Anti-racism activism among Black adolescents and emerging adults: Understanding the roles of racism and anticipatory racism-related stress

This study examines associations between individual racism, anticipatory racism-related stress, and anti-racism activism among Black adolescents (n = 443; M_age = 15.6; 57.4% female) and emerging adults (n = 447; M_age = 23.8; 77.6% female). The authors tested competing hypotheses about associations between individual racism and anti-racism activism on anticipatory racism-related stress. Findings indicated anticipatory racism-related stress may be both a catalyst and consequence of engagement in anti-racism activism for Black adolescents and emerging adults. Results for each age group varied by type of stress (physiological; psychological) and activism (low-risk; high-risk). Supporting youth engagement in anti-racism activism without increasing anticipatory racism-related stress is a key priority for meaningfully advancing scholarship on the development of anti-racism and pursuit of racial justice.     

Humans and Change: BlackBerry Haters to iPhone Fans

This article is a lighthearted look at how people's attitudes changed over time in relation to their mobile phones, what the drivers of that change were, and what we can learn from that.     

Envisioning Equitable Classrooms That Enhance All Students’ Wonderful Ideas: A Duckworth Perspective

This synopsis centers on Eleanor Duckworth’s ideas about the relationship between education and intellectual development. Specifically, Duckworth described the essence of intellectual development as the “having of wonderful ideas” and the essence of pedagogy as the creation of occasions to “have wonderful ideas.” As opposed to accepting the persistent, pernicious educational belief that there is a single, best way to understand and a single, best way of explaining this understanding, Duckworth determined that all children can come to comparable, equally satisfactory, wonderful understandings when provided occasions to do so.     

Moving toward a grand theory of development: in memory of Esther Thelen

This paper is in memory of Esther Thelen, who passed away while President of the Society for Research in Child Development. A survey of Esther Thelen's career reveals a trajectory from early work on simple movements like stepping, to the study of goal-directed reaching, to work on the embodiment of cognition, and, ultimately, to a grand theory of development--dynamic systems theory. Four central concepts emerged during her career: (1) a new emphasis on time; (2) the proposal that behavior is softly assembled from the interaction of multiple subsystems; (3) the embodiment of perception, action, and cognition; and (4) a new respect for individuality. Esther Thelen communicated these ideas to scientists and practitioners alike, so the ultimate benefactors of her work were children.     

The role of the printed answer in programmed instruction

Using a variety of programmed materials, this series of studies showed that students observed available answers in the program far less than 100% of the time. Answer observing was found to be correlated with student error on the related frame. The view that the printed answer in a program is always a reinforcer for the preceding response(s) is severely questioned.     

Formal theories clarify the complex: Generalizing a neural process account of the interaction of visual exploration and word learning in infancy

The interaction of visual exploration and auditory processing is central to early cognitive development, supporting object discrimination, categorization, and word learning. Research has shown visual–auditory interactions to be complex, created from multiple processes and changing over multiple timescales. To better understand these interactions, we generalize a formal neural process model of early word learning to two studies examining how words impact 9- to 22-month-olds' attention to novelty. These simulations clarify the origin and nature of previously demonstrated effects of labels on visual exploration and the basis of mutual exclusivity effects in word learning. We use our findings to discuss key questions for this special section: what makes a good theory and how should formal theories interface with empirical paradigms and findings?