Reconstructing culture: the promises and challenges as articulated by Latino/a youth

This qualitative study examines how a group of Latino/a high school students living in the Southeast used youth media as a forum to promote a selective pattern of acculturation. The study explores the ways in which the students’ discourse emphasised the maintenance of the students’ home culture and privileged familismo, a cultural construct that holds the needs of the family above the needs of the individual. The doubly precarious issue of gender and biculturalism is examined, and found to be problematic for the female participants who personally struggled with a patriarchal family structure, yet publically promoted family loyalty and respect. The study highlights the female participants’ challenges and the importance of providing a space to examine these challenges.     

Perceived Local Job Prospects and School Connectedness in a Struggling Rural Economy: A Life-Course Perspective

Late in first decade of the 2000s, the closing of pulp and paper mills in the rural northeastern United States contributed to economic decline in the region and to rising concerns about population decline due to out-migration among local emerging adults in search of occupational or educational opportunities. In this context, and drawing on a life-course framework, the present study used four waves of panel data from the population of 7th- and 11th-grade public school students in a rural northeastern U.S. county to explore whether the county unemployment rate was related to perceived local job prospects; school connectedness was related to subsequent perceived job prospects; and the effects of county unemployment and school connectedness on perceived local job prospects varied by age cohort. Initially, changes in respondents’ perceptions about local job prospects paralleled shifts in local unemployment similarly for both cohorts; yet after the older cohort respondents had completed high school, their perceived local job prospects fell sharply, while perceptions among the younger cohort respondents, who were still in high school, remained stable. Among the older cohort respondents only, school connectedness was associated with subsequent positive perceptions about local job prospects net of relevant controls. Same-age cohort comparisons, evaluated when each cohort was in 12th-grade, showed no differences in the short-term effects of school connectedness on perceived local job prospects, despite variations in the age-linked timing of the most dramatic rise in unemployment during the study. The results highlight the lasting importance of school connectedness for teens raised in struggling rural economies.     

The rat’s long-term preference for complexity in its environment

Locomotor, resting, and feeding responses to four levels of environmental complexity were measured in a two-phase study. In a long-term free-choice testing situation (ad-lib phase), subjects (N = 20) demonstrated a marked preference for high complexity during “day” conditions. This preference, present in the patterns of resting and locomotor behavior, was partially preserved under “night” conditions. The patterns of feeding behavior were essentially independent of complexity preference. The same subjects in the discrete trial phase of the study chose high complexity most often in a four-choice testing situation. The apparent preference for high environmental complexity was interpreted as a shelter/relaxation seeking response elicited by the number or complexity of elements in the complexity area. Complexity seemed to reduce the arousal level of the subject, arguing against current arousal hypotheses which suggest that complex stimuli are attractive because of their arousal-inducing qualities.     

Speech recognition-based and automaticity programs to help students with severe reading and spelling problems

This study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of two programs developed by the Frostig Center Research Department to improve the reading and spelling of students with learning disabilities (LD): a computer Speech Recognition-based Program (SRBP) and a computer and text-based Automaticity Program (AP). Twenty-eight LD students with reading and spelling difficulties (aged 8 to 18) received each program for 17 weeks and were compared with 16 students in a contrast group who did not receive either program. After adjusting for age and IQ, both the SRBP and AP groups showed significant differences over the contrast group in improving word recognition and reading comprehension. Neither program showed significant differences over contrasts in spelling. The SRBP also improved the performance of the target group when compared with the contrast group on phonological elision and nonword reading efficiency tasks. The AP showed significant differences in all process and reading efficiency measures.     

Frustration-mediated learning of a barpress response

Following 72 reinforced placements in a box, rats received 30 additional nonreinforced placements during which time a bar was initially available. Under one condition a barpress response resulted in the rat’s being immediately removed from the box. Under the other condition, a barpress resulted in removal of the bar from the box while the rat remained in the box for a fixed period of time. Barpress speeds of both groups, but especially of the latter, improved with trials, whereas the slower speeds of control subjects, which received nonreinforced placements prior to barpress testing, showed no evidence of learning. The results were interpreted as supporting a prediction from elicitation theory that frustration can mediate learning through consistent elicitation of a response that is characteristic of frustration conditions, even when reinforcement in the form of frustration reduction is absent.     

Gender and Religious Tradition: the role‐learning of British Hindu children

Much of children's attitude to gender is developed in their home. For children from a Hindu background dharma (right conduct) involves all aspects of life. It includes family and ritual responsibilities and they are largely gender‐specific. This article is based on research among 8‐13 year‐old Hindu children of Punjabi and Gujarati origin in Coventry [2] [2] The Hindu Nurture in Coventry Project and the Punjabi Hindu Nurture in Coventry Project, both parts of the Religious Education and Community Project, directed by Robert Jackson, were made possible by generous funding from the Leverhulme Trust. The Punjabi Hindu Nurture in Coventry Project focused upon children in two low caste communities, namely the Valmikis and being conducted among children in other faith communities as part of the Religious Education and Community Project with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council ‘Project number R000 232489’. View all notes. I contend that gender is significant in the religious involvement of both boys and girls. This article draws attention to areas of their experience as young British Hindus in which their gender is decisive and examines these in relation to the role expectations enunciated by the children.

     

Infants' use of lexical-category-to-meaning links in object individuation

Infants watched an experimenter retrieve a stuffed animal from an opaque box and then return it. This happened twice, consistent with either 1 animal appearing on 2 occasions or 2 identical-looking animals each appearing once. The experimenter labeled each object appearance with a different novel label. After infants retrieved 1 object from the box, their subsequent search behavior was recorded. Twenty-month-olds, but not 16-month-olds, searched significantly longer for a second object inside the box when the labels were both proper names than when they were 1 count noun followed by 1 proper name. The effect was not significant when proper names were replaced by adjectives. Twenty-month-olds' understanding of meaning distinctions among several word categories guided their object individuation.     

A review of observational instruments to assess the motivational environment in sport and physical education settings

To date, the majority of research grounded in achievement goal frameworks (AGT) and self-determination theory (SDT), which has examined the coach-created motivational environment and its correlates, has relied exclusively on athletes’ self-reported perceptions. This limits progress in the field as objective data on real-life events could be used to further identify what coaches and teachers do and say to ‘motivate’ their athletes and students to influence their skill development, performance and well-being. Such information may help inform how coaches and teachers should be trained to create more motivationally adaptive environments and could help extend results derived from self-report measures. This review outlines the observational systems that are currently available and the research related to AGT and/or SDT-based objective assessments of motivational dimensions of the coaching and physical education (PE) environment. Future research could utilise information in this review to employ and/or amend one of the available observation systems to address important questions related to the observed motivational environment in sport and PE.