Native Waters: Integrating Scientific and Cultural Ways of Knowing about Water

Away needs to be found to make young people want to learn the importance of water, before it is too late and our information is lost forever. —Rosebud Sioux elder.     

Time and the Environments of Schooling

In this article, we explore questions related to the meaning and nature of time in schooling environments. Cultural, historical and ecological images inform our thinking, using concepts from postmodern perspectives such as semiotics and critical pedagogy. We begin by reviewing the historical development of conceptions of time and describe what is meant by framing our research and thinking in a postmodern vision of time. We examine ideas about other potential meanings of time using semiotic and critical pedagogical interpretations. As the research and recommendations are of value to professional educators and policy makers, we discuss the value of nurturing intellectual relationships, the value of collaboration, and the importance of developing new ways to give voice to teachers to allow them to articulate their views about what is most meaningful and significant in the organization of learning environments.     

Single-document and multi-document summarization techniques for email threads using sentence compression

We present two approaches to email thread summarization: collective message summarization (CMS) applies a multi-document summarization approach, while individual message summarization (IMS) treats the problem as a sequence of single-document summarization tasks. Both approaches are implemented in our general framework driven by sentence compression. Instead of a purely extractive approach, we employ linguistic and statistical methods to generate multiple compressions, and then select from those candidates to produce a final summary. We demonstrate these ideas on the Enron email collection – a very challenging corpus because of the highly technical language. Experimental results point to two findings: that CMS represents a better approach to email thread summarization, and that current sentence compression techniques do not improve summarization performance in this genre.     

An Approach to Consider the Semiotic Messages of School Science Learning Culture

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Affordances of mHealth technology and the structuring of clinic communication

Careful examination of communicative outcomes of mHealth technology is critical for understanding its capacity to shape the clinical interview and structure clinic communication. Drawing on a communicative affordances framework and adopting a video-based inductive analytic approach, we extend the concept of actualizations. We do so by examining the in situ communicative actions afforded by a mHealth web interface utilized during medication titration interviews with parents of children beginning stimulant medication for ADHD. We find that the web interface served five broad communicative functions that provided opportunities for improving information accuracy and for rendering clinical reasoning transparent, while jeopardizing opportunities for parents to narrativize medication experiences. We discuss clinical, theoretical, and methodological implications.     

The Effects of Peer Victimization and Physical Aggression on Changes in Internalizing From First to Third Grade

Three models of the prospective relations between child maladjustment and peer victimization are examined: (a) internalizing results directly from victimization, (b) internalizing leads to victimization, and (c) physical aggression fuels retaliatory victimization that leads to increases in internalizing over time. Data came from assessments of children at the beginning of Grade 1 ( n  = 432; average age = 6.3 years), with follow-ups at the end of Grades 1, 2, and 3. Most children showed low stable internalizing trajectories (73%); however, high stable and increasing curvilinear trajectories were evident for 7% and 20% of children, respectively. Findings suggest that children's adjustment problems at entry to Grade 1 affect the course of their internalizing, in part, by setting the stage for peer victimization.     

ISPCAN Child Abuse Screening Tools Retrospective version (ICAST-R): Delphi study and field testing in seven countries

ObjectivesTo gain consensus among an ethnically and linguistically diverse group of international child protection experts on the structure and content of a new survey tool for retrospective measurement of child abuse, and to determine the performance of the instrument through an international field trial with young adults.MethodsThe questionnaire was developed through focus group discussions with international experts, and then subjected to a Delphi study in two waves to determine the perceived importance and translatability of items. The resultant questionnaire was translated into six languages and field tested in seven countries with convenient samples of young adults aged 18–26 years (N = 842).ResultsChild maltreatment experts from 28 countries provided input to questionnaire development. Satisfactory agreement on draft item inclusion and exclusion and the translatability of items was gained. The tool includes 15 primary questions about potentially abusive physical, sexual and emotional events, with follow-up questions about perpetrator characteristics, frequency of acts and periods in childhood when the recalled abuse occurred. The field test revealed lifetime prevalence per item usually exceeded 10% (11/15 items; range 2.1–49.5%). Internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) was moderate to high for each of three item sub-sets (between .61 and .82) and the rates of missing data were low (less than 1.5% for 14 of 15 items). The great majority of respondents nominated either peer and/or adult perpetrators (between 82.3% and 98.2% depending upon the item), and among these, child/adolescent peers and non-family adults (including teachers for emotional and physical acts) were nominated often.ConclusionsThe ICAST-R is based on consensus from international experts, translates clearly and has satisfactory properties for adoption as a survey tool to estimate prevalence and describe perpetrators and other contextual aspects of child abuse.Practice implicationsThis tool can be utilized in a broad range of cultures and languages and may contribute to improved research practice. Although the core items are limited to just 15 acts of maltreatment, if these behaviorally specific questions are adopted as key indicators and incorporated into comprehensive local, national or regional surveys, eventually there should be greater comparability in survey estimates.