Math-gender stereotypes in elementary school children

A total of 247 American children between 6 and 10 years of age (126 girls and 121 boys) completed Implicit Association Tests and explicit self-report measures assessing the association of (a) me with male (gender identity), (b) male with math (math-gender stereotype), and (c) me with math (math self-concept). Two findings emerged. First, as early as second grade, the children demonstrated the American cultural stereotype that math is for boys on both implicit and explicit measures. Second, elementary school boys identified with math more strongly than did girls on both implicit and self-report measures. The findings suggest that the math-gender stereotype is acquired early and influences emerging math self-concepts prior to ages at which there are actual differences in math achievement.     

First‐Generation Undergraduate Students' Social Support,Depression, and Life Satisfaction

First‐generation undergraduate students face challenging cross‐socioeconomic cultural transitions into college life. The authors compared first‐ and non‐first‐generation undergraduate students’ social support, posttraumatic stress, depression symptoms, and life satisfaction. First‐generation participants reported less social support from family and friends, more single‐event traumatic stress, less life satisfaction, and marginally more depression symptomatology than non‐first‐generation participants, but significant generation–gender interactions showed first‐generation women doing worse and first‐generation men doing better than others.     

Moral Leadership in the 21st Century: Everyone Is Watching—Especially the Students

Educational leaders continually must be vigilant about their actions as they speak volumes about the values that the leader supports. It is impossible for an educational leader to take an action without generating some comment about how things should be done—which by definition is moral action. What's more, everyone is watching—especially the students.

This article explores leadership relationships, interrelationships, and interdependence—and how administrative “moral leadership” rests with the institution's leader. First, it examines the concept of systems thinking to determine how relationships, support structures, and decisions made by school leaders impact the entire school—especially the students and the community at large. Second, it explores and furthers our understanding of moral leadership models by synthesizing concepts in the literature and offers a new paradigm of moral leadership for educational leaders in the 21st century.     

Response to Grace’s reflections on Allen and West’s paper

Since the 1970s, school effectiveness research has looked for process-variables filling the black box between mainly structural school features and cognitive outcomes in students. Two concepts came to the fore: school climate and school culture. Both concepts are currently used interchangeably, although it is open to debate whether both are actually the same thing. Because of the way culture and climate are defined and subsequently measured, we propose school culture is a better frame from which to study school effectiveness. This article goes through the premises of perceptual measurement usually overlooked in climate research, and we demonstrate empirically by means of very basic and simple methods and techniques that perceptual measurement and measurement based on assumptions are different approaches and might yield totally different results on an aggregated level. We conclude by demonstrating how culture can be probed and integrated in the models traditionally used in school effectiveness research in an advantageous and theoretically sound way.     

Gender differences in the academic career

This study examines sources of satisfaction, indicators of stress, academic performance, and reward structure in the academic careers of male and female faculty at a major midwestern state university. Faculty pairs were selected from five academic divisions. A total of 58 matched pairs were identified. Of these, 63 faculty responded, yielding data for 23 matched pairs. Subjects were mailed the Academic Career Development Survey, consisting of 144 items. Results indicated that self-reported physical and mental health, and professional and personal life satisfaction were high for both males and females. Both males and females placed high importance on their career and on marriage/other intimate relationships; however, both reported high levels of dissatisfaction with these factors. Gender differences were found in both satisfaction and type of stress reported; no gender differences were found in composite teaching and research performance indices. Salary data, obtained for 42 matched pairs, indicated similar salary levels for men and women. Results were discussed with respect to prior research on gender differences and the academic career.     

Student achievement and differential reinforcement of incompatible behavior: Hand raising

Workbook reading achievement of five second-grade girls was assessed under two teacher-contact contingencies. Under one contingency, teacher contacts were made during on-task behavior. Under the other contingency, differential reinforcement of an incompatible behavior (DRI) was in effect, with teacher contacts contingent on students' hand-raising behavior. Both reading achievement and time on task were greater under the on-task contingency than under DRI for hand raising.     

Concept learning by pigeons: Matching-to-sample with trial-unique video picture stimuli

Pigeons were trained to match-to-sample with several new methodologies: a large number of stimuli, computer-drawn color picture stimuli, responses monitored by a computer touch screen, stimuli presented horizontally from the floor, and grain reinforcement delivered onto the picture stimuli. Following acquisition, matching-to-sample concept learning was assessed by transfer to novel stimuli on the first exposure to pairs of novel stimuli. One group (trial-unique), trained with 152 different pictures presented once daily, showed excellent transfer (80% correct). Transfer and baseline performances were equivalent, indicating that the matching-to-sample concept had been learned. A second group (2-stimulus), trained with only two different pictures, showed no evidence of transfer. These results are discussed in terms of the effect of numbers of exemplars on previous failures to find concept learning in pigeons, and the implications of the positive finding from this experiment on abstract concept learning and evolutionary cognitive development.     

Teachers as Carers: A Case Study of a Secondary School's Pastoral Process

This paper describes the review and evaluation of the house/pastoral system at the Anglican Church Grammar School. The main findings were: an overwhelming acceptance of the house system; a high level of caring and commitment; and a desire to offer new challenges and support to permeate the whole educational process. There was also an almost total disregard for and antagonism towards the tutorial system. Based on interviews with staff, a representative staff working party agreed the changes that needed to be undertaken and improvements were made. The approach to the evaluation is an example of collaboration.     

The information seeking behaviour of the users of digital scholarly journals

The article employs deep log analysis (DLA) techniques, a more sophisticated form of transaction log analysis, to demonstrate what usage data can disclose about information seeking behaviour of virtual scholars – academics, and researchers. DLA works with the raw server log data, not the processed, pre-defined and selective data provided by journal publishers. It can generate types of analysis that are not generally available via proprietary web logging software because the software filters out relevant data and makes unhelpful assumptions about the meaning of the data. DLA also enables usage data to be associated with search/navigational and/or user demographic data, hence the name ‘deep’. In this connection the usage of two digital journal libraries, those of EmeraldInsight, and Blackwell Synergy are investigated. The information seeking behaviour of nearly three million users is analyzed in respect to the extent to which they penetrate the site, the number of visits made, as well as the type of items and content they view. The users are broken down by occupation, place of work, type of subscriber (“Big Deal”, non-subscriber, etc.), geographical location, type of university (old and new), referrer link used, and number of items viewed in a session.