Collaborating With a Skilled Peer: The Influence of Achievement Goals and Perceptions of Partners' Competence on the Participation and Learning of Low-Achieving Students

The authors examined whether motivational goals influenced the participation and performance of low-achieving students during collaborative problem solving with a high-achieving partner. Thirty-five pairs of 4th- and 5th-grade students were randomly assigned a set of instructions designed to induce students to adopt a learning goal or a performance goal. The following day, the students were individually given a posttest on problems similar to those worked on collaboratively. The low-achieving students given learning-goal instructions performed better on the posttest problems and perceived their partner's competence as more similar to their own than did the low-achieving students given performance-goal instructions. No differences in overall amount or level of low achievers' participation during collaborative problem solving were observed. Implications of the findings for the use of peer learning in heterogeneous classrooms are discussed.     

Developing anti-discriminatory education: the impact of specialist training on practitioners and pupils

This article addresses the question as to whether training pre-school practitioners in an approach to anti-discriminatory education can impact on the developing attitudes of young children. This article attempts to analyse the effect of training practitioners in the delivery of an anti-discriminatory curriculum on the developing attitudes of the children they are teaching. This training was carried out with Leicestershire Foundation Stage settings.     

The role of the A* grade at A level as a predictor of university performance in the United Kingdom

In summer 2010, the A* grade at A level was awarded for the first time. This grade was introduced to help higher education institutions to differentiate between the highest achieving candidates and to promote and reward greater stretch and challenge. Exploring data from the Higher Education Statistics Service and making use of multilevel regression models, this research investigated for the first time the relationship between achieved A* grades and performance at the end of three-year courses in higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. The results of this work showed that, when prior schooling and other background characteristics were accounted for, the number of A* grades was a good predictor of achieving either a first or at least an upper second class degree. Specific subject-level analyses revealed that the number of top grades in some A level subjects was associated with good degree outcomes in specific degree subject areas.     

Measuring Children's Age Stereotyping Using a Modified Piagetian Conservation Task

We examined five-year-old-children's age stereotyping using a modified Piagetian conservation task. Children were asked if two lines of objects were the “same” after one line had been made longer (transformed). A conversational account posits that children's answers reflect assumptions about the asker's motivation for the question (Schwarz, 1996 Schwarz , N. ( 1996 ). Cognition and communication: Judgmental biases, research methods, and the logic of conversation . Mahwah , NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum . [Google Scholar]). We reasoned that when asked by a young adult (puppet Experiment 1, experimenter Experiment 2) children would assume the question is to ascertain if they have noted a perceptual change and would provide answers focused on the change (length). If older adults are assumed to be in decline because of negative age stereotyping, however, children may assume an older adult (puppet, experimenter) is seeking clarification about line equality and would, therefore, give responses focused on the similarity of the lines (number). The expectation that a focus on length or number should differ across puppet/experimenter conditions was supported in both experiments and provides behavioral evidence for children's old age stereotyping.     

Effects of Intergenerational Interaction on Aging

The world population pyramid has changed shape. However, this does not mean that societies have changed their negative concept of old age. Our study proposes an intergenerational service-learning program with 179 university students and 101 slightly depressed elderly people. The results show that the elderly people who interacted improved in well-being. Those interacting with the young people tended to lower their stereotyped perception of themselves, while the others tended to augment it. The young people tended to moderate their stereotypes of the elderly with or without interaction.     

The “I” and the “ME” of criminology and criminal justice students: Symbolic interaction in an educational setting

This study examines the self-concept of criminology and criminal justice students, vis-`a-vis the perceptions held of them by non-criminology and criminal justice students, using a framework of symbolic interactionism. The data in this study were obtained from a sample of both criminology and criminal justice students and non-criminology and criminal justice students attending a large state university in north Texas. The findings reveal a lack of consensus among perception patterns held by criminology and criminal justice students and non-criminology and criminal justice students. Implications regarding the future of criminology and criminal justice education follow.     

Routine leisure activities: opportunity and risk in adolescence / Rutinas de tiempo libre: oportunidad y riesgo en la adolescencia

Abstract

In order to differentiate between types of routine leisure activities and to evaluate their corresponding protection/risk value in adolescent development, we performed a study with a sample of 218 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 14 years by asking them to fill out a grid that analysed their daily routines. The results are presented here. They were required to account for each hour of a weekday by specifying whether they were awake or asleep, the place they were at, who they were with, and what type of activity they were engaged in. A group of these adolescents (N = 59) were considered to be at risk (they formed part of a social integration and marginalization prevention program), whereas the rest (comparison group) were their classmates. A multiple correspondence analysis was performed, revealing the existence of four adolescent typologies according to daily routines. The analysis showed that the routines incorporating a greater variety of leisure activities, as well as more creative, organized, and supervised activities, were associated with adolescents who possessed a more normative development, whereas more monotonous, unstructured and unsupervised activities tended to be characteristic of adolescent development at risk.     

Coverage and citation impact of oncological journals in the Web of Science and Scopus

This paper reviews a number of studies comparing Thomson Scientific’s Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier’s Scopus. It collates their journal coverage in an important medical subfield: oncology. It is found that all WoS-covered oncological journals (n = 126) are indexed in Scopus, but that Scopus covers many more journals (an additional n = 106). However, the latter group tends to have much lower impact factors than WoS covered journals. Among the top 25% of sources with the highest impact factors in Scopus, 94% is indexed in the WoS, and for the bottom 25% only 6%. In short, in oncology the WoS is a genuine subset of Scopus, and tends to cover the best journals from it in terms of citation impact per paper. Although Scopus covers 90% more oncological journals compared to WoS, the average Scopus-based impact factor for journals indexed by both databases is only 2.6% higher than that based on WoS data. Results reflect fundamental differences in coverage policies: the WoS based on Eugene Garfield’s concepts of covering a selective set of most frequently used (cited) journals; Scopus with broad coverage, more similar to large disciplinary literature databases. The paper also found that ‘classical’, WoS-based impact factors strongly correlate with a new, Scopus-based metric, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), one of a series of new indicators founded on earlier work by Pinski and Narin [Pinski, G., & Narin F. (1976). Citation influence for journal aggregates of scientific publications: Theory, with application to the literature of physics. Information Processing and Management, 12, 297–312] that weight citations according to the prestige of the citing journal (Spearman’s rho = 0.93). Four lines of future research are proposed.