Disgust,Need for Affect,and Responses to Microbiome Research

Contributing to the literature on affective processing and attitude formation, this study investigates the effects of a discrete emotion (disgust) and an emotional disposition (need for affect [NFA]) on support for regulation in the context of microbiome research. Data from a web-based experiment (N = 1,005) showed that experienced disgust mediated the effect of disgust-eliciting information on support for regulation. This mediated relationship was moderated by NFA. More specifically, NFA moderated the path between experienced disgust and regulatory attitudes but not that between message exposure and experienced disgust. The two dimensions of NFA played different moderating roles: Emotional approach amplified the relationship between disgust and the attitudinal outcome, whereas emotional avoidance attenuated it. The study furthers understanding about how NFA influences emotional processing and contributes to research on disgust as a relatively understudied discrete emotion.     

Body in Mind: How Gestures Empower Foreign Language Learning

It has previously been demonstrated that enactment (i.e., performing representative gestures during encoding) enhances memory for concrete words, in particular action words. Here, we investigate the impact of enactment on abstract word learning in a foreign language. We further ask if learning novel words with gestures facilitates sentence production. In a within‐subjects paradigm, participants first learned 32 abstract sentences from an artificial corpus conforming with Italian phonotactics. Sixteen sentences were encoded audiovisually. Another set of 16 sentences was also encoded audiovisually, but, in addition, each single word was accompanied by a symbolic gesture. Participants were trained for 6 days. Memory performance was assessed daily using different tests. The overall results support the prediction that learners have better memory for words encoded with gestures. In a transfer test, participants produced new sentences with the words they had acquired. Items encoded through gestures were used more frequently, demonstrating their enhanced accessibility in memory. The results are interpreted in terms of embodied cognition. Implications for teaching and learning are suggested.     

Managing the teaching–research nexus: ideals and practice in research-oriented universities

This paper demonstrates that while ideals of close linkages between research and teaching are widely embraced in research-oriented universities, a practice of division of labour between teaching-oriented and research-oriented staff persists. In an investigation of how the research–teaching nexus is managed at three Swedish universities, we identify a perceived misalignment between institutional incentives for individual academic staff and the needs of teaching. Under pressure from such tensions, managers are forced to deploy pragmatic strategies for the staffing of undergraduate education tasks. This includes allowing research needs and agendas to take priority over teaching needs. While managers seek to secure the participation of senior researchers in education, they often actively prefer to delegate the bulk of teaching activities to less research-active staff. Such strategies seem to reinforce existing patterns of division of labour among academic staff.     

Reducing Risk for Substance Use by Economically Disadvantaged Young Men: Positive Family Environments and Pathways to Educational Attainment

Using prospective, longitudinal data spanning 10 years (age = 10–20) from a study of 295 economically disadvantaged males, the current investigation evaluated a developmental model that links early family environment and later educational aspirations, extracurricular activities, and educational attainment to substance use in early adulthood. The results indicate that a positive family environment during adolescence (low family conflict, high family warmth, and effective child management) predicted educational involvements during adolescence that promoted educational attainment during early adulthood. Finally, higher levels of educational attainment were associated with less substance use in early adulthood, even after controlling for adolescent substance use. These findings suggest that positive parenting promotes educational achievements that increase resilience to substance use for economically disadvantaged males.     

Social capital in the classroom: a study of in-class social capital and school adjustment

Social capital is generally considered beneficial for students’ school adjustment. This paper argues that social relationships among pupils generate social capital at both the individual and the class levels, and that each has its unique effect on pupils’ performance and well-being. The sample in this study consists of 1036 children in 60 first-grade classes in 46 Dutch elementary schools. Multilevel regression results show that a substantial proportion of the variance in school adjustment can be attributed to the class level and that both individual-level and classroom-level social capital have substantial effects on school adjustment. At the individual level, the size of one’s network is more important than its structure. At the collective level, social capital also has a ‘dark side’ because it can have negative effects on adjustment, lowering the academic performance in a class.     

The Norden Associations and international efforts to change history education, 1919–1970: international organisations,education, and hegemonic nationalism

During the interwar period, a number of organisations started to look into education as part of an attempt to understand how nationalism was fuelled through education and to what extent it had forced the outbreak of the Great War. In response to nationalism and a perceived need for reformation of national narratives, the school subjects of history and geography became the primary suspects as advocates of chauvinism and militarism. In 1919, associations for the promotion of understanding and cooperation between the Scandinavian countries – the Norden Associations [föreningarna Norden] – began investigating history textbooks. This revision of textbooks was expanded in the 1930s to explore, assess, and develop the entire teaching of history in the Nordic countries. The Norden Associations converged on many levels with the disparate international movements for educational change. This article presents the Norden Associations as part of a process of hegemonic isomorphism in which cultural hegemony set the institutional boundaries within which the organisations could work in order to attain legitimacy. The article demonstrates how an organisation with a specific political agenda, and with only limited international objectives came to be – not only a part of – but, to some extent, an organisational role model for loftier efforts aimed at global and cosmopolitan history teachings.     

VALIDATION OF THE SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL HEALTH SURVEY FOR FIVE SOCIOCULTURAL GROUPS: MULTIGROUP INVARIANCE AND LATENT MEAN ANALYSES

Social‐emotional health influences youth developmental trajectories and there is growing interest among educators to measure the social‐emotional health of the students they serve. This study replicated the psychometric characteristics of the Social Emotional Health Survey (SEHS) with a diverse sample of high school students (Grades 9–12; N = 14,171), and determined whether the factor structure was invariant across sociocultural and gender groups. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) tested the fit of the previously known factor structure, and then structural equation modeling was used to test invariance across sociocultural and gender groups through multigroup CFAs. Results supported the SEHS measurement model, with full invariance of the SEHS higher‐order structure for all five sociocultural groups. There were no moderate effect size or higher group differences on the overall index for sociocultural or gender groups, which lends support to the eventual development of common norms and universal interpretation guidelines.     

The medicalization of current educational research and its effects on education policy and school reforms

This paper starts from the assumption of the emergence of an educationalized culture over the last 200 years according to which perceived social problems are translated into educational challenges. As a result, both educational institutions and educational research grew, and educational policy resulted from negotiations between professionals, researchers, and policy makers. The paper argues that specific experiences in the Second World War triggered a fundamental shift in the social and cultural role of academia, leading up to a technocratic culture characterized by confidence in experts rather than in practicing professionals (i.e., teachers and administrators). In this technocratic shift, first a technological system of reasoning emerged, and it was then replaced by a medical “paradigm.” The new paradigm led to a medicalization of social research, in which a particular organistic understanding of the social reality is taken for granted and research is conducted under the mostly undiscussed premises of this particular understanding. The result is that despite the increased importance of research in general, this expertocratic and medical shift of social research led to a massive reduction in reform opportunities by depriving the reform stakeholders of a broad range of education research, professional experience, common sense, and political deliberation.     

Learning mechanisms in multidisciplinary teamwork with real customers and open-ended problems

Recently, there has been a trend towards adding a multidisciplinary or multicultural element to traditional monodisciplinary project courses in computing and engineering. In this article, we examine the implications of multidisciplinarity for students' learning experiences during a one-semester project course for real customers. We use a qualitative research approach and base our analysis on students' learning reports on three instances of a project course titled Multidisciplinary working life project. The main contribution of this article is the unified theoretical picture of the learning mechanisms stemming from multidisciplinarity. Our main conclusions are that (1) students generally have a positive view of multidisciplinarity; (2) multidisciplinary teams enable students to better identify their own expertise, which leads to increased occupational identity; and (3) learning experiences are not fixed, as team spirit and student attitude play an important role in how students react to challenging situations arising from introduction of the multidisciplinarity.     

Students’ use of the interactive whiteboard during physics group work

This paper presents a case study of how the interactive whiteboard (IWB) may facilitate collective meaning-making processes in group work in engineering education. In the case, first-year students attended group-work sessions as an organised part of a basic physics course at a Norwegian university college. Each student group was equipped with an IWB, which the groups used to write down and hand in their solutions to the physics problems. Based on a Vygotskian, dialectical stance, this study investigates how the students used the IWB in the group-work situation. From qualitative analysis of video data, we identified four group-work processes where the IWB played a key role: exploratory, explanatory, clarifying and insertion. The results show that the IWB may facilitate a ‘joint workspace’, a social realm in which the students’ dialogues are situated.