Cyber Safe Curricula and Online Harassment

In this article, Heather Greenhalgh‐Spencer analyzes three examples of curricula aimed at cultivating good cyber behavior and countering online harassment. These curricula are branded as addressing civic needs, cultivating civic duty, and developing skills to help students understand and react to online threats. Here, Greenhalgh‐Spencer offers two critiques of these, and other similar, cyber safe curricula. First, current cyber safe curricula do not adequately address the ways that identity — particularly gender and sexuality — shape one's experience of online spaces and exposure to online threats. Second, current cyber safe curricula do not adequately consider nuances of how to “react” to online threats. The preponderance of cyber curricula teach students that all forms of offensive speech online should be abolished or pushed against. These curricula miss the opportunity to cultivate conversations around the tensions between the need to feel safe and the need to protect freedoms of speech.     

Tests of a Dynamic Systems Account of the A-not-B Error: The Influence of Prior Experience on the Spatial Memory Abilities of Two-Year-Olds

Recently, Smith, Thelen, and colleagues proposed a dynamic systems account of the Piagetian "A-not-B" error in which infants' errors result from general processes that make goal-directed actions to remembered locations. Based on this account, the A-not-B error should be a general phenomenon, observable in different tasks and at different points in development. Smith, Thelen, et al.'s proposal was tested using an A-not-B version of a sandbox task. During three training trials and three "A" trials, 2-year-olds watched as a toy was buried in a sandbox at Location A. Following a 10-s delay, children searched for the object. Across five experiments, children's (total N = 92) performance on the A trials was accurate. After the A trials, children watched as a toy was hidden at Location B, 8 to 10 inches from Location A. In all experiments, children's searches after a 10-s delay were significantly biased in the direction of Location A. Furthermore, this bias toward Location A decreased with repeated trials to Location B, as well as when children completed fewer trials to Location A. Together, these data suggest that A-not-B-type errors are pervasive across tasks and development.     

“It’s Like I’m Really There”: Using VR Experiences for STEM Career Development

Research suggests that the likelihood of students entering into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers can be increased by promoting and maintaining students’ interest in STEM during middle school years, a critical developmental stage when students’ interests begin to solidify. One way to attract students to STEM is through technology-enhanced learning environments and experiences, which can spark and cultivate the long-term interest needed to pursue STEM careers. Virtual reality (VR) can potentially increase access to such STEM-related experiences for all students due to its educational and technological affordances. Currently, there has been little exploration of the intersection between VR and career development for K-12 students. This study, therefore, aims to address this gap by exploring the use of VR 360 videos for STEM career exploration. Data were collected using focus group interviews with 39 primarily Latinx middle school students who participated in the summer enrichment program. These interviews were conducted immediately after a VR 360 video activity that featured female characters and/or characters from racial minorities in order to best support students who are underrepresented in STEM fields. The findings support the potential of VR as a tool for career development as long as content, possible physical side effects, and scaffolding are considered. The implications for research and practice are discussed.

     

The Pictorial Representation of Gender and Physical Activity Level in Caldecott Medal Winning Children's Literature (1940-1999): A Relational Analysis of Physical Culture

The pictorial representation of physical activity and gender over three time periods is investigated in Caldecott Medal winning children's literature. Relational analysis and recent national position documents on physical activity are used to frame an interdependent relationship between current levels of physical activity among children and the various institutionalized forms of physical culture with which they interact. Fifty-seven Caldecott Medal winning books were analyzed. Frequency counts were recoded for each book in four categories: (1) females engaged in sedentary roles, (2) females engaged in active roles, (3) males engaged in sedentary roles and (4) males engaged in active roles. A 2 (gender) 2 2(activity level) 2 3 (time period) factorial ANOVA adjusted for nonormally distributed data was used to test frequency of pictorial representation. Results indicate the illustrations in Caldecott Medal literature are a poor media for communicating a physically active lifestyle to children while at the same time have consistently underrepresented females. Males were significantly more likely to be portrayed than females (p < 0.05) and, regardless of gender, sedentary roles were significantly more likely to be portrayed than active roles (p < 0.05). This condition did not change significantly over the three time periods tested (1940-1959, 1960-1979 and 1980-1999). With recent national position documents identifying young people as largely inactive and unfit researchers and practitioners are (1) encouraged to rethink the seemingly innocent relationship between picture books and the trend of inactivity currently seen in the United States and (2) develop skills related to critical media literacy as part of a pedagogy for new times.     

Applied utility and the auto-ethnographic short story: persuasions for,and illustrations of,writing critical social science

In some quarters it is argued that, narrative researchers might be classified as being either story-analysts or storytellers. They go on to suggest that one feature of storytellers is that they undertake a form of analysis as the process of writing unfolds. With these sentiments in mind, in the present paper, we consider how auto-ethnographical accounts of traumatic and challenging life events might, through the analysis contained within, demonstrate value within the realm of applied pedagogy. In making our case we embrace and adapt the literary genre of storytelling, more specifically, the short story. The story presented here, ‘Travel Writer’, offers an opaque, multi-contextualised and lifelong view of career transition. The present paper, in more general terms, considers the capacity of auto-ethnography and, more specifically, the short storied version of it, to engender critical reader engagement, to encourage personal reflection in others, and to act as a point of stimulus for the enactment of applied debate through the lens of critical social science. With regards to the assumptions of critical social science, the final discussion also considers how the auto-ethnographic text, as a pedagogic tool, might help others to contest and challenge the meta-narratives that, we argue, risk stagnating established thinking.     

A Grandmothers’ Tea: Evaluation of a Breastfeeding Support Intervention

This study’s purpose was to evaluate an intervention to facilitate grandmothers’ knowledge and support of breastfeeding. A pilot study with a quasi-experimental two-group posttest design was used to evaluate whether the intervention made a difference in grandmothers’ knowledge, attitudes, and intent to recommend breastfeeding. The 26 grandmothers in the intervention group attended A Grandmothers’ Tea program; the 23 grandmothers in the control group received written information. The intervention group had greater posttest knowledge scores than the control group but had no significant differences in attitudes or intent. However, a significant difference was evident between the attitude scores of grandmothers who breastfed their infants and of grandmothers who did not breastfeed their infants regardless of receiving the intervention.     

Investigating the influence of question type and cognitive process on academic performance in VCE Physical Education: a secondary data analysis

External written examinations are commonly used for determining student academic achievement. The influence of question type and cognitive process on examination performance in senior-secondary physical education is unclear. A secondary data analysis of Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) Physical Education examination data (2011; n?=?9,323, 2012; n?=?8,781) was conducted. Question type (multiple choice and short answer) and overall examination performance were compared and the predictive value of question type, cognitive process (based on Bloom’s revised taxonomy), and overall examination scores determined. In 2011 and 2012, students performed significantly better on multiple-choice questions; however, short-answer performance better predicted overall exam performance. A significant difference between marks achieved by cognitive level and grade (Ungraded [UG] – A+) was found. Low-achieving students (UG – D) were performing well below the examination mean across all questions. Developing higher order thinking skills for all students may lead to improved overall examination performance in VCE Physical Education.     

Infant Auditory Temporal Acuity: Gap Detection

The development of auditory temporal acuity during infancy was examined in 3-, 6-, and 12-month-old infants and in adults using the gap detection paradigm. Listeners detected a series of gaps, or silent intervals, or variable duration in a broadband noise. In order to vary the acoustic frequencies available to the listener, a high-pass noise was used to mask frequencies above specified cutoffs. High-pass maskers with cutoffs of 500, 2,000, and 8,000 Hz were used. The minimum detectable gap was determined using the Observer-based Psychoacoustic Procedure. The thresholds of 3- and 6-month-olds were considerably poorer than those of the adults, although the effect of masker condition was about the same for these 3 groups. The thresholds of 12-month-olds were significantly worse than the adults when the stimulus was unmasked or when the masker cutoff frequency was 2,000 or 8,000 Hz. When the masker cutoff frequency was 500 Hz, 12-month-olds fell into 2 groups: some had gap thresholds that were about the same as 3- and 6-month-olds, while some had gap thresholds that approached those of adults. In a second experiment, a larger group of 12-month-olds were tested with a 500-Hz masker cutoff. Average performance of 12-month-olds was about the same as that of 3- and 6-month-olds in Experiment 1. Some infants attained thresholds close to those of adults. Thus, gap detection thresholds are quite poor in infants, although the similarity of the effect of frequency on performance in infants and adults suggests that the mechanisms governing temporal resolution in infants operate qualitatively like those in adults.