Bridging understanding between preservice teachers and diverse students through service-learning

This study examines the effectiveness of service-learning as a pedagogical approach that seeks to bridge the gap of understanding between predominantly White undergraduate preservice teachers (PSTs) and diverse students at a local elementary school. Analysis of ‘before’ and ‘after’ reflective papers and surveys from 23 PSTs enrolled in an entry-level education course as well as reflective letters from 41 fourth-grade students, revealed that prior to the project, PSTs feared that students’ language barriers or home circumstances might prohibit them from understanding or valuing the concepts introduced through the project. In PST ‘after’ reflections, PSTs expressed their new realizations that teaching is complex and requires careful preparation, that the children were ‘less different’ and more engaged than they expected, and that they can make a difference in children’s lives. Benefits to the children include development of new and usable social skills and an increase in their interpersonal confidence.     

Social Media and Information Behavior: A Citation Analysis of Current Research from 2008–2015

This article presents a survey study of social media and information behavior research published from 2008 to 2015 by way of bibliometric principles. Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar were used in order to determine the publication rate, established researchers, impact, productivity, and thematic areas of selected papers. The results show a dearth of published works and a low level of established authors; however, the results also indicate high rates of impact, especially in relation to information seeking and information sharing studies. Overall, this study serves as a springboard for new scholarly inquiries in order to further develop research in the field.     

Elite footballers as role models: promoting young women’s football participation

Sportspeople are constantly urged to maintain the highest levels of conduct because of their position as ‘role models’ to children. This article reports from a study in progress which explores the experiences of elite female athletes in Britain, and focuses on qualitative interview responses of elite female footballers, all of whom were currently playing at top-flight domestic and international levels and took part in the 2012 Olympics. It explores what they perceive the position as ‘role model’ to mean, how it impinges on their sport performance, and how they work with gifted young footballers to promote sporting excellence as well as community cohesion through grass-roots outreach work. It discusses their thoughts on how role models are currently and can best be used to encourage young women’s football participation from elite down to grass-roots levels, and highlights the amount of responsibility they feel to do this.     

Scaling and Sustaining an Intervention: The Case of Reading Recovery

ABSTRACT

In every school district across the country, every year, initiatives are adopted with the goal of improving the literacy performance of young students, and, just as frequently, these initiatives fail or quickly become passing fads. In this article, Rodgers reviews literature related to scaling educational innovations and describes challenges and barriers to implementing and maintaining evidence-based reform. Using Reading Recovery as a case example, she describes features of the intervention that are thought to be linked to its longevity in terms of scalability and sustainability. She also shares lessons learned from the most recent period of its expansion with the 5-year grant to scale up Reading Recovery across the county. Implications from this article include the importance of adopting an initiative that has a well-articulated design, collecting data on the progress of the students served, and having a person in the district who acts as a redirecting agent, maintaining the design of the initiative and guarding it against tendencies to pare down the design.     

Interaction of Imposter Phenomenon and Research Self-Efficacy on Scholarly Productivity

Research self-efficacy, imposter phenomenon, and scholarly productivity were explored among a sample of 247 counselor educators. In most cases, feeling like an imposter hindered scholarly productivity; however, the interaction of a moderate to frequent amount of imposter feelings with high research self-efficacy increased scholarly productivity.     

Relation of maternal cognitive stimulation, emotional support, and intrusive behavior during Head Start to children's kindergarten cognitive abilities

The current study examined how parental cognitive stimulation, emotional support, and intrusiveness measured during children's prekindergarten year were related to children's verbal and nonverbal abilities 1 year later. Participants were 110 Head Start children and their caregivers from primarily rural and low-income backgrounds. Analysis of children's scores on the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities confirmed the predictive utility of cognitive stimulation, emotional support, and intrusive behavior for perceptual scores (20% of the unique variance) as well as the predictive utility of emotional support and intrusive behavior for verbal scores (15% of the unique variance). Parental emotional support during guidance of problem solving (positive feedback) explained statistically significant unique variance in children's perceptual scores beyond other measures of emotional support. Cognitive stimulation moderated the relation between positive feedback and perceptual scores. Although other syntactic forms of maternal utterances such as commands did not explain statistically significant unique variance in children's scores beyond emotional support and intrusive behavior, mothers' questions did. Specific policy implications of the effects are discussed.     

Competition between ethanol-induced reward and aversion in place conditioning

Previous place conditioning studies in mice have shown that injection of ethanol immediately before a conditioned stimulus (CS+) produces conditioned preference, whereas injection of ethanol immediately after CS+ produces conditioned aversion. In the present experiments, we examined the learning that occurs when ethanol is injected in “ambiguous“ procedures that provide the opportunity for both types of conditioning. When ethanol was given midway through the CS (Experiments 1 and 2) or both before and after the CS (Experiment 3), the direction of place conditioning was the same as when mice were exposed only to whichever contingency occurred first (a primacy effect). That is, injection of ethanol in the middle of the CS conditioned aversion, whereas injection both before and after the CS conditioned preference. Because these results support the idea that ethanol elicits both aversive and rewarding effects, they are most consistent with conditioning theories that conceptualize unconditioned stimuli (USs) as events that can activate multiple representational components.