The PEERS® Curriculum for School-Based Professionals brings UCLA's highly acclaimed and widely popular PEERS program into the school setting. This sixteen-week program, clinically proven to significantly improve social skills and social interactions among teens with autism spectrum disorder, is now customized for the needs of psychologists, counselors, speech pathologists, administrators, and teachers. The manual is broken down into clearly divided lesson plans, each of which have concrete rules and steps, corresponding homework assignments, plans for review, and unique, fun activities to ensure that teens are comfortable incorporating what they've learned. The curriculum also includes parent handouts, tips for preparing for each lesson, strategies for overcoming potential pitfalls, and the research underlying this transformative program.

In schools, much of the responsibility of implementing interventions to improve outcomes for students falls on teachers, which may lead to capacity and resource issues. One solution to this problem is the use of Peer-Mediated Interventions (PMIs), which include a variety of approaches that utilize similar individuals to the target student (e.g., students in school-based interventions) as interventionists or behavior change agents. Although there is a wealth of research to support the effectiveness of students as interventionists, peers remain an under-utilized resource in school-based intervention delivery. Peers as Change Agents is a comprehensive resource for school-based professionals working to incorporate PMIs across academic, behavioral, and social-emotional interventions. The text synthesizes the current research on school-based PMIs and distills the literature into concrete strategies that can be easily implemented in school-based contexts. Building on the foundational principles of PMIs, the authors reconceptualize this work into three new categories: Peer-Mediated Academic Interventions; Peer-Mediated Behavioral Interventions; and Peer-Mediated Group Supports, to better address students' unique needs. Chapters also highlight the advantages of PMIs, including their potential for cultural relevance. As school staff continue to grapple with the practical challenges of ensuring equity in student outcomes, Peers as Change Agents provides educators, school psychologists, and counsellors effective and efficient tools to support students as change agents in their own learning communities.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Second International Workshop on Databases, Information Systems, and Peer-to-Peer Computing, DBISP2P 2004, held in Toronto, Canada in August 2004 in conjunction with VLDB 2004. The 14 revised full papers presented together with an invited keynote paper were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on query routing and processing, similarity search in P2P networks, adaptive P2P networks, and information sharing and optimization.

Just like the industrial society of the last century depended on natural resources, today’s society depends on information and its exchange. Staab and Stuckenschmidt structured the selected contributions into four parts: Part I, "Data Storage and Access", prepares the semantic foundation, i.e. data modelling and querying in a flexible and yet scalable manner. These foundations allow for dealing with the organization of information at the individual peers. Part II, "Querying the Network", considers the routing of queries, as well as continuous queries and personalized queries under the conditions of the permanently changing topological structure of a peer-to-peer network. Part III, "Semantic Integration", deals with the mapping of heterogeneous data representations. Finally Part IV, "Methodology and Systems", reports experiences from case studies and sample applications. The overall result is a state-of-the-art description of the potential of Semantic Web and peer-to-peer technologies for information sharing and knowledge management when applied jointly.

Peer-to-peer has emerged as a promising new paradigm for large-scale distributed computing. The International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS) aimed to provide a forum for researchers active in peer-to-peer computing to discuss the state of the art and to identify key research challenges. The goal of the workshop was to examine peer-to-peer technologies, appli- tions, and systems, and also to identify key research issues and challenges that lie ahead. In the context of this workshop, peer-to-peer systems were characterized as being decentralized, self-organizing distributed systems, in which all or most communication is symmetric. The program of the workshop was a combination of invited talks, pres- tations of position papers, and discussions covering novel peer-to-peer appli- tions and systems, peer-to-peer infrastructure, security in peer-to-peer systems, anonymity and anti-censorship, performance of peer-to-peer systems, and wo- load characterization for peer-to-peer systems. To ensure a productive workshop environment, attendance was limited to 55 participants. Each potential participant was asked to submit a position paper of 5 pages that exposed a new problem, advocated a speci?c solution, or reported on actual experience. We received 99 submissions and were able to accept 31. Participants were invited based on the originality, technical merit, and topical relevance of their submissions, as well as the likelihood that the ideas expressed in their submissions would lead to insightful technical discussions at the workshop.

This volume represents the first collection of empirical studies focusing on peer interaction for L2 learning. These studies aim to unveil the impact of mediating variables such as task type, mode of interaction, and social relationships on learners’ interactional behaviors and language development in this unique and pedagogically powerful learning context. To examine these issues, contributors employed quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods designs as well as cognitive, social, and sociocognitive theoretical frameworks. The majority of the studies are classroom based and were conducted in a rich array of settings covering five continents and encompassing a wide range of learner L1s and target languages. These settings include second and foreign language classrooms from primary to university level, content-based programs, online contexts, and after-school programs. To span the divide between research and practice, each study includes a section suggesting pedagogical implications.