Teaching technical communication on the pre‐college level: An annotated bibliography

Technical communication is being integrated into the pre‐college curriculum at an accelerating pace. However, few curriculum materials have been developed for the pre‐college level. This annotated bibliography is a partial attempt to address this lack. The entries have been divided into two categories: Pre‐College Level Material and Adaptable Post‐Secondary Material.     

Who Knows What? Maintaining Multiple Perspectives During Reading

Recent findings (Keysar, 1994 Keysar, B. 1994. The illusory transparency of intention: Linguistic perspective taking in text.. Cognitive Psychology, 26: 165–208. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Weingartner & Klin, 2005 Weingartner, K. M. and Klin, C. M. 2005. Perspective taking during reading: An on-line investigation of the illusory transparency of intention.. Memory & Cognition, 33: 48–58. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) have shown that readers are not always accurate at taking a story character's perspective. When readers evaluated a character's understanding of a written message, they mistakenly took into account information that was inaccessible to that character. The results from the three experiments reported here demonstrate that this “illusory transparency of intention” is not dependent on the message readers' communicative role: Even when the message was composed for one character but read by another, readers assumed that the message was understood as it was intended. The results are discussed in the context of two theoretical accounts for these perspective-taking errors: the “knowledge projection hypothesis,” which appeals to readers’ expectations about cooperative behavior during communication, and “construal,” which attributes the illusory transparency of intention to a general cognitive bias that occurs during the perception of ambiguous stimuli.     

Scaffolding the emergence of infant helping: A longitudinal experiment

Early social experiences, such as caregiver scaffolding, play a crucial but disputed role in the emergence of prosociality. A longitudinal experiment examined how explicit scaffolding—such as encouragement or praise—influences helping late in the first year, when helping emerges. Eighty-three infants (40 female, 6–9 months, 54% White, 17% Hispanic/Latinx, 16% Asian) participated in up to 10-weekly home visits in which they could help an experimenter in a novel activity. Data were collected in Santa Cruz, CA between February 2018 and August 2019. Compared to the control condition, explicit scaffolding increased helping by handing out-of-reach objects, η² = .02, and, among younger infants, by cleaning up. Helping also increased with age and visit number. Using a new paradigm, this research provides experimental evidence for how adults’ scaffolding shapes the emergence of helping in infancy.     

The rise of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">blended professional</Emphasis> in higher education: a comparison between the United Kingdom,Australia and the United States

This paper builds on earlier work by the author to explore the international dimensions of a study of the changing roles and identities of professional staff in higher education (Whitchurch 2008a, b). It further develops the concept of the blended professional, characterising individuals with identities drawn from both professional and academic domains, and examines the institutional spaces, knowledges, relationships and legitimacies that they construct. Comparisons between the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States are used to provide indicators of possible futures for this group of staff, including their positioning in the university community, the challenges they face, and the potentials that they offer to their institutions.     

Experiences of sexual harassment and abuse among Norwegian elite female athletes and nonathletes

This paper compares the prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse among 660 Norwegian elite female athletes and an age-matched control sample of nonathletes. It also explores differences in the prevalence of harassment and abuse in sport and work or school settings and compares harassment and abuse perpetrated by male authority figures and peers in these different contexts. No differences were found between the athletes and controls in overall prevalence of sexual harassment or abuse. However, the athletes experienced significantly more harassment from male authority figures than did the controls. Based on these results, the article considers whether or not sport offers women any particular immunity from sexual harassment and abuse. The implications of the findings for structural and cultural change in sport are discussed.