The role of SES in Chinese (L1) and English (L2) word reading in Chinese‐speaking kindergarteners

The present study investigated the relationships between socioeconomic status (SES) and word reading in both Chinese (L1) and English (L2), with children's cognitive/linguistic skills considered as mediators and/or moderators. One hundred ninety‐nine Chinese kindergarteners in Hong Kong with diverse SES backgrounds participated in this study. SES explained unique variance in English word reading even after age, phonological processing, vocabulary and working memory were controlled. However, the effect of SES on Chinese word reading became nonsignificant when these control variables were included. Moreover, phonological awareness showed a full mediating effect on the relationship between SES and Chinese word reading. Both phonological awareness and vocabulary were found to partially mediate the association between SES and English word reading. These findings complement our understanding of the relation between SES and reading development in Chinese societies and may have policy or intervention development implications.     

Teaching Discourses: Science Teachers' Responses to the Voices of Adolescent Girls

The purpose of this study was to provide an opportunity for science teachers to listen to adolescent girls discuss their ideas and feelings about the contemporary structure of middle-level science education. The reflections of these teachers were then analyzed to capture how the teachers interpreted what adolescent girls had to say and the action that they will take in the classroom as a result of those interpretations. This qualitative study investigated 11 teachers and 51 Grade 7 and 8 girls from various states across the continental USA. The girls discussed such things as their favorite science topics, comfort level in science classrooms, and curiosities about the physical world. The study revealed that adolescent girls strive to make a connection to science. They can see how science can help them to understand better themselves and their world, but they seldom find such understandings in contemporary science classrooms. In addition, adolescent girls not only need to have choices in their studies, but they understand that need. The study revealed that the teachers interpreted the girls' request from an assimilative perspective by seeking ways to help the girls fit into the existing structure of science education. The implications of the study suggest that science education will need to change in response to the voices of the others, but that change will only happen if we prepare teachers better to be prepared to listen and change practice in light of what they hear.     

Cheating Behaviors among Undergraduate College Students: Results from a Factorial Survey

Using a factorial survey administered to college students at two Universities, this study examines students’ tendencies to engage in academic misconduct. The relation of strain, self-control, and deterrence theories to likelihood of cheating are further explored. The results suggest that increasing the severity of the punishment for cheating does not deter academic misconduct; however, several variables indicating an increased certainty of being caught did decrease the likelihood of cheating behaviors. Only the strain variables that indicated a student had an ill family member or that the student found the course difficult significantly increased academic misconduct. Although self-control did not have a direct effect on cheating it indirectly affected cheating behaviors through students’ perceptions of getting caught and their perception of wrongfulness of the cheating behavior. Policy and future research implications of the findings are further discussed.     

Phonological awareness and morphological awareness: differential associations to regular and irregular word recognition in early Korean Hangul readers

A large battery of reading related skills were orally administered to 111 4-year old and 118 5-year old Korean kindergartners, who were also tested on reading of regular and irregular Korean Hangul words. In regression equations, speeded naming was uniquely associated with reading of both regular and irregular words. In contrast, only the three measures of phonological awareness at the levels of phoneme onset, coda, and syllable uniquely explained Hangul regular word recognition, whereas only morphological awareness consistently explained irregular word recognition. Results suggest somewhat different cognitive demands for reading of regular and irregular words, based on the dual-route model, in Korean Hangul.     

Rethinking Big Science. Modest,mezzo, grand science and the development of the Bevalac, 1971-1993

Historians of science have tended to focus exclusively on scale in investigations of largescale research, perhaps because it has been easy to assume that comprehending a phenomenon dubbed "Big Science" hinges on an understanding of bigness. A close look at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's Bevalac, a medium-scale "mezzo science" project formed by uniting two preexisting machines--the modest SuperHILAC and the grand Bevatron--shows what can be gained by overcoming this preoccupation with bigness. The Bevalac story reveals how interconnections, connections, and disconnections ultimately led to the development of a new kind of science that transformed the landscape of large-scale research in the United States. Important lessons in historiography also emerge: the value of framing discussions in terms of networks, the necessity of constantly expanding and refining methodology, and the importance of avoiding the rhetoric of participants and instead finding words to tell our own stories.     

The early assessment conundrum: Lessons from the past,implications for the future

The early childhood educational field has garnered attention with initiatives to foster skill acquisition in young children prior to kindergarten entry. These initiatives, in conjunction with the rigorous demands of curricular reform and a burgeoning accountability movement, invoke questions regarding the adequacy of the instruments used to assess young children and the inherent difficulties in conducting such assessments. Because the effectiveness of education relies critically on the sound diagnoses of children's readiness for learning and the measurement of their subsequent progression throughout the schooling process, critical issues in early assessment must be addressed. An examination of past practices was synthesized with recent research to focus awareness on the insufficient content domain, restrictive context, adverse timing and questionable psychometric properties, specifically the inappropriate norms and low predictive validity, of many instruments. Both the implications of and compensatory strategies for each issue are considered. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 41: 737–749, 2004.     

Immigrant Chinese Mothers’ Socialization of Achievement in Children: A Strategic Adaptation to the Host Society

Academic socialization by low‐income immigrant mothers from Mainland China was investigated in two studies. Immigrant Chinese mothers of first graders (n = 52; M_age = 38.69) in the United States (Study 1) and kindergartners (n = 86; M_age = 36.81) in Hong Kong (Study 2) tell stories that emphasized achieving the best grade through effort more than did African American (n = 39; M_age = 31.44) and native Hong Kong (n = 76; M_age = 36.64) mothers, respectively. The emphasis on achievement was associated with mothers' heightened discussion on discrimination (Study 1) and beliefs that education promotes upward mobility (Study 2), as well as children's expectations that a story protagonist would receive maternal criticism for being nonpersistent in learning (Study 2).     

Judicious imitation: children differentially imitate deterministically and probabilistically effective actions

Three studies look at whether the assumption of causal determinism (the assumption that all else being equal, causes generate effects deterministically) affects children's imitation of modeled actions. These studies show even when the frequency of an effect is matched, both preschoolers (N = 60; M = 56 months) and toddlers (N = 48; M = 18 months) imitate actions more faithfully when modeled actions are deterministically rather than probabilistically effective. A third study suggests that preschoolers' (N = 32; M = 58 months) imitation is affected not just by whether the agent's goal is satisfied but also by whether the action is a reliable means to the goal. Children's tendency to generate variable responses to probabilistically effective modeled actions could support causal learning.