Communication,Communication, Communication! Growth through Laboratory Instructing

This study examined gains undergraduate students made in their communication and collaboration skills when they served as peer teachers, i.e., laboratory instructors (LIs), for a General Psychology laboratory. Self-ratings of communication and collaboration skills were completed before and after teaching the laboratory. When compared to before the teaching experience, the students rated their skills significantly higher in written expression, oral expression, and participation skills. They also rated themselves significantly higher in written comprehension and expression skills than did a comparison group of non-LIs. Results from interviews also revealed beliefs that their communication and collaboration skills had substantially increased.     

Building a future without gender violence: rural teachers and youth in rural KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa,leading community dialogue

This article advances the idea that rural youth and teachers are the key in leading community dialogue towards addressing gender-based violence (GBV) in their community through their film making. The youth voices on the realities of GBV in their school and community, in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, captured through the process of participatory video, are used to engage a group of their teachers in thinking about addressing GBV in the school and community. The teachers' engagement with the five participatory videos on GBV – through participatory analysis and participatory archiving – provided an opportunity to deepen their understanding of GBV by also interrogating their own stance and led them to direct the production of a composite video suitable for use in leading community dialogue on a future without violence.     

Does war contribute to family violence against children? Findings from a two-generational multi-informant study in Northern Uganda

After 20 years of civil war in Northern Uganda, the continuity of violence within the family constitutes a major challenge to children's healthy development in the post-conflict era. Previous exposure to trauma and ongoing psychopathology in guardians potentially contribute to parental perpetration against children and dysfunctional interactions in the child's family ecology that increase children's risk of maltreatment. In order to investigate distal and proximal risk factors of child victimization, we first aimed to identify factors leading to more self-reported perpetration in guardians. Second, we examined factors in the child's family environment that promote child-reported experiences of maltreatment. Using a two-generational design we interviewed 368 children, 365 female guardians, and 304 male guardians from seven war-affected rural communities in Northern Uganda on the basis of standardized questionnaires. We found that the strongest predictors of self-reported aggressive parenting behaviors toward the child were guardians’ own experiences of childhood maltreatment, followed by female guardians’ victimization experiences in their intimate relationship and male guardians’ posttrautmatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and alcohol-related problems. Regarding children's self-report of victimization in the family, proximal factors including violence between adults in the household and male guardians’ PTSD symptom severity level predicted higher levels of maltreatment. Distal variables such as female guardians’ history of childhood victimization and female guardians’ exposure to traumatic war events also increased children's report of maltreatment. The current findings suggest that in the context of organized violence, an intergenerational cycle of violence persists that is exacerbated by female guardians’ re-victimization experiences and male guardians’ psychopathological symptoms.     

Adolescents’ cheating and delinquent behavior from a justice-psychological perspective: the role of teacher justice

The more people believe in a just world (BJW) in which they get what they deserve, the more they are motivated to preserve a just world by ones’ just behavior. Consequently, we expected school students with a strong BJW to show less deviant behavior as cheating or delinquency. The mediating role of teacher justice was also examined. Questionnaire data were obtained from a total of N?=?382 German and Indian high school students. Regression analyses revealed that the stronger students’ BJW was, the less cheating and delinquent behavior they reported. Moreover, the more the students believed in a just world, the more they evaluated their teachers’ behavior toward them personally to be just, and the experience of teacher justice fully mediated the relation between BJW and cheating and delinquency, respectively. This pattern of results was in line with our hypotheses and consistent across different cultural contexts. It persisted when neuroticism and sex were controlled. The adaptive functions of BJW and implications for future school research are discussed.     

Fostering Upper Secondary Students’ Ability to Engage in Practices of Scientific Investigation: a Comparative Analysis of an Explicit and an Implicit Instructional Approach

Research in Science Education - Inquiry-based teaching is considered as contributing to content-related, procedural, and epistemic learning goals of science education. In this study, a...     

Measuring child maltreatment risk in communities: a life table approach

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this article is to: (1) illustrate the application of life table methodology to child abuse and neglect report data and (2) demonstrate the use of indicators derived from the life tables for monitoring the risk of child maltreatment within a community. METHOD: Computerized records of child maltreatment reports from a large, urban county in Ohio are cumulated for 11 years and linked for each child. Life table methods are used to estimate the probability that children from birth to age 10 will be reported victims of maltreatment by age, race, and urban or suburban residence. RESULTS: Using life tables, the estimates in the county of this study are that 33.4% of African American children and 11.8% of White children will appear in substantiated or indicated child abuse or neglect report(s) by their 10th birthday. The age-specific probability of a maltreatment report is highest in the first year of life for both groups. The probability of a child being reported for a substantiated or indicated incident of maltreatment before his or her 10th birthday is more than three times higher for city dwellers than for suburbanites in the urban county studied here. CONCLUSIONS: Life table methodology is useful for creating child well-being indicators for communities. Such indicators reveal that a larger portion of the child population is affected by maltreatment reports than would be concluded from examining cross-sectional rates and can be used to identify racial or geographic disparities.     

Covariation in conditioned response strength between stimuli trained in compound

Conditioned lick suppression by water-deprived rats was used to elaborate on recent evidence that the attenuated conditioned response elicited by an overshadowed stimulus may be enhanced by extinction of the overshadowing stimulus with which it had been trained in simultaneous compound. Using a modified serial stimulus arrangement in which a light coexisted with the last half of a tone that terminated with footshock, it was found in Experiment 1 that the tone overshadowed the light. Extinction of the tone-shock association resulted in a virtually complete recovery of the response to the overshadowed light. Using this serial overshadowing procedure, the possibility that the strength of a conditioned response to an element trained in compound covaries as a function of the strength of the response to the other element was tested in Experiment 2. Following overshadowing training similar to that of Experiment 1, independent reinforcement of the overshadowed light, that is, associative inflation, was found to have no deleterious effect on the response to the overshadowing tone. This suggests that the effects of postconditioning extinction and inflation of one element do not have symmetrical effects upon responding to the other element. The results of Experiment 2 were replicated in Experiment 3 using a simultaneous compound stimulus as opposed to the serial compound of the previous studies. These results are discussed in terms of various associative and cognitive models of learning and performance.     

A comparison of non-verbal and verbal indicators of young children’s metacognition

Metacognition and Learning - In the past decade, research increasingly uncovers emerging metacognitive skills in young children by using child-friendly, creative, and non-verbal measures of...