Guiding children's behavior: The issue of compliance

Parents and teachers need to be aware of the principles of development in order to guide children appropriately. The process of guidance begins with attempts to baby-proof the environment, such as arranging the nursery in anticipation of the arrival of the infant. During the infant-toddler stage, adults may view their acts of altering the child's physical environment as their responsibility, not connecting such actions to the development of a discipline plan. In fact, the adults are beginning to develop a positive atmosphere so that the child has a healthy environment in which to grow. Sandy Bailey is Program Coordinator for the Montana Resource and Referral Netword, a statewide program based     

青少年抗逆力的解读和培养

在积极心理学思潮影响下,心理学研究焦点己逐步从原来探讨个体的疾病症状转向发掘人们内在的积极心理品质上来。在这种背景下,抗逆力研究脱颖而出,并成为国际心理学界的研究热点。抗逆力研究从积极心理学视角挖掘当事人的内在潜能,不再单纯关注问题的负面影响,更加强调人在面对压力、挫折时的潜能激发和自我超越。对青少年抗逆力进行研究和培养的终极目标是探索青少年生存和成长的力量源泉,让逆境对青少年的消极影响最小化,使青少年的适应和成长最大化。     

The influence of group size on children's competitive behavior

The present research was designed to test the hypothesis that children would compete more in tetrads than in dyads. Twenty-two pairs of male and 14 pairs of female target children (N = 72) played a competitive game in both tetrads and dyads. Consistent with the hypothesis, male target children competed more in tetrads than in dyads. This hypothesis was not supported for females, however. Analyses of the dynamics of tetrads and dyads further demonstrated that based on a global measure of smiling, the emotional atmosphere was less positive in tetrads than in dyads. The causes and consequences of interaction in different sized social groups are discussed.     

Ideational prominence and reading comprehension of expository prose: a partial replication

It has often been demonstrated that adults are more likely to remember important text elements than less important elements –“levels effect”. It is not clear whether the same effect exists in children because the evidence is inconsistent. Most of the existing studies with children can be criticised for failing to include adult subjects as well as children, thereby making it impossible to determine whether the observed differences between adults and children reflect genuine differences in processing or just the effects of strategies for coping with the specific texts selected for the children. The present study partly replicated a study that found no evidence for a levels effect in children (Baumann, 1981) with a group of adults. With one passage stronger evidence for a levels effect was found with the adults in our study than was found with children, whereas with the second passage no evidence for a levels effect was found in either study. It was argued that this finding suggested that there were differences between adults and children in the extent to which they engaged in the type of processing that resulted in levels effects, but also that texts differed in the degree to which they induced this type of processing, and that the latter factor had to be taken into account in developmental studies.     

The stability of children's mathematical behavior: When is a bug really a bug?

This article describes an empirical investigation of the extent to which incorrect arithmetic algorithms persist over time. The use of subtraction procedures by children aged 9–11 was charted over time periods of 1–3 months. The ways in which several bugs might be related to a single misconception were considered and a set of “bug classes” was identified. The results indicated that the prevailing tendency to attribute stable procedural knowledge and systematic behavior to children of this age is misguided. They provide some insight into the development of mathematical knowledge under the influence of conventional instruction.     

Direct and vicarous effects of social praise on mentally retarded preschool children's attentive behavior

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of social praise on the attentive behavior of reinforced and nonreinforced children. Two pairs of mentally retarded preschool boys served as subjects. Employing a reversal design, one child from each pair was differentially reinforced for attending to manipulative toys. The results revealed that: (a) The intervention procedure increased the attentive behavior of the target subjects. (b) Nonreinforced subjects also increased their attentive behavior during both reinforcement conditions. (c) This “spillover” of reinforcement effect was transient, as the non- target subjects level of attentive behavior decelerated during the final half of each 20-day rekforcement period.     

The effects of documentation on young children's memory

A central aspect of the Reggio approach to early childhood education is documentation, in which educators observe, record, and display children's work. Educational anecdotes and developmental theory suggest that documentation may facilitate children's memory; the current study explored this possibility empirically. Sixty-three preschool/kindergarten children experienced a novel learning event. Two days later, children were reminded with either documentation or worksheets of event details and the factual information that had been presented, or they were not reminded. Three weeks later, children completed a memory interview that included episodic and semantic measures. Children in the documentation and worksheet conditions remembered more factual information than those in the no-reminder condition. Children in the documentation condition produced more on-topic speech than those in the worksheet condition during reminding and a subsequent learning session. Potential benefits of documentation for classroom performance are discussed.     

The effects of provocation, intentions, and consequences on children's moral judgments.

Dutch boys 8 and 12 years old read brief stories about a harm doer whose intentions were either good or bad and whose actions resulted in either minor or serious injury to a victim. The harm doer had previously been either strongly provoked or not provoked by the victim. The older boys differentiated their evaluations of the harm doer's naughtiness on the basis of provocation and intentions, while the younger boys failed to differentiate their evaluations of the provoked harm doer on the basis of intentions. Both age groups strongly differentiated their judgments of the victim's naughtiness on the basis of his role as provoker, except when the victim was seriously injured by a bad-intentioned aggressor.     

Determinants of withdrawal behavior: An exploratory study

Research on college persistence has typically classified nonreturnees as dropouts. Recently, this practice has been criticized by Tinto (1987) who argues that such a practice merges together different types of withdrawal behavior whose determinants may vary as a function of the particular departure behavior under consideration. This paper empirically examines whether the determinants of decisions to withdraw from the institution are similar to those affecting decisions to transfer to other institutions of higher education for the 1984 entering freshman class at a large southern institution. Results provide support for Tinto's proposition of differentiating between different types of voluntary withdrawal behavior. While institutional commitment, academic performance, finance attitudes, and student perceptions of faculty concern for student development and teaching discriminated between persisters and dropouts, only final institutional commitment and final goal commitment discriminated between persisters and transfers.An earlier version of this paper was presented before the 1990 American Educational Research Association annual meeting.     

The effects of computers on children's social development and school participation: Evidence from a randomized control experiment

Concerns over the perceived negative impacts of computers on social development among children are prevalent but largely uninformed by plausibly causal evidence. We provide the first test of this hypothesis using a large-scale randomized control experiment in which more than one thousand children attending grades 6–10 across 15 different schools and 5 school districts in California were randomly given computers to use at home. Children in the treatment group are more likely to report having a social networking site, but also report spending more time communicating with their friends and interacting with their friends in person. There is no evidence that computer ownership displaces participation in after-school activities such as sports teams or clubs or reduces school participation and engagement.     

The effects of whole language on children's writing: A review of literature

A review was conducted of 14 studies examining the effects of whole language on learning to write. Although we found that the writing of students in whole-language classes generally improved during kindergarten and the primary grades, reliable differences between the writing of children in whole-language and skills-oriented classes were not found. The only reliable difference between children in these two types of programs involved students' thinking about writing. Students in whole-language classes held a meaning-based view of writing, whereas their peers in conventional classes viewed writing from a skills perspective. There were not enough data available to draw any conclusions about the writing progress of older children.     

Variable effects of children's aggression,social withdrawal,and prosocial leadership as functions of teacher beliefs and behaviors

Teachers' beliefs about aggressive and withdrawn behaviors in the classrooms and teachers' overall caring and support of students were hypothesized to influence the relations between these classroom behaviors and peer acceptance and self-perceived social competence. These hypotheses were tested in a sample of 82 middle school classes consisting of 4,650 students ages 13 to 16. The results suggest that teachers' aversion to aggression and empathy toward withdrawal enhanced the self-perceptions of both aggressive and withdrawn children and enforced peer rejection of aggression but not of social withdrawal. Teacher warmth had similar effects. Prosocial leadership had a positive social impact among students independent of teacher beliefs. These findings are discussed in an attempt to reconceptualize children's social behaviors and peer status.     

Foster children's attachment behavior and representation: Influence of children's pre-placement experiences and foster caregiver's sensitivity

Although the majority of foster children have been exposed to early adversity in their biological families and have experienced one or more disruptions of attachment relationships, most studies surprisingly found foster children to be as securely attached as children in low-risk samples. However, attention has been paid almost exclusively to attachment formation in young children up to two years of age, and the majority of studies solely investigated attachment behavior whereas few is known about foster children's representations about attachment relationships. To extend findings on attachment in foster children and its predictors, our study examined both attachment behavior and representations in foster children aged between 3 and 8 years. Diverse potential predictors including child variables, birth parents’ variables, pre-placement experiences, and foster caregiver's behavior were included in the analyses. Results revealed that foster children showed both lower attachment security and higher disorganization scores than children in low-risk samples. Attachment behavior and representation were found to be widely independent from each other. Different factors contributed to attachment behavior and representation: whereas foster children's attachment behavior was mainly influenced by foster parents’ behavior, pre-placement experiences did predict hyperactivation and disorganization on the representational level. The results indicate that, when intervening with foster families, it seems crucial to focus not exclusively on the promotion of secure attachment behavior but also to develop interventions enhancing secure and organized attachment representations.