Hypothalamic–Pituitary–Adrenal and Sympathetic Nervous System Activity and Children's Behavioral Regulation

Self-regulation ability is an important component of children's academic success. Physiological reactivity may relate to brain activity governing attention and behavioral regulation. Saliva samples collected from 186 preschool children (101 boys, mean age = 53 months, 34% minority) before and after a series of mildly challenging games and again 30 min following the challenges were used to assess hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) (cortisol) and sympathetic nervous system (SNS; alpha-amylase) activity. Behavioral regulation was measured in delay of gratification and slow-down motor activities included in the challenge task. Cortisol and alpha-amylase were related differentially to aspects of behavioral regulation. Low cortisol was related to classroom regulation difficulties. Children with greater cortisol elevations following the challenge task had poorer performance on the slow-down motor task. Children with greater increases in salivary alpha-amylase following challenge were less able to delay gratification. Results suggest that HPA axis and SNS arousal may contribute differentially to behavioral regulation ability.     

Laboratory materials: Affordances or constraints?

Laboratory instruction is critical to the understanding of biology and is a central piece of biological sciences instruction. Although much investigation has focused on the content of biology laboratory exercises, we contend that understanding the extent to which the laboratory materials can aid or limit experimental investigation is of equal importance. In this study, therefore, we investigate the role of timing and availability of laboratory equipment in the context of two different laboratory exercises. We use both case study and an experimental approach to investigate how laboratory materials guide the planning, context, creativity, and timing of ideas shared among students. Our data support the notion that providing students with laboratory equipment before students plan and consider different experimental approaches can constrain students' ideas and encourage tool‐focused solutions to experimental design tasks. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 1010–1025, 2011     

Factors associated with caregiver stability in permanent placements: a classification tree approach

Objective

Identify individual and environmental variables associated with caregiver stability and instability for children in diverse permanent placement types (i.e., reunification, adoption, and long-term foster care/guardianship with relatives or non-relatives), following 5 or more months in out-of-home care prior to age 4 due to substantiated maltreatment.

Methods

Participants were 285 children from the Southwestern site of Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN). Caregiver instability was defined as a change in primary caregiver between ages 6 and 8 years. Classification and regression tree (CART) analysis was used to identify the strongest predictors of instability from multiple variables assessed at age 6 with caregiver and child reports within the domains of neighborhood/community characteristics, caregiving environment, caregiver characteristics, and child characteristics.

Results

One out of 7, or 14% of the 285 children experienced caregiver instability in their permanent placement between ages 6 and 8. The strongest predictor of stability was whether the child had been placed in adoptive care. However, for children who were not adopted, a number of contextual factors (e.g., father involvement, expressiveness within the family) and child characteristics (e.g., intellectual functioning, externalizing problem behaviors) predicted stability and instability of permanent placements.

Conclusions

Current findings suggest that a number of factors should be considered, in addition to placement type, if we are to understand what predicts caregiver stability and find stable permanent placements for children who have entered foster care. These factors include involvement of a father figure, family functioning, and child functioning.

Practice implications

Adoption was supported as a desired permanent placement in terms of stability, but results suggest that other placement types can also lead to stability. In fact, with attention to providing biological parents, relative, and non-relative caregivers with support and resources (e.g., emotional, financial, and optimizing father involvement or providing a stable adult figure) the likelihood that a child will have a stable caregiver may be increased.     

Congenital learning,organisational performance and work-life balance culture

A possible explanation for the numerous failures in the implementation and use of work-life balance (WLB) practices may relate to the fact that the majority of companies have introduced them without exploring the nature and extent of their founders’ or owners’ prior knowledge of WLB and WLB practices. This paper analyses the relationships between congenital learning and WLB culture and tries to identify whether WLB culture impacts on business performance through an empirical study of 229 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Spanish metal industry. Our findings show that in order to create positive attitudes toward WLB, managers need to create and support a learning process. These findings provide interesting insights into the drivers of organisational performance for SMEs that develop and support a WLB-supporting culture.     

Influence of starting position on finishing position in World Cup 500 m short track speed skating

Top short track speed skaters and their coaches have suspected that starting positions influence finishing positions, especially in the 500 m racing distance. The objective of this study was to examine systematically the influence of starting position on finishing position in 500 m short track speed skating. The data analysed included results from World Cup 500 m races ranging from the 1999-2000 season through to the end of the 2003-2004 season. All 500 m men's and women's races with four skaters starting and finishing (preliminaries, heats, quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals) were included in the data set. The association between starting position and finishing position was examined using Kendall's tau. Results show that for both sexes, there is a significant positive correlation between starting position and finishing position (P<0.001). This effect is generally more pronounced in semi-finals and finals than it is in preliminaries, heats and quarter-finals. Strategies to counter this inequity are proposed, drawing upon similar experiences in other sports.     

The Contribution of Memory and Anxiety to the Math Performance of College Students with Learning Disabilities

The impact of memory and anxiety on math performance was analyzed in a sample of 115 college undergraduates, all of whom had a diagnosed learning disability. The direct effects of memory and anxiety on math performance were first examined, followed by an examination of whether anxiety moderates the relationship between memory and math. Both memory and anxiety were found to directly affect math performance. Additionally, anxiety served as a moderator of the relationship between memory and math for most, but not all, measures of math achievement. The moderating effect of anxiety was stronger for long-term retrieval than for short-term memory. The relationships between memory, anxiety, and math were not significantly different for males and females. These findings suggest that, when working with individuals who have low anxiety but poor memory, enhancing memory strategies may be effective for remediating problems in math. However, for those with high levels of anxiety, it may be more efficacious to first ameliorate the anxiety, as working on memory may have a negligible effect on math performance for these individuals.     

The Importance of Language in Students' Reasoning About Heat in Thermodynamic Processes

Researchers believe that the way that students talk, specifically the language that they use, can offer a window into their reasoning processes. Yet the connection between what students are saying and what they are actually thinking can be ambiguous. We present the results of an exploratory interview study with 10 participants, designed to investigate the role of language in university physics students' reasoning about heat in thermodynamic processes. The study revealed two key findings: (1) students' approaches to solving certain heat-related problems are related to the way in which they explicitly define the word ‘heat’ and (2) students' tendency to reason with heat as a state function in inappropriate contexts appears to be connected to a model of heat implicitly encoded in language. This model represents heat or heat energy/thermal energy as a substance that moves from one location to another. In this model, students talk about thermodynamic systems as ‘containers' of heat, and temperature is a measure of the amount of heat ‘in' an object.     

Teaching essay-writing to extra-mural students: An integrated approach

This article desribes an attempt made by researchers at the Research Centre for University Extra-mural Studies to improve the performance of extra-mural students following courses in the Adam Mickiewicz University by providing systematic training in the preparation of written assignments. A significant feature of the experiment was the integration of pedagogic material into the content of the subject-based courses.     

Binary Pathfinder: An improvement to the Pathfinder algorithm

The Pathfinder algorithm is widely used to prune social networks. The pruning maintains the geodesic distances between nodes. It has shown itself to be very useful in the analysis of, amongst others, citations in BIS (bibliometrics, informetrics, and scientometrics). It has even been proposed for the online display of the search results in an information retrieval system. However, its great time and space complexity limits its use in real-time applications and in networks of any considerable size.The present work describes an improved algorithm with considerably reduced time and space complexity. Its lower execution costs thus increase its applicability both in real time and to large networks.