Promoting Math Talk in Adult–Child Interactions Through Grocery Store Signs

Young children have better math abilities when their parents engage in more math‐related conversations with them. Yet, previous studies have found that math talk occurs only very infrequently in everyday interactions. In the present study, we sought to promote adult–child conversations about math in a naturalistic context using minimal instructions. We observed 179 adult–child dyads while they shopped in grocery stores with signs prompting them to engage in math‐related conversations (math condition), signs prompting them to talk about other topics (general language condition), or without any signs (baseline condition). In the math condition, more adults talked about math compared to the general language or the baseline condition, and this finding could not be explained by demographic characteristics of the dyad or the overall amount of conversations. This study demonstrates that cost‐effective signs placed in everyday contexts can promote math‐related conversations and potentially provide math learning opportunities for children.     

Assessing physicians' intentions to talk about sex when they vaccinate nine-year-old to 15-year-old girls against HPV

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine provides physicians with an opportunity to have conversations with girls about sex and sex-related topics. Current research suggests that these conversations are not happening. This study was designed to assess whether physicians would use the HPV vaccination as an opening to communicate with nine-year-old to 15-year-old female patients about sex using the Theory of Planned Behavior as a framework. The study also assessed what sexual health topics physicians were willing to discuss when they vaccinated patients and at what ages they would be willing to discuss each topic. Differences in communication were also examined between older and younger physicians and female and male physicians. A random sample (n = 207) of all family practice and pediatric physicians in a rural, Midwest state in the USA were mailed a survey about the HPV vaccine and their intentions to talk about sex-related topics. Specifically, the survey questions assessed the theoretical constructs: attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behaviour control. The results point to physicians' intentions to talk about sex when they vaccinate. Most physicians intended to talk about sexually transmitted infections when they vaccinate against HPV (90.3%). A multivariate linear regression reveals that physicians' intentions to talk about sex are influenced by attitudes (β = 0.18, p < 0.05), subjective norms (β = 0.53, p < 0.001), and perceived behavioural control (β = 0.15, p < 0.05). Physicians intended to talk about a variety of sex-related topics when they vaccinate nine-year-old to 15-year-old girls against HPV. The research indicated that physicians' intentions were high, but do not indicate how well physicians are prepared for this communication with nine-year-old to 15-year-old girls about sex.     

论电视谈话节目的平民化

近年来,很多电视谈话节目开始走向平民化,由最早单一的主持人与所邀名人对话,到主持人、多位嘉宾、现场观众甚至场外嘉宾的多方互动;无论是从嘉宾、话题的选择,还是主持人的风格都有了明显改变,这不仅是对受众选择的迎合也是市场要求的必然结果;平民谈话节目具有极大的发展前景,但必须控制住制约其发展的重要因素。     

Conversations of family and primary school groups at robotic dinosaur exhibits in a museum: what do they talk about?

The story which a natural history museum wishes to tell to its self-guided visitors is presented through a number of different components, such as type of exhibit. However, this story from the museum may not be 'read' by visitors, who come with their own knowledge and understanding and read a different story in the animals. Increasingly robotic models are being used in natural history museums, science centres and zoos to attract visitors and tell some kind of story. To what extent are they successful in this and does the quality and context of the animatronics matter? What do the visitors actually talk about when looking at such robotic animals? This article focuses on primary school groups and families. Do they talk about similar things at the same exhibits even though the schools visit for educational purposes and the families visit of their own free choice in their leisure time. Furthermore, within school groups do different sub groups respond in a different way, gauged by the content of their conversations, to similar robotics? This article is a study of the responses of the conversational content of primary school and family groups to two different robotics dinosaur exhibits in the Natural History Museum, London. These verbal responses were analysed through using a systemic network. Results indicate that the animatronics have a simple, well thought out, story line which is 'read' by both the family and school visitors and hence increases their understanding of the topic of the exhibit.     

智库对美国外交决策的影响方式及原因探究

20世纪末,在美国国内国际事务日益复杂的大背景下,智库蓬勃发展并且在美国外交决策中担任重要角色。这些智库在具有传统智库特征的同时,也有着自身明显的特色,按职能标准将美国智库分为学术智库、游说智库和合同智库三种。由于美国政府决策的各阶段、各层次决策主体特点的不同,智库有针对性地采取诸如组建专业总统竞选团队、"旋转门"效应、利用大众传媒引导和教育公众、利用人脉和专有渠道举行学术会议、发布会以及午餐会、出版刊物、发布报告提供外交思想和政策建议等方式施加影响。智库对美国外交决策施加多种影响是由美国政治制度、政治传统及智库本身特点决定的。美国智库近年来出现了在数量上不断增加、研究议题多样化、工作网络日益国际化及与政府政策联系日益紧密的趋势,这些趋势使得智库研究外交政策的范围更加广泛。可以预见,美国智库在外交决策研究中的重要性和影响力将在今后进一步增强。     

Conversation and Object Manipulation Influence Children's Learning in a Museum

The effects of parent–child conversation and object manipulation on children's learning, transfer of knowledge, and memory were examined in two museum exhibits and conversations recorded at home. Seventy‐eight children (M_age = 4.9) and their parents were randomly assigned to receive conversation cards featuring elaborative questions about exhibit objects, the physical objects themselves, both, or neither, before their exhibit visits. Dyads who received the cards engaged in more elaborative talk and joint nonverbal activities with objects in the first exhibit than those who did not. Dyads who received objects engaged in the most parent–child joint talk. Results also illustrate transfer of information across exhibits and from museum to home. Implications for understanding mechanisms of informal learning and transfer are discussed.     

Taking the risk to engage in race talk: professional development in elementary schools

Developing public education where every child has the right to learn requires that teachers pay attention to and engage in race talk – open discussion about race, social construction of race, and racism. While it is clear that children engage and reflect critically about these aspects of race even at a young age, teachers rarely engage in race talk with them. In this study, an African-American preservice teacher and a White teacher educator explore how African-American, Polynesian, and White in-service teachers, participating in Courageous Conversations professional development, address or avoid race talk in their elementary schools through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and what risks they take when they do. Findings, through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, demonstrate that (1) racism was observed and/or experienced by all teachers in elementary schools; (2) lived racial experiences impacted teachers’ approach to conversations about race; (3) creating an open space was crucial for race conversations; (4) Courageous Conversations provided a ‘new language’ to talk about race; and (5) administrative support facilitated more attention to race. Findings indicate the road to greater equity in schools requires more professional development about race talk in elementary schools.     

The family car as a “vehicle” for children's use of distant time referents

The conversations of nine preschool-aged children (C.A. 4:0–5:2) were tape-recorded as they interacted with teachers and with peers at preschool, as they traveled home from school with their parent in the family car, and as they engaged in routine home activities. The speech samples were coded to identify the time referents the children used in their topics of conversation in the three settings. The study sought to explore suggestions that young children, although generally context-bound in their talk at home and school, are capable of decontextualized talk when settings and conversational partners are familiar and supportive, and when contexts are transitional and prompt talk about other than the here-and-now.Significant differences were found in the children's use of present, past and future time referents in the three settings. Overall, the children spoke most often about the here-and-now, making frequent references to the present activities or to people in each setting. References to past and future events, however, were significantly more frequent in the car setting than in the home or school talk. Most references to the past occurred during the first 5 min of travel and were often prompted by the presence of a project remnant in the car or parents' questions or comments. References to future events occurred more frequently during the latter portion of the car trip. Differences in the children's proportional use of fantasy time referents were not significant. Possible implications for teachers and parents are discussed along with suggestions for future research.     

Educator Talk in Long Day Care Nurseries: How Context Shapes Meaning

Little is known about the quality and characteristics of the language used by childcare staff when interacting with infants in non-parental group care settings. This qualitative study analysed the manner in which staff used language when interacting with ten children aged between 9 and 20 months in four different long day care centres in Sydney, Australia. Each infant was audiorecorded for one whole day using a small recording device attached to her/his clothing, which captured all the language spoken directly to, or in their presence of, the infant. The infants and staff were simultaneously videorecorded as they went about their everyday activities, to provide additional contextual information. Using systemic functional linguistics as the theoretical underpinning, the study found that staff members tended to talk to more than one child at a time, limiting their potential to engage in the types of sustained conversations with individual children that have been shown to promote language development. Staff also tended to use language primarily to manage children’s behaviour and provide physical care, rather than using language to encourage children to use their own developing language to represent their experiences in a variety of contexts. The findings have implications for group size, early childhood teacher education and inservice professional development.     

The linguistic complexity of adult and child contextualized and decontextualized talk

The association between decontextualized talk (DT; i.e., talk extending beyond immediate context) and child language outcomes is well-attested but not well-understood. This study tested the hypothesis that DT is more linguistically complex than contextualized talk (CT). Thirty-eight Norwegian children (M_age = 5.5 years; 25 girls; 30 Norwegian-speaking monolinguals and eight multilinguals) and their teachers were videotaped during picture book reading, story card conversations and toy play (collected 2010–2011 and 2017). Results show that DT was more complex than CT among children and teachers. Both types of talk were more complex during book reading and story conversations than during play. The conversational context should be accounted for when theorizing about the role of DT in language development.     

Usage patterns of communication interfaces for social support among at-risk adolescents

Social and interpersonal support has mostly been carried out face-to-face. However, the internet was able, in the last couple of decades, to facilitate social interactions through a range of computer-mediated communication (CMC) interfaces—from email applications, chat-rooms, forums, instant messages (IM), short text messages (SMS), social networks, and others. Various studies have examined how these interfaces influence interpersonal communication among adolescents from a wide spectrum of angles. Some studies examined the impact that CMC interfaces are having on written language Ling (2005); Segerstad (2002), while others examined the behavioral and economic effects which they applied to different users Yang (2003); Livingstone (2008). Our research aimed to examine the correlation between CMC interfaces and interpersonal social support among at-risk adolescents, with the goal of studying the patterns of use of today’s four most commonly used CMC interfaces: email, SMS, IM, and closed forums within social networks. An occasional sample was taken from two cities and involved 316 (n?=?316) 8th graders who were identified by their teachers as being at-risk teenagers. Each teenager filled out a questionnaire Kraut (2002) which was adapted especially for this research in order to examine the patterns of use with the four CMC interfaces. The results indicated that instant-message (IM) and the short-message (SMS) interfaces were the most preferred interfaces for expressing social support among adolescents at-risk. These findings reflect the results of other studies, which showed a clear preference for the IM interface in normative adolescents Lenhart et al. (2001); Boneva et al. (2005). However, in contrast with these results, our study found that the conversations on social characteristics were more supportive than those on emotional characteristics. We found that the participating at-risk adolescents preferred the IM interface only when topics of conversations were related to the categories of ‘negative partner’ (conversations on topics such as complains and gossip). To a similar extent, they preferred the SMS interface only in the category of ‘social support’ (conversations on topics such as asking favors or advice and gossip), as opposed to email and chat interfaces. However, they preferred to a significant degree the chat interface when the conversations were on topics related to the category of ‘relationship partner’ (conversations on topics such as acquaintances and romance). These results indicate that there is a correlation between the type of the interface and the topics of conversation, and that at-risk adolescents prefer certain interfaces over others for conducting conversations of a different nature.     

Supporting family conversations and children's STEM learning in a children's museum

This study tested the effectiveness of a facilitated educational program in a museum for promoting family conversations and children's learning about STEM. A sample of 130 families (71 European-American; 33 African-American; and 26 Hispanic-American) with children M age = 6.42 years were observed in a building construction exhibit. Prior to building, families were randomly assigned to conditions that varied in terms of the instructions about a key engineering principle and elaborative question-asking they received. Conversation instruction resulted in adults’ asking double the number of Wh-questions compared to families who did not receive the instruction. The building instruction was important in promoting increases in adults’ STEM-related talk during the building activity, as well as in the children's STEM talk when prompted for information about what they had learned. The effects of the instructions did not vary by families’ ethnic background. Implications for facilitating family conversations and children's learning related to STEM are discussed.     

港台与内地电视谈话节目的差异

港台与内地电视谈话节目既有联系，又有区别。与内地相比，港台电视谈话节目话题更敏感、刺激，嘉宾的选择上精英化、明星化，主持风格世俗诙谐、极具个性化，结构是板块式的，不时插播广告，体现了重娱乐轻教化的宗旨和商业化的价值取向。这些差异是由媒介性质、化背景、社会宽容度等不同的媒介生态决定的。     

Evaluation of second step child protection videos: A randomized controlled trial

This randomized controlled trial (RCT) examined the effects of the Second Step Child Protection Unit videos on parents’ knowledge, motivation, and self-reported communication with their child about personal safety and childhood sexual abuse prevention. Parents of children between the ages of 3–11 years were randomly assigned to the intervention (watching the Second Step videos) or the control (watching videos on child obesity) groups. They completed measures assessing their knowledge of child sexual abuse (CSA), motivation to discuss CSA, self-reported discussions of CSA, child history of victimization, parent exposure to CSA, and comparable measures on topics of health and nutrition at pre-test. Participants viewed the videos one week later and immediately completed post-test 1, and then two months later completed the measures again. Multivariate Analyses of Covariance (MANCOVAs) and serial mediation analyses were conducted with the final sample of 438. The intervention group, compared to the control group, had significant increases in knowledge (specifically, less restrictive stereotype beliefs about CSA) and motivation to talk with their children about CSA both immediately after the intervention and at the two-month follow-up. Although the intervention did not have a direct effect on parent self-reported conversations with their children about CSA, it had a mediated effect. The intervention increased knowledge regarding CSA, which then predicted motivation, which in turn predicted conversations. The most pronounced effect was the intervention’s direct effect of increasing motivation immediately after the intervention, which then increased self-reported conversations with children about personal safety and CSA two months later.     

Parent–child conversations about letters and pictures

Learning about letters, and how they differ from pictures, is one important aspect of a young child??s print awareness. To test the hypothesis that parent speech provides children with information about these differences, we studied parent?Cchild conversations in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). We found that parents talk to their young children about letters, differentiating them from pictures, by 1?C2?years of age and that some of these conversational patterns change across the preschool years in ways that emphasize important features of letters, such as their shape. We also found that children talk about letters and pictures in distinct ways, suggesting an implicit understanding of some of the differences between letters and pictures at an early age. Some differences in parent?Cchild conversations about letters were found as a function of socioeconomic status: Lower SES families appeared to focus more on alphabetic order than higher SES families. The general letter knowledge expressed in these conversations suggests that everyday interactions are an important component of the home literacy environment and that they differ, in some respects, as a function of child age and family background.     

Navigating the relationship between policy and practice: competing discourses of fear and care in teachers’ sense-making about the FAIR Education Act

In this article, I examine the relationship between large-scale social discourses and local, school discourses as it plays out in conversations about gender and sexuality with and among teachers, specifically in the context of the passage of the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act in California. Grounded in feminist poststructural theories of discourse, I discuss qualitative data from a year-long study at one public middle school in Southern California where I provided professional development. I examine what happens when teachers are given opportunities to make sense of their roles in attending to topics of gender and sexual diversity, through conversations and dialogue. The following research questions guided my analyses: What themes arise in teachers’ conversations about their roles and responsibilities in the implementation of the FAIR Education Act? (How) are these themes produced in relationship with large-scale social discourses about gender and sexual diversity in schools? I argue that examining this relationship provides key insights into the ways teachers make sense of equity-focused policies that are meant to shift sociopolitical paradigms, and their roles and responsibilities in the implementation of such policies.     

How students socially evaluate interest: Peer responsiveness influences evaluation and maintenance of interest

Social influences (e.g., by teachers, parents and peers) on students’ experience of interest are typically described in terms of affecting students’ initial choice of and/or completion of specific educational activities. When considered within the framework of the Self-Regulation of Motivation (SRM) model, however, other people may influence the interest experience even after activity completion, by influencing how a person evaluates that past experience. Previous experimental research showed that when students talked about a game upon completion, listeners’ responsiveness influenced their evaluation of interest. The present research examined whether peer responsiveness when undergraduates talked about topics covered in actual classes predicted students’ evaluation of class interest. In Study 1, we examined responsiveness in the context of conversations that took place as a structured part of an online psychology class (i.e., discussion board), and found that the frequency of replies from classmates to students’ posts (but not the reverse) predicted students’ interest in the class measured at the end of the semester. In Study 2, we examined responsiveness in the context of students’ reported everyday conversations about two completed interesting class topics or two completed class exams in an introductory physics course. Perceived listener responsiveness in conversations about class topics (but not about exams) predicted students’ concurrent evaluation of class interest, even when controlling for anticipated interest at the beginning of the semester. Moreover, listeners indirectly affected interest measured at the end of the semester via their influence on interest during the semester.     

酒店管理中的宾客投诉处理艺术

宾客投诉是指住店宾客对酒店在服务过程中由于其工作人员的服务水平及产品的质量问题引发的不满而提出的批评、抱怨或控告。酒店投诉管理的宗旨在于如何减少客人的投诉,及如何使因客人的投诉而造成的危害减小到最低程度。宾客投诉管理是弥补服务缺点,保证宾客满意,防止宾客流失的最后一道防线。     

Language use and racial redirect in the educational landscape of ‘just good teaching’

At colleges and universities across the United States, teacher preparation programs are increasingly required to prepare teachers for culturally and linguistically diverse student populations. Teacher education programs have responded by incorporating fieldwork experiences and curricular requirements that include a social justice and multicultural education focus. One key individual is uniquely positioned to reinforce and connect coursework with classroom practice during the teacher candidate’s practicum experience: the university supervisor. Our research team focused on the supervisors and their understandings of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) in order to better support them as they worked with teacher candidates to reinforce CRP in the classroom. Through interviews, field notes, and classroom observations, we examined language (words, phrases) that the supervisors used to talk about race and culture in relation to CRP. Our findings indicate a tendency to redirect conversations about race and culture to topics that they were more versed on such as teaching to the whole child or addressing the needs of the individual student. We termed this linguistic move the racial redirect, which emerged in language that (1) simplified the meaning of CRP and (2) made CRP seem like an unexpected or chance event in teaching.     

The influence of framing on transfer: initial evidence from a tutoring experiment

This paper investigates the idea that the framing of learning and transfer contexts can influence students’ propensity to transfer what they have learned. We predicted that transfer would be promoted by framing contexts in an expansive manner in which students are positioned as having the opportunity to contribute to larger conversations that extend across time, places, people, and topics. A one-on-one tutoring experiment was conducted to test this hypothesis by manipulating framing as either expansive or its opposite (bounded) within a complex instructional learning ecology. We investigated the degree to which high school biology students transferred knowledge from a learning session about the cardiovascular system to a transfer-of-learning session about the respiratory system depending on framing condition. Consistent with the framing hypothesis, students in the expansive condition were generally more likely to transfer facts, a conceptual principle, and a learning strategy from one system to another.