Prosocial Behavior and Caring in Adolescence: Relations to Self-Understanding and Social Judgment

The relation of self-understanding and moral judgment to dedicated prosocial behavior is investigated. Participants were African-American and Latin-American adolescents who had been nominated by community leaders for having demonstrated unusual commitments to care for others or the community ( care exemplars ). The care exemplars, and matched comparison adolescents, were extensively interviewed over the course of 4–6 sessions in order to elicit self-understanding, moral judgment, and implicit personality theories. The care exemplars were more likely than the comparison adolescents to: (1) describe themselves in terms of moral personality traits and goals, (2) view themselves as having closer continuity to their pasts and futures, (3) think of themselves as incorporating their ideals and parental images, and (4) articulate theories of self in which personal beliefs and philosophies are important. There were no differences between the care exemplars and the comparison adolescents in developmental stages of moral judgment nor in the abstractness of their implicit personality theories.     

Preservice elementary science teachers’ argumentation competence: impact of a training programme

The recent literature has shown the importance of preservice elementary science teachers (PESTs) having a deep understanding of argumentation, as this factor may affect the nature of the class activities that are taught and what students learn. A lack of understanding of this factor may represent an obstacle in the development of science education programmes in line with the development of scientific competences. This paper presents the results of the design and implementation of a training programme of 6 sessions (12 h of class participation plus 8 h of personal homework) on argumentation. The programme was carried out by 57 Spanish PESTs from Malaga, Spain. The training programme incorporates the innovative use of certain strategies to improve competence in argumentation, such as teaching PESTs to identify the elements of arguments in order to design assessment rubrics or by including peer assessment during evaluation with and without rubrics. The results obtained on implementing the training programme were evaluated based on the development of PESTs’ argumentation competence using Toulmin’s argumentative model. Data collection methods involved two tasks carried out at the beginning and the end of the programme, i.e., pre- and post-test, respectively. The conclusion of the study is that students made significant progress in their argumentation competence on completing the course. In addition, PESTs who followed the training programme achieved statistically better results at the end than those in the control group (n = 41), who followed a traditional teaching programme. A 6-month transfer task showed a slight improvement for the PESTs of the experimental group in relation to the control group in their ability to transfer argumentation to practice.     

Adult distance study through computer conferencing

The use of computer conferencing by higher education institutions offering distance education courses has expanded rapidly since 1987. Despite a parallel growth in the academic scholarship, few studies examined students' experience of learning in an on‐line course. Using unstructured interviews and observations at adultstudents' homes or worksites, thestudy investigated adult student perspectives of distance study by computer conferencing. It found theseadults actively engaged in social relationships outside their distance studies which sustain their educational pursuits. The students provided insights into aspects of the on‐line environment: asynchronicity, interactivity, textual communications, and collaboration. Their learning orientation suggested the value they placed on conference activities. They incidentally transferred or invented learning strategies to deal with the different dynamics of this instructional environment. The computer conference brought together widely dissimilar students and encouraged them to ‘talk’ with one another, while unaware of each others' physical attributes. On‐line relationships served meaningful purposes, but rarely continued beyond the course. Based on these findings, the study presents an Adult Distance Study Through Computer Conferencing Model to guide understanding of the student experience with this medium.     

Learning strategies and self-regulation in context: how higher education students approach different courses,assessments, and challenges

European Journal of Psychology of Education - This study’s aim was to analyse the decisions higher education students make about learning strategies. We focus on research questions related to...     

Standardization techniques for grade‐inflation problems at higher educational institutions of Ethiopia: the case of Addis Ababa

Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) is a measure that is used to display the achievement of college students in Ethiopia. It also serves as a key yardstick in career and scholarship assessment. In recent time there has been a rapid massification of higher educational institutions (HEIs). Many academics believe that the expansion has increased a tendency for grade inflation in Ethiopia. As an objective comparison of the quality of graduates from different HEIs is not easy, this study has attempted to discern the CGPA differentials across sample HEIs in Ethiopia and to derive a new standardization technique for their comparison. The study identifies different grading patterns, not only across college categories but also along various batches of HEIs. To generate the standardization technique, both CGPA and the ESLCE (Ethiopian School Leaving Certificate Examination) are employed to derive the Normalized Index. The index is used to adjust not only the inflated but also the deflated CGPAs. The quality of the index could be further improved by incorporating additional variables and also by validating the method over a large set of HEIs.     

Perceptions of a Chilly Climate: Differences in Traditional and Non-traditional Majors for Women

The purpose of this study was to examine how perceptions of a chilly climate differ between students in traditionally female-dominated majors (nursing and education) versus traditionally male-dominated majors (information technology and engineering), and how these perceptions relate to students’ intentions to persist or pursue higher education in their chosen field. Students (n = 403) attending a community college completed the 28-item Perceived Chilly Climate Scale (PCCS). The primary research question asked: To what extent can scores on the five subscales of the PCCS be explained by the predictor variable set of gender, ethnicity, age, college major, and intent to leave the field? Canonical correlation analysis indicated that women found the climate chillier than men, non-white students found the climate chillier than white students, younger students perceived the climate chillier than older students, and students in traditionally female-dominated majors perceived the climate chillier than students in traditionally male-dominated majors. Intent to leave the field was not a significant predictor of perceptions of chilly climate.     

A phenomenological exploration of children’s school life and well-being

Learning Environments Research - This phenomenological study explored children’s school life as it relates to their subjective well-being in the United States (N?=?22). It was...     

Rank-based self-training for graph convolutional networks

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been established as a fundamental approach for representation learning on graphs, based on convolution operations on non-Euclidean domain, defined by graph-structured data. GCNs and variants have achieved state-of-the-art results on classification tasks, especially in semi-supervised learning scenarios. A central challenge in semi-supervised classification consists in how to exploit the maximum of useful information encoded in the unlabeled data. In this paper, we address this issue through a novel self-training approach for improving the accuracy of GCNs on semi-supervised classification tasks. A margin score is used through a rank-based model to identify the most confident sample predictions. Such predictions are exploited as an expanded labeled set in a second-stage training step. Our model is suitable for different GCN models. Moreover, we also propose a rank aggregation of labeled sets obtained by different GCN models. The experimental evaluation considers four GCN variations and traditional benchmarks extensively used in the literature. Significant accuracy gains were achieved for all evaluated models, reaching results comparable or superior to the state-of-the-art. The best results were achieved for rank aggregation self-training on combinations of the four GCN models.     

Journalism

THE AMERICAN JOURNALIST: A PORTRAIT OF U.S. NEWS PEOPLE AND THEIR WORK by David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986—$25.00)

THE “UNCENSORED WAR:” THE MEDIA AND VIETNAM by Daniel C. Hallin (New York: Oxford, 1986—$22.50)

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION SHOW: CAMPAIGN '84 AND BEYOND ON THE NIGHTLY NEWS by Keith Blume (Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 670 South Amherst Rd., South Hadley, MA 01075—$29.95/12.95)

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN AMERICA by Robert E. Denton, Jr. and Gary C. Woodward (New York: Praeger, 1985—$42.95/15.95)

NEWS MEDIA AND PUBLIC POLICY: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY edited by Joseph P. McKerns (New York: Garland, 1985—$39.00)

COMMITTED JOURNALISM: AN ETHIC FOR THE PROFESSION by Edmund B. Lambeth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986—$25.00/8.95)

SUING THE PRESS: LIBEL, THE MEDIA & POWER by Rodney A. Smolla (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986—$18.95)

WORLDLY POWER: THE MAKING OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL by Edward E. Scharff (Beaufort Books, 9 East 40th St., New York 10016—$18.95)

THE ULTIMATE INSIDERS: U.S. SENATORS IN THE NATIONAL MEDIA by Stephen Hess (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1986—price not given, cloth and paper)

THE FLACKS OF WASHINGTON: GOVERNMENT INFORMATION AND THE PUBLIC AGENDA by David Morgan (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1986—$29.95)

ISSUES MANAGEMENT: CORPORATE POLICYMAKING IN AN INFORMATION SOCIETY by Robert L. Heath and Richard Alan Nelson (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1986—no price given)

BEHIND THE LINES: CASE STUDIES IN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING by Margaret Jones Patterson and Robert H. Russell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986—$28.50)

GOVERNING THE PRESS: MEDIA FREEDOM IN THE U.S. AND GREAT BRITAIN by Deborah Holmes (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986—$16.50, paper)

THE UNTAPPED POWER OF THE PRESS: EXPLAINING GOVERNMENT TO THE PEOPLE by Lewis W. Wolfson (New York: Praeger, 1985—$28.95/9/95)