes for courses that seem less challenging. The swapping process may continue until the end of the drop-add period.

Others, known as bulk shoppers, schedule a far larger course load than they intend to take. They then attend all the classes they’ve registered for, and drop the ones they like the least.

A veteran college administrator, Hagedorn has seen ample anecdotal evidence of the prevalence of course swapping. As the lead investigator of a project called TRUCCS (or Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students) Hagedorn and her colleagues found themselves uniquely well-positioned to examine course shopping’s true effects.

TRUCCS is a multiyear, comprehensive study of the college transcripts and educational outcomes of more than 5,000 students within the community college system in Los Angeles. While many studies have examined student transcripts or polled students on their backgrounds, plans, and academic habits, TRUCCS is one of the largest studies to look at transcripts and student questionnaires in tandem.

When investigators looked at course shopping among their sample, they found that 38 percent of students in the study engaged in at least some form of course shopping. Most of those were cyclic shoppers. About 7 percent of the entire study body qualified as bulk shoppers. And some students were “mixed-bag shoppers” who did a little of both.

It’s clear that bulk shopping does the most damage, Hagedorn said, but all kinds of course shoppers do damage to the higher education system by blocking out fellow students, causing needless work for administrators, and throwing a monkey wrench into class schedules.

“The cost is difficult to quantify, but when you have empty seats in a class and students who wish they could have taken that class, it’s clear that there is some waste involved,” Hagedorn said.

Course-shopping appears to hold broad appeal. The study found few variations in shopping behaviors between men and women or people of different ethnic backgrounds. Business majors were more likely than others to add and drop courses in bulk, and English and math courses were the ones most likely to be “shopped.”

The appeal is strongest among struggling students, who see course shopping as a way to make up for academic shortcomings, Hagedorn said. Still, the study suggests that stratagem may not work. The authors found that while occasional course shoppers showed a roughly average rate of course completion, frequent shoppers were more likely to have low grades and to drop out of school entirely.

Hagedorn and her co-authors offer a number of suggestions for reining in course shoppers. Schools could take a relatively hard line, instituting a “three strikes” policy that bans any student from dropping large numbers of classes for more than a few semesters. They could also employ less direct techniques such as requiring teachers to post a syllabus for each class online, which would help occasional shoppers avoid registering for courses they aren’t prepared to take.

“Dropping a course is very easy for a student,” Hagedorn said. “It might benefit the students if colleges made the process more difficult.”

Educators have long believed that a “critical mass” of like students is vital to making minority students feel at home on college campuses – but this study, appearing in the February issue of the journal Research in Higher Education, may be the first to find statistical evidence to confirm that belief.

“These data suggest that if colleges are really serious about reaching out to minority groups, they need to think in terms of clusters, not individuals,” said professor Linda Serra Hagedorn, chairwoman of UF’s Department of Educational Administration and Policy. “If you’re the only Latino or African-American on your college campus, you can certainly succeed academically – but if you’re surrounded by people who share your cultural background, your chances of success improve.”

Hagedorn is the lead investigator and director of the Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students (or TRUCCS) project, a multiyear, comprehensive study of the educational outcomes of 5,000 community college students at the nine community college campuses in the Los Angeles area. Investigators queried the students on their backgrounds, attitudes and experiences, and compared that data to the students’ transcript records.

When they looked at students who self-identified as Hispanic, the researchers found that students at largely Hispanic community colleges had better educational outcomes than students at colleges where Hispanic students were rare. The differences were small but statistically significant. Age, involvement in campus activities and even ability to speak English were less predictive of Hispanic students’ success.

Researchers have long suspected that the size of a school’s minority population plays a key role in the academic experience of minority students. The education field has even borrowed a term from nuclear physics – “critical mass” – to describe the point at which minority students become plentiful enough to change the campus climate and give a school a more welcoming feel.

The study produced some surprising findings. For instance, while students at colleges with large Hispanic colleges were more likely to stay in school and succeed academically, they were also less likely to enroll in remedial English or math classes.

In schools where Spanish speakers are few, teachers may be more likely to refer students to remedial classes, Hagedorn said. And a large community of bilingual students may help struggling English speakers learn the language without formal intervention.

The researchers also found that first-generation immigrants – students born in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries – tended to do better in school than students born in the U.S. to immigrant parents.

“One might expect students who grew up in the U.S. to perform better because they understand the social climate better,” Hagedorn said. “But in fact, many immigrant students were in very good schools in Mexico before they moved here – while many students who were born in the U.S. live in impoverished urban communities with substandard school systems.”

Alberto Cabrera, a University of Maryland education professor, co-authored an earlier large-scale study which found that parental involvement was one of the best indicators of academic success among Latino students. Cabrera said Hagedorn’s study sheds new light on his findings.

“Latino students often rely on their families for social support in school because they do not feel represented among the faculty or students,” Cabrera said. “In light of Linda Hagedorn’s findings, I would hypothesize that a critical mass of Latino students can create a support system that mimics the effect of support from one’s family.”

The study reinforces the benefits of the community college system. Hagedorn notes that among the colleges in the study, every institution with a large Hispanic population was located in a largely Hispanic neighborhood – providing additional social support for students.

“They’re called ‘community’ colleges for a reason,” Hagedorn said. “They’re supposed to serve the community in which they reside, and create a comfortable learning environment for students in that community.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A carrot for teachers helps students stick to the books, according to a new University of Florida study that finds merit pay for instructors equates to better test scores for their pupils.

Pay incentives for teachers had more positive effects on student test scores than such school improvement methods as smaller class sizes or stricter requirements for classroom attendance, said David Figlio, a UF economics professor. The study, by Figlio and UF economics professor Lawrence Kenny, has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Public Economics.

“This research provides the first systematic evidence of a relationship between individual teacher performance incentives and student achievement in the United States,” Figlio said. “We demonstrate that students learn more when teachers are given financial incentives to do a better job.”

Students at schools with teacher pay-for-performance programs scored an average of one to two percentage points higher on standardized tests than their peers at schools where no bonuses were offered, Figlio said.

“While many explanations have been offered for the disappointing performance of primary and secondary schools, one untested hypothesis lays the blame on there being little or no incentive for teachers to do a good job,” he said. “Good teachers make no more than uninspired, mediocre teachers.”

The UF study found the effects of these pay incentives were strongest in schools with students from the poorest families, perhaps because those schools have the most to gain from the incentive plan, Figlio said.

“Many teachers complain that poor parents often are uninvolved in their children’s education,” he said. “Since there appears to be less parental monitoring in schools serving poorer families, these schools stand to have a greater potential for improvement.”

Figlio and Kenny collected surveys from 534 schools that were among 1,319 public and private schools participating in a national study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education beginning in 1988. They also collected data on the frequency and magnitude of school salary incentives, analyzing it in relation to student achievement. That achievement was measured in the earlier U.S. Department of Education study on eighth-graders, with follow-up surveys done in 10th and 12th grades.

About 16 percent of American schools have teacher pay-for-performance programs in place, Figlio said. Such financial incentives were the rule rather than the exception early in the 20th century, but they gradually became less prevalent starting in the 1960s, probably because of the rising strength of teachers’ unions, he said.

Many teachers criticize these bonus plans, saying they raise questions about fairness and they destroy cooperation among teachers.

”It’s important to note that the form of performance pay we’re looking at is linked to student outcomes rather than principal assessments,” Figlio said. “One reason why performance pay based on principal assessments is not very effective is that principals are under a huge amount of pressure to say that everybody is excellent.”

One proposal that links teachers’ bonuses to student performance is a Florida plan that awards the top 10 percent of teachers in each school district a 5 percent bonus based on student gains on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Figlio believes such an approach, using standardized tests, recognizes individual teacher accomplishments without destroying the incentive of teachers within a school to work together.

“This is important because one of the major criticisms of performance pay systems is that teaching is a collaborative enterprise,” he said. “If a principal has to identify a single excellent teacher, it could end up pitting one colleague against another.”

The study also found that merit pay proposals that targeted only a few teachers for bonuses were more effective than programs in which large numbers of instructors received some kind of reward, Figlio said. “Doling out merit pay to most teachers seems to provide them with little incentive to do a better job,” he said.

Figlio said he believes the ideal merit pay system would reward both individual teachers as well as teams of teachers.

“Parents need to be able to talk to a counselor about their child’s progress,” said Professor Harry Daniels, chairman of the counselor education department at UF’s College of Education and a co-author of the study. “They need a place in the school system where they feel safe, where they feel their child’s needs are understood.

“These things may seem small, but they have a huge effect on academic success.”

Daniels and co-author Sondra Smith-Adcock, an associate professor of counselor education at UF, led a team that surveyed school services administrators in school districts across Florida on the counseling provided to Hispanic students. The researchers published their results in this month’s issue of the journal Professional School Counseling.

Fifty-nine percent of the administrators said their Hispanic students were at risk of not receiving needed counseling. Eighty-four percent said their district needed more Spanish-speaking bilingual counselors to address the personal needs of students, and 80 percent agreed that their district needed more Spanish-speaking counselors to guide students in making career decisions.

The results, researchers say, were worrisome but not surprising. Studies in the mid-1990s showed that while Hispanics made up one-eighth of Florida’s student population at the time, only 2 percent of school counselors were Hispanic. In the past decade, Smith-Adcock said, every single county has seen its Hispanic population increase by at least 30 percent – but there is no evidence of a similar increase in the number of Hispanic counselors.
“When school administrators think of the needs of Hispanic students, they tend to think in terms of language acquisition for new immigrants,” Smith-Adcock said. “There’s a whole stratum of services that is being missed.”

Hispanic students who face mental health issues may find it difficult to trust or open up to non-Hispanic counselors, and often need someone who speaks their first language, Smith-Adcock said.

However, mental health counseling is just one responsibility for counselors, Smith-Adcock said. They also help students define their career goals and navigate the increasingly complex academic world in a way that will help them achieve their goals. These services are particularly difficult to provide students who are new arrivals to the country, or whose parents are first-generation immigrants with limited English skills.

“Simply choosing electives is a new experience for many people in the Latino community,” said Jennifer Gonzales Young, a district-level bilingual counselor for Hillsborough County Public Schools. “In many Spanish-speaking countries, students take a prescribed schedule of courses, and don’t get to choose their classes. Some parents are overwhelmed by the system, and if it isn’t explained to them properly, their children can miss some important opportunities.”

Similar problems can arise when students apply to college, apply for financial aid or try to interpret the results of standardized tests, Young said.

Hillsborough County has one of the fastest-growing Hispanic populations in the state. Young said there are an estimated 51,000 Hispanic children in Hillsborough County’s school system, and more than 36,000 speak Spanish as their first language. Until recently, Young was one of only a few Hispanic counselors serving that population.

“There seems to be a shortage of bilingual counselors everywhere in the state, and Hillsborough is just one example,” UF’s Daniels said. “At the elementary level, for instance, the ideal ratio is one counselor per 300 students. I don’t know of a single place in Florida that comes close to that ratio for Spanish-speaking students.”

UF is attempting to relieve the shortage. The College of Education recently completed a three-year, grant-funded program that brought 17 bilingual Hillsborough County teachers to UF to study for the educational specialist degree in counselor education. All of those teachers were Spanish-speaking and most were either of Hispanic origin or had prior experience living in a Spanish-speaking country.

Daniels said the project, titled “Consejeros: Levantando El Pueblo” (or “Counselors Lifting the Community”) was more than simply a degree program. Students followed a culturally relevant course of study designed to give equal focus to the three major influences in the life of Hispanic families: the school, the family and the community.

Based on the success of that project, Daniels and Smith-Adcock are considering the creation of a permanent distance education program that would allow bilingual teachers to study for a counselor education degree in the county where they work.

“Many bilingual teachers are already serving as a contact point between the school system and the families of their Hispanic students,” he said. “By becoming full-time counselors, they can fill that role more effectively, for more people.”

Fall semester marks the official launch of a science-based organic agriculture undergraduate degree program at UF, making it one of the first three U.S. institutions to offer this major. Colorado State University and Washington State University debut similar programs this fall.

UF has offered a minor in organic agriculture for the past year. Both the major and minor programs are administered by the horticultural sciences department, part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Florida has a growing organic food industry, but producers must look beyond the state to find highly trained personnel to manage their operations, said Dan Cantliffe, chairman of the horticultural sciences department.

“This (program) is something that’s been long overdue, especially for UF and the United States,” Cantliffe said. “There’s a big industry, a big demand and a lack of people who are qualified to do the work employers need.”

Organic agriculture is an approach to food production that involves little or no synthetic chemical fertilizer and pesticide. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has established strict guidelines for certifying organic farmers.

In 2005, organic foods accounted for $13.8 billion in U.S. consumer sales, about 2.5 percent of total U.S. food sales, according to a manufacturers’ survey commissioned by the Organic Trade Association, a leading industry organization. Since 1998, revenues from U.S. consumer sales of organic foods have risen by an average of more than 18 percent per year.

And it’s not just consumers who are interested in organic food, Cantliffe said. The UF major and minor programs were developed partly in response to ongoing student demand.

“Another big factor was that we have faculty and facilities that are suitable for teaching this material,” he said. “As the demand and the curriculum develop, we may expand the program.”

Three students have enrolled in the undergraduate degree program, and many others have expressed interest, said Melissa Webb, academic support services coordinator for the horticultural sciences department.

“We think a lot more (students) will come out of the woodwork,” Webb said. “There’s no set cap on enrollment, so the more, the merrier.”

About one dozen students are enrolled in the minor program, she said.

The undergraduate degree program will focus on training students to manage an organic farming unit, said Mickie Swisher, director of UF’s Center for Organic Agriculture.

“This gives you the skills and technical knowledge where if you needed to put 2,000 acres of organic crops into production, you could do it,” said Swisher, a UF associate professor of family, youth and community sciences.

The program requires 120 credit hours, most of them in science courses, including chemistry, botany, genetics, entomology and soil science, capped off by several production-agriculture classes.

One required class, Principles of Organic and Sustainable Production, was devised specifically for the program; another, Alternative Cropping Systems, was modified to put greater emphasis on organic agriculture.

The minor program requires the sustainable production and alternative cropping classes, plus at least three credits of electives on each of three subjects – crop production, pest management and resource management.

Swisher helped organize a committee that developed the minor program over a six-month period in 2004. Launched in fall 2005, the minor is considered interdisciplinary and is also headquartered in the horticultural sciences department.

While the minor program was being proposed, a committee in the horticultural sciences department developed the proposal for the organic agriculture major. Webb and Rebecca Darnell, a professor of horticultural sciences and undergraduate coordinator for the department, chaired the committee. Darnell also helped secure approval from the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and the UF Curriculum Committee for both the minor and major.

The new undergraduate degree program will enhance the prestige of both UF and the department, Darnell said.

“The development of this program is addressing a critical need in educating students in science-based information required for successful organic production,” she said. “These students would then be in an excellent position to aid in the success of the organic industry in Florida and elsewhere.”

The study offers a small glimpse of education in China – a country of strong regional differences, where urban life is markedly different from rural life – but the results could shed light on China’s increasing competitiveness in technological fields and the hard sciences, the study’s lead author said.

“If our findings in China are borne out by further study, they could have some interesting implications for higher education, particularly in the sciences,” said Thomas Oakland, a professor of educational psychology at UF’s College of Education. “Children who prefer a practical and organized learning style tend to do well in the sciences, and children generally choose career paths that complement their temperament.”

Oakland is the creator of the Student Style Questionnaire, a psychological test that measures students’ learning styles and preferred learning environments. His test – loosely based on the Myers-Briggs personality test familiar to many Americans – has been given to thousands of
students in the United States, as well as groups in 24 other countries. While the primary purpose of the test is to help teachers choose teaching methods, Oakland has used his cross-national data
to analyze the differences between students from different cultures.

Oakland’s co-author, Professor Li Lu of Shanxi Medical University, recently tested 400 students of various ages and income levels in Taiyuan, a large industrial city in northern China. The researchers compared their results to tests given to nearly 8,000 American students.

Here’s what they found:

• 86 percent of Chinese students preferred an “organized” learning style, which means they preferred orderly classrooms, a set routine and firm standards of behavior – as opposed to a “flexible” style based on variety and study that feels like play. In most countries, a majority of children prefer the organized style, but the researchers describe the Chinese preference as “remarkably high.”
• Six out of 10 Chinese children preferred a “practical” learning style, showing more interest in material that has real-world applications, preferring to learn by experience and seeking hard facts. Of their American counterparts, six out of 10 preferred an “imaginative” style, which stresses discussion of ideas and possibilities.
• Chinese girls were evenly split between a “thinking” style — with an emphasis on debate, competition, and logics – and a “feeling” style, which emphasizes harmony and cooperation in the classroom. In most countries, girls overwhelmingly prefer the “feeling” style.

The results could have interesting implications in the sciences in both countries, Oakland said.

“The combination of ‘organized’ and ‘thinking’ styles is particularly good for people who hope to become researchers,” said Oakland. “Compared to Chinese students, American students seem to be much more interested in the use of imagination and in flexible work routines, traits that are typically conducive to creative work.”

It is too early to say why these groups show such marked personality differences, Oakland said. The individualist culture of the United States and the comparatively collectivist culture of China probably influence learning styles, he said. Chinese classrooms tend to be more structured and authoritarian than classrooms in the West, while American schools try to encourage critical thinking skills and student interaction with teachers. Still, Oakland doubts various students’ learning styles are picked up entirely in school.

“Earlier studies seem to indicate that temperament is formed even before a child hits school age, through early influences and biology,” he said.

In his two decades of international research on student temperament, Oakland has usually found only shades of difference between students in different cultures. “Organized” learners are in the majority almost everywhere, for instance, and extroverted children outnumber introverts in almost every country. Perhaps not surprisingly, students from countries with close cultural ties tend to show similar results on tests. The closest match to the American student population, for instance, came from tests in the Australian school system.

UF passed half a billion dollars for the first time in the fiscal year that ended June 30, thanks in large part to a $13.4 million increase in funding from the National Institutes of Health. Overall, federal funding rose to $324.4 million. Other major federal sponsors include the National Science Foundation, $39.6 million; the U.S. Department of Agriculture, $33.3 million; and the Department of Defense, $23.1 million.

“It’s a testimony to the quality of our faculty that UF’s NIH funding continues to increase at a time when the agency’s budget has leveled off and the competition for funding has increased considerably,” said Win Phillips, UF’s vice president for research.

About 20 percent of some 47,000 NIH proposals were funded last year, down from about 32 percent in 2000.

UF’s Institute on Aging received two of the largest NIH awards in 2005-06: $2.7 million to study how exercise can prevent disability in the elderly and $2.7 million to study rehabilitation techniques designed to improve walking in the first year after a stroke. Other large NIH awards included $2.1 million for a biosafety laboratory in UF’s planned emerging pathogens facility; and $1.6 million to study one of several incurable forms of blindness that afflict about 200,000 Americans.

UF’s industry funding rose from $49.7 million in 2005 to $62.4 million last year. As with NIH, funding from industry grew more than 25 percent despite what the National Science Foundation calls “declining support” in industrial funding of academic research and development.

“The initiatives the university has undertaken in recent years in areas like genetics and nanoscience are attractive to industrial partners,” Phillips said. “The University of Florida’s research strategy makes it a natural partner for growth industries.”

Among the largest industry grants was $1.5 million to conduct clinical trials on new HIV treatments; and $1.5 million to study the use of lasers to repair macular degeneration that leads to blindness.

UF’s Health Science Center accounted for just over half of the university’s total, with its six colleges receiving a record $271 million, up 5.4 percent. The College of Engineering saw an 18.8 percent increase, from $63.4 million in 2005 to $75.2 million last year. The university’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences saw its awards increase 3.8 percent to $87.5 million.

“Growth in research has a ripple effect across all of the university’s missions,” UF President Bernie Machen said. “Our faculty are the engine of a robust research enterprise that increases economic development collaborations, provides unique opportunities for students and enhances the university’s reputation among its peers.”

“One of the things we have noticed working with many kids with OCD is that peer relations are extremely impaired,” said Eric Storch, a UF assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics and lead author of the study. “Kids target kids who are different. Kids with OCD sometimes exhibit behaviors that peers simply don’t understand.”

More than one-quarter of the children with OCD who researchers studied reported chronic bullying as a problem, according to findings described in the September issue of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology.

By comparison, only 9 percent of kids in the two other groups researchers studied – healthy kids without medical or mental conditions and children with type 1 diabetes – reported serious problems with bullies.

Nearly all children are bullied at least once in their lives. But chronic bullying equates to about one taunt per day, ranging from kicking or hitting to name-calling or excluding children from activities in school.

“The kids with OCD are really experiencing higher rates of peer problems than other kids,” Storch said. “We’re not saying one causes the other, but there is a positive relationship between (OCD and bullying).”

About one in 100 children struggle with OCD, an anxiety disorder that leads people to engage in rituals such as hand washing to drive away obsessive thoughts about germs or other worries. Rituals often become so involved that they interfere with a person’s ability to function, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

“Their day becomes filled with repeating behaviors,” Storch said. “For a lot of kids, peers don’t understand what is going on. They are isolated. They are ostracized because it doesn’t make sense why they are washing their hands. Why they keep repeating questions.”

The researchers also found links between bullying and other problems, namely loneliness and depression, in children with OCD, Storch said. Kids were also apt to internalize bullies’ negative comments, telling themselves, “No one will ever love me,” or “Maybe I am a loser,” Storch said.

Having OCD and conditions such as depression is linked to worsening obsessive-compulsive symptoms, potentially explaining why researchers also found a link between bullying and more serious symptoms.

“It could be that the peers are attacking because they are doing things that are so different,” he said. “Or it might be that bullying is in some way contributing to OCD.”

Compulsive behaviors such as repeating questions, recounting and rechecking information can draw attention to kids with OCD in school, as can vocal or physical tics, common among children with OCD, said Phoebe Moore, an assistant clinical professor of child psychiatry at Duke University.

“That kind of behavior can draw fire,” Moore said. “I definitely see that clinically.”

Treating OCD either with approved drugs or behavior modification techniques will help patients control their obsessions and compulsions, Storch said. But he emphasizes that doctors need to examine the whole child and not just treat OCD symptoms.

“When one focuses solely on the obsessions and compulsions you experience a resolution of those problems, but problems like depression or anxiety and loneliness may still exist,” he said. “If you address the OCD without addressing the peer problems, that depression and loneliness may not go away.”

Storch suggests parents help children learn how to handle aggressive peers, either at home or by finding a counselor who can help them develop social skills. Parents should also take their concerns to their child’s school if teachers or administrators are not stopping the bullying before it becomes a problem.

“Bullying is one of the largest challenges kids, with OCD and in general, have to face,” he said. “One of the main clinical implications is considering the child as an entire person, one who has OCD but who also has other impairments.”

However, the trend once known as “mainstreaming”— widely considered the best option for such students – appears to have stalled in some parts of the country, the study’s authors report. And a student’s geographic location, rather than the severity of his disability, often determines how he will spend his school days, the researchers say.

“We’ve known for a long time that students with MR (mental retardation) are better off educationally if they can spend at least part of the day in a typical classroom,” said James McLeskey, chair of special education in UF’s College of Education and an author of the study. “We’ve found that there are still lot of students who could be included in the general classroom but aren’t included.”

Before the mid-1970s, most children with mental retardation were completely segregated from other children in the school system, if they were formally educated at all. Society widely viewed these children as uneducable, and those who did attend school were sent to institutions solely for children with mental retardation.

Both children and their parents often viewed these institutions as dehumanizing and ineffective – and by the late 1960s, educators had assembled a large body of research to show that children with mental retardation did indeed perform much better when schooled, at least part-time, among the general student population. That research led Congress to pass a 1975 law requiring a more inclusive environment for students with mental retardation.

Surveys in the 1980s and early 1990s showed that schools had made little progress toward implementing that mandate. In an article published in the spring 2006 issue of the journal Exceptional Children, UF researchers – including doctoral candidates Pam Williamson, David Hoppey and Tarcha Rentz – revisited the question, taking a comprehensive look at placement rates for students with mental retardation in all 50 states and the District of Columbia during the 1990s. They found some very good news.

“Inclusion seems to have genuinely caught on in the 1990s,” said Williamson, the lead author of the study. “By the end of the decade, a student with MR was almost twice as likely to be educated in the general classroom as a similar student the beginning of the decade.”

In 1990, almost three-fourths of students with MR were educated separately from their typical peers, learning in separate classrooms or entire schools dedicated to children with mental retardation. By 2000, only slightly more than half of students with MR were educated separately.

Still, a handful of states – Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota and Vermont – accounted for much of the gain seen nationwide, with many other states marking little or no progress.

A simple move across state lines, the researchers say, can have a major impact on a child’s educational career. Various states have widely different policies on who can be identified with mental retardation, and how they are educated. Some states identify mental retardation in as few as three out of every 1,000 students; others identify as many as 30 students per 1,000. Demographically similar states such as Alabama and Mississippi differ widely in their reported rates of mental retardation – suggesting the differences are due to policy, not environmental factors.

“For a student with mental retardation, geographic location is possibly the strongest predictor of the student’s future educational setting,” Williamson said.

Many of these students can have functional work lives in adulthood, Williamson said. However, if they aren’t exposed to their peers in the general classroom, students with MR may not pick up the social and academic skills they need to do so.

Inclusion can also have a beneficial effect for students already in the general classroom. When typical students attend school with classmates who have MR, the researchers say, they learn leadership skills and become more tolerant. They even score higher, as a group, on standardized tests.

“The inclusive classroom environment seems to work better for students who are struggling, academically, but not identified as having MR,” McLeskey said. “That tends to bring up averages on test scores for typical students in the entire class.”

In the current era of high-stakes testing, that effect could work to the benefit of students with MR. Under past school accountability rules, many states did not count the scores of students in MR-only classes when conducting statewide achievement tests – an incentive to administrators to keep students with mental retardation out of the general classroom.

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, however, schools must report test scores of all students, including those in separate special education classes.

“All these students count now, and schools have an incentive to improve their scores,” McLeskey said. “Inclusion seems to be the best way to do that.”

“We’re seeing women in relationships acting differently nowadays than we have in the past,” said Angela Gover, a UF criminologist who led the research. “The nature of criminality has been changing for females, and this change is reflected in intimate relationships as well.”

In a survey of 2,500 students at UF and the University of South Carolina between August and December 2005, more than a quarter (29 percent) reported physically assaulting their dates and 22 percent reported being the victims of attacks during the past year. Thirty-two percent of women reported being the perpetrators of this violence, compared with 24 percent of men. The students took selected liberal arts and sciences courses. Forty percent were men and 60 percent were women, reflecting the gender composition of these classes.

In a separate survey of 1,490 UF students, one quarter (25 percent) said they had been stalked during the past year and 7 percent reported engaging in stalking, of whom a majority (58 percent) were female.

Although women were the predominant abusers, they still made up the largest number of victims in both surveys, accounting for 70 percent of those being stalked, for example.

The reason more college men weren’t victims may be that women in the study did not exclusively date them, preferring men who had already graduated, not yet enrolled in college or chose not to attend college at all, Gover said. “It shows that students who are perpetrating these attacks aren’t just targeting other students on campus,” she said.

It also is possible that some of the physical attacks women claim they are responsible for are actually acts of self-defense, Gover added. “Maybe some of these women have been abused by their partner for some time and they’re finally fighting back,” she said.

Recent studies on domestic violence suggest that whereas in the past victims might have felt trapped in violent situations, today’s women are more likely to understand they have options instead of putting up with mistreatment, she said.

“I think we may also be seeing sort of a new dynamic in dating relationships in terms of women feeling more empowered,” she said. “They recognize they don’t have to be in a dating relationship forever. They can get out of it.”

Child abuse was the single biggest determining factor for men and women becoming perpetrators or victims of either dating violence or stalking, Gover said. Even if one never personally experienced abuse, witnessing violence between one’s parents as a child increased the likelihood of stalking or being stalked as a young adult and it made girls more susceptible to becoming victims of dating violence when they grew up, she said.

The survey found that men and women who were abused as children were 43 percent more likely than their peers who were not mistreated to perpetrate physical violence and 51 percent more likely to be victims of physical violence in a dating relationship. Violent acts included kicking or slapping, pushing or shoving, punching or hitting with a hand or object, slamming someone against a wall and using force to make a partner have sex, she said.

Sexual risk-taking – the age when survey respondents first had sex and the number of sexual partners in their lifetime – was another important risk factor, but surprisingly, attitudes toward women made no difference, said Gover, who did her research with Catherine Kaukinen, a University of South Carolina criminology professor, and Kathleen Fox, a UF graduate student in criminology. Some of the findings were presented at the American Society of Criminology annual meeting in November in Toronto.

The study also was among the first to look at psychological abuse. Examples included preventing partners from seeing family or friends, shouting at them and using threats to have sex. Fifty-four percent of respondents reported being psychologically abusive, and 52 percent said they were victims of this type of behavior. Women were more likely to be psychologically abusive, with 57 percent saying they were perpetrators versus 50 percent of males.

Shelley Serdahely, executive director of Men Stopping Violence, in Decatur, Ga., questions the validity of studies showing women are more violent. “Women might be more likely to get frustrated because men are not taught how to be active listeners and women feel like they are not being heard,” she said. “Often women are more emotional because the relationship matters a lot to them, and while that may come out in a push or a shove or a grab, all of which are considered dating violence, it doesn’t have the effect of intimidating the man.”