Developmental change in the ERP responses to familiar faces in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders versus typical development

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show differences in face processing abilities from early in development. To examine whether these differences reflect an atypical versus delayed developmental trajectory, neural responses to familiar and unfamiliar faces in twenty-four 18- to 47-month-old children with ASD were compared with responses of thirty-two 12- to 30-month-old typically developing children. Results of 2 experiments revealed that neural responses to faces in children with ASD resembled those observed in younger typically developing children, suggesting delayed development. Electrophysiological responses to faces were also related to parent report of adaptive social behaviors for both children with ASD and typical development. Slower development of the face processing system in ASD may be related to reduced self-directed "expected" experience with faces in early development.     

CSRP's Impact on low-income preschoolers' preacademic skills: self-regulation as a mediating mechanism

Based on theoretically driven models, the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) targeted low-income children's school readiness through the mediating mechanism of self-regulation. The CSRP is a multicomponent, cluster-randomized efficacy trial implemented in 35 Head Start-funded classrooms (N = 602 children). The analyses confirm that the CSRP improved low-income children's self-regulation skills (as indexed by attention/impulse control and executive function) from fall to spring of the Head Start year. Analyses also suggest significant benefits of CSRP for children's preacademic skills, as measured by vocabulary, letter-naming, and math skills. Partial support was found for improvement in children's self-regulation as a hypothesized mediator for children's gains in academic readiness. Implications for programs and policies that support young children's behavioral health and academic success are discussed.     

The reading rate and comprehension of adults with impaired reading skills or visual discomfort

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of impaired reading skills and visual discomfort on the reading rate and comprehension of university students when reading texts presented at a high school (Grade 9) or university (Grade 12) level of difficulty. Groups included impaired readers (n=18) and normal readers with (n=13) or without visual discomfort (n=19). Regardless of text difficulty the impaired reader group had a significantly slower reading rate and poorer comprehension than the normal reader control group. However, when reading rate and comprehension were compared at the assessed reading level of each group, no group differences were found. The normal reading visual discomfort group had poorer reading comprehension than other normal readers with presentation of university‐level text only. It was concluded that poor word decoding skills may exacerbate comprehension difficulties in impaired readers. In contrast, the comprehension difficulties found for normal readers with visual discomfort occurred because of the somatic and perceptual difficulties induced with exposure to the repetitive striped patterns found on text pages. The types of strategy needed to increase the reading efficiency and produce greater academic success in university students with impaired reader skills or visual discomfort are discussed.     

Are You Satisfied? PhD Education and Faculty Taste for Prestige: Limits of the Prestige Value System

This paper empirically evaluates Caplow and McGee??s (The academic marketplace, 1958) model of academia as a prestige value system (PVS) by testing several hypotheses about the relationship between prestige of faculty appointment and job satisfaction. Using logistic regression models to predict satisfaction with several job domains in a sample of more than 1,000 recent social science PhD graduates who hold tenure-track or tenured faculty positions, we find that the relationship between prestige of faculty appointment and job satisfaction is modified by PhD program prestige. Graduates of high prestige PhD programs value prestige more highly and graduates of low prestige programs value salary more highly. We explain our findings by incorporating reference group theory and a theory of taste formation into our model of the academic PVS, which identifies PhD programs as sites of socialization to different tastes for prestige (a process of cultural transmission) in addition to their well recognized role in transmission of human and social capital. We discuss practical and theoretical implications of our findings in relation to efforts to measure PhD program quality and to understand the structure of academic labor markets.     

Ethnicity and gender gaps in early childhood

Gender differences in academic performance and achievement have been of policy concern for decades—both interest in lower performance by girls in the areas of mathematics and science and, more recently, in boys' underperformance in most other academic areas. Much previous research has focused on gender gaps, while overlooking other factors that may play a role, such as ethnicity. This study looks at the gender differences in cognitive assessments at age five across ethnic groups in a sample of English children from the Millennium Cohort Study. While girls generally perform better than boys, general trends mask some differences across ethnic groups. Results show gender gaps at the mean are largest for black and Pakistani and Bangladeshi children and smallest for white children, they are also larger for the teacher‐rated assessments than for the survey‐administered tests.     

Ranking scientific articles based on bibliometric networks with a weighting scheme

As the volume of scientific articles has grown rapidly over the last decades, evaluating their impact becomes critical for tracing valuable and significant research output. Many studies have proposed various ranking methods to estimate the prestige of academic papers using bibliometric methods. However, the weight of the links in bibliometric networks has been rarely considered for article ranking in existing literature. Such incomplete investigation in bibliometric methods could lead to biased ranking results. Therefore, a novel scientific article ranking algorithm, W-Rank, is introduced in this study proposing a weighting scheme. The scheme assigns weight to the links of citation network and authorship network by measuring citation relevance and author contribution. Combining the weighted bibliometric networks and a propagation algorithm, W-Rank is able to obtain article ranking results that are more reasonable than existing PageRank-based methods. Experiments are conducted on both arXiv hep-th and Microsoft Academic Graph datasets to verify the W-Rank and compare it with three renowned article ranking algorithms. Experimental results prove that the proposed weighting scheme assists the W-Rank in obtaining ranking results of higher accuracy and, in certain perspectives, outperforming the other algorithms.     

Surgeons as medical school educators: an untapped resource

Despite extensive experience teaching residents, surgeons are an untapped resource for educating medical students. We hypothesized that by involving surgeons as teachers earlier in the medical school curriculum, medical students' interest in surgery will increase and their opinions of surgeons will improve. Five programs designed to involve surgeons as educators in the medical school curriculum were implemented. The first program, started in 2008, introduced surgical faculty into the first-year medical student anatomy dissection laboratories. Other programs initiated in 2008 included: Surgical Clinical Correlates in Anatomy, which involved faculty teaching through cadaver surgery; Clinical Pathologic Conferences in Anatomy, a surgeon-led conference based on clinical cases; and a women's faculty-student mentorship program. Table Rounds, a surgeon-led anatomy review that used clinical scenarios to quiz students was begun in 2009. All five programs were successfully integrated into the medical school curriculum. While student opinion of surgeons as educators improved, there were no significant changes in student interest in surgery as a career nor change in performance on written examinations over the Anatomy content covered by the surgeons. Surgical faculty and trainees can be integrated into the medical school curriculum. Involving surgeons as educators earlier in the medical school curriculum may have longer term effects than could be observed in this study. At a minimum, the experience improved student opinion of surgeons as educators.     

VO2 prediction and cardiorespiratory responses during underwater treadmill exercise

We compared cardiorespiratory responses to exercise on an underwater treadmill (UTM) and land treadmill (LTM) and derived an equation to estimate oxygen consumption (VO2) during UTM exercise. Fifty-five men and women completed one LTM and five UTM exercise sessions on separate days. The UTM sessions consisted of chest-deep immersion, with 0, 25, 50, 75, and 100% water-jet resistance. All session treadmill velocities increased every 3 min from 53.6 to 187.8 m x min(-1). Cardiorespiratory responses were similar between LTM and UTM when jet resistance for UTM was 50%. Using multiple regression analysis, weight-relative VO2 could be estimated as: VO2 (mLO2 c kg(-1) x min(-1)) = 0.19248 x height (cm) + 0.17422 x jet resistance (% max) + 0.14092 x velocity (m x min(-1)) -0.12794 x weight (kg)-27.82849, R2 = .82. Our data indicate that similar LTM and UTM cardiorespiratory responses are achievable, and we provide a reasonable estimate of UTM VO2.