Faculty Organizational Commitment and Citizenship

Building on a theoretical framework that links characteristics of individuals and their work settings to organizational commitment (OC) and citizenship behavior, this study considers why faculty may be disengaging from institutional service. Analyses of survey data collected from a state system of higher education suggest that job characteristics, exchanges and social learning are associated with faculty members’ OC. For instance, opportunities for advancement and research support, as well as responsiveness of administrators to faculty, contributed to the likelihood that faculty would accept a position at their institution again if given the chance. Commitment, however, did not significantly affect time spent on institutional service. Two job characteristics—time spent on research and time spent on teaching—were negatively associated with this behavior.     

Stimulus devaluation and extinction of chain schedule performance

Pigeons were trained on a two-component multiple schedule in which each separate component consisted of a three-link chain schedule. After initial baseline training, the stimuli correlated with the terminal links of each chain were presented in a successive discrimination, with one stimulus continuing to be associated with reinforcement while responses to the alternative stimulus were extinguished. Subjects were then returned to the original chain schedule, but with extinction in effect in both components of the multiple schedule. In two separate experiments, extinction of initial-link responding was not affected by which terminal link had been extinguished during the separate discrimination training, indicating that devaluation of the terminal link was not transmitted directly to the initial link of the chain. There was also no effect of the devaluation procedure during the first session of testing on responding in the middle link of the chain, but an effect did develop with continued extinction of the entire chain when the terminal components were presented during extinction. When the terminal components were omitted, however, the latter effect did not occur. Also, when the terminal link was omitted, extinction occurred more rapidly in the middle component than in the initial component, indicating a backward pattern of extinction.     

Grounds for health: the intersection of green school grounds and health‐promoting schools

Despite the growing body of research on green school grounds, relatively little has been written about their relationship with health promotion, particularly from a holistic health perspective. It is this relationship that we explore in this paper – the power and potential of green school grounds to promote health and well‐being and to be an integral element of multifaceted, school‐based health promotion strategies. Specifically, we bring together recent research to examine green school grounds as places where the interests of educators and children’s health advocates can meet, inform and support one another. By grounding our comments in recent thinking about health‐promoting schools, we highlight the growing body of evidence that green school grounds, as a school setting, can contribute to children’s physical, mental, social and spiritual well‐being.     

Patterns of Subject Uptake and Examination Entry 1984–1997

In 1984, the APU science survey collected information on the courses followed by Year 11 pupils. In this paper, the APU survey will be compared with recent GCSE examination level data and will describe the impact of the National Curriculum on the sexes and on pupils of differing ability. In 1984, there were considerable differences in uptake by the sexes and by ability. In 1997, pupils were taking more examinations than were pupils in 1984. Also, girls were taking more GCSEs than boys in 1997. This could be the result of changes in the provision of subjects. The subjects favoured by males, such as science and technology, tend to have been merged with other subjects. The amount of physics studied by boys has decreased with the introduction of the GCSE (from a whole subject to half a subject). Subjects stereotypically preferred by girls such as modern languages, drama and English literature have increased. In this sense, it could be said that there has been a feminisation of the curriculum, but these changes would only account for some of the differential performance between the sexes.     

Youth Disciplinary Identification During Participation in Contemporary Project-Based Science Investigations in School

Recent science educational policy reform efforts call for a shift toward practice-focused instruction in kindergarten–Grade 12 science education. We argue that this focus on engaging students in epistemic practices of science opens up new possibilities for the design of learning environments that support the stabilization of learners’ science-linked identities. Learning environments often assume that youth come to them without relevant identity resources to contribute or that the learning environment has no bearing on the disciplinary identification of individuals. We conducted this research while developing a year-long course to teach high school biology by engaging youth in interest-driven projects focused on contemporary topics. We explored how engaging youth in the epistemic practices of science in culturally expansive ways supported their science-linked identification. We propose a model grounded in social practice theory that describes aspects of students’ stabilization of disciplinary identities. We found that (a) deepening participation in scientific practices is linked to whether or not youth have opportunities to coordinate their engagement with their existing identities; and (b) material, relational, and ideational identity resources and qualities of the learning environment mediate how youth stabilize disciplinary identities in interactional moments.     

Developmental patterns of children's shyness: Relations with physiological,emotional, and regulatory responses to being treated unfairly

The dysregulation of social fear has been widely studied in children's shyness, but we know little about how shy children regulate during unfair treatment. We first characterized developmental patterns of children's shyness (N = 304, n_girls = 153; 74% White, 26% Other) across 2 (M_age = 2.07), 3 (M_age = 3.08), 4 (M_age = 4.08), and 6 (M_age = 6.58) years of age. Data collection occurred from 2007 to 2014. At age 6, the high stable group had higher cardiac vagal withdrawal and lower expressed sadness and approach-related regulatory strategy than the low stable group when being treated unfairly. Although shy children may be more physiologically impacted by being treated unfairly, they may mask their sadness to signal appeasement.