Critical Race Theory Meets the NYPD: An Assessment of Anti-Racist Pedagogy for Police in New York City

This research describes and assesses Critical Race Theory (CRT) pedagogy in a higher education ethnic studies course for police officers. CRT pedagogy aims to help students overcome “color-blind” thinking, which minimizes awareness of racism, by raising their critical understanding of racism and framing it as a pervasive and institutionalized reality that everyone has a responsibility to change. Using the Color Blind Racial Awareness (COBRA) Scale, critical awareness in three cluster areas, white privilege, institutional discrimination, and blatant racism, is measured among those completing the ethnic studies course and a comparison group of officers completing a different college course for police. Conclusions reflect on the impact of the course on students’ awareness of racism, the correlation of identity and awareness of racism, the hypothetical impact of such awareness in policing and possibilities for future research.     

Graphical Representation of Missing Data Problems

Rubin’s classic missingness mechanisms are central to handling missing data and minimizing biases that can arise due to missingness. However, the formulaic expressions that posit certain independencies among missing and observed data are difficult to grasp. As a result, applied researchers often rely on informal translations of these assumptions. We present a graphical representation of missing data mechanism, formalized in Mohan, Pearl, and Tian (2013). We show that graphical models provide a tool for comprehending, encoding, and communicating assumptions about the missingness process. Furthermore, we demonstrate on several examples how graph-theoretical criteria can determine if biases due to missing data might emerge in some estimates of interests and which auxiliary variables are needed to control for such biases, given assumptions about the missingness process.     

Broadcasting and Cable

Larry James Gianakos' Television Drama Series Programming: A Comprehensive Chronicle, 1959-1975 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978—$27.50)

Albert C. Book and Norman D. Cary's The Radio and Television Commercial (Chicago: Crain Books, 1978—$6.95, paper)

Jay S. Harris's TV Guide: The First 25 Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978—$14.95)

Steven R. Rivkin's A New Guide to Federal Cable Television Regulations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978—$25.00)

Felix Chin's Cable Television: A Comprehensive Bibliography (New York: Plenum Publishing, 1978—$45.00)     

Children's developing commitments to joint goals

This study investigated young children's commitment to a joint goal by assessing whether peers in collaborative activities continue to collaborate until all received their rewards. Forty-eight 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children worked on an apparatus dyadically. One child got access to her reward early. For the partner to benefit as well, this child had to continue to collaborate even though there was no further reward available to her. The study found that 3.5-year-olds, but not 2.5-year-olds, eagerly assisted their unlucky partner. They did this less readily in a noncollaborative control condition. A second study confirmed that 2.5-year-old children understood the task structure. These results suggest that children begin to appreciate the normative dimensions of collaborative activities during the 3rd year of life.     

Supplementation of urban home visitation with a series of group meetings for parents and infants: results of a “real-world” randomized, controlled trial

Objective: Home visitation has been shown to be effective in reducing rates of child maltreatment and in enhancing psychosocial outcomes in children and their parents. Even when available, however, it is underutilized by parents in some urban settings. We tested a supplemental 10-session group intervention for its ability to increase active participation in home visitation, enhance the quality of caregiving behavior of parents, and improve social developmental outcome in children.Method: A randomized controlled design was utilized, involving two separate cohorts of parents of 3- to 18-month old infants, totaling 148 parent-child dyads. The intervention focused on practical experience in promoting parent-infant attachment relationships.Results: At 6 months follow-up, there was a substantial increase in the proportion of intervention group parents participating in home visitation, compared to parents in the control group (Fisher’s exact p = .008). Parents in the intervention group exhibited a trend for improvement in their capacity to appropriately interpret infants’ emotional cues (p = .08), independent of the effects of home visitation itself. Attrition in both the treatment and control groups was inversely associated with income and level of education.Conclusions: Group meetings may constitute an effective means of engaging stressed urban families in home visitation.     

Reforms in pedagogy and the Confucian tradition: looking below the surface

This Forum article addresses some of the issues raised in the article by Ying-Syuan Huang and Anila Asghar’s paper entitled: Science education reform in Confucian learning cultures: teachers’ perspectives on policy and practice in Taiwan. An attempt is made to highlight the need for a more nuanced approach in considering the Confucian education tradition and its compatibility with education reforms. In particular, the article discusses issues concerning the historical development of the Confucian education tradition, challenges in reform implementation that are in reality tradition-independent, as well as opportunities and points of convergence that the Confucian education tradition presents that can in fact be favorable to implementation of reform-based pedagogies.     

Failures and Successes: Notes on the Development of Electronic Cash

Between 1997 and 2001, two mid-sized communities in Canada hosted North America's most comprehensive experiment to introduce electronic cash and, in the process, replace physical cash for casual, low-value payments. The technology used was Mondex, and its implementation was supported by all the country's major banks. It was launched with an extensive publicity campaign to promote Mondex not only in the domestic but also in the global market, for which the Canadian implementation was to serve as a "showcase." However, soon after the start of the first field test it became apparent that the new technology did not work smoothly. On the contrary, it created a host of controversies, in areas as varied as computer security, consumer privacy, and monetary policy. In the following years, few of these controversies could be resolved and Mondex could not be established as a widely used payment mechanism. In 2001, the experiment was finally terminated. Using the concepts developed in recent science and technology studies (STS), this article analyzes these controversies as resulting from the difficulties of fitting electronic cash, a new sociotechnical system, into the complex setting of the existing payment system. Implementing a new technology is seen as a long process in which social and technological actors are required to adapt to one another. In the Mondex case, such adaptation did not happen sufficiently to stabilize the sociotechnical network as a whole. However, in some limited areas mutual adaptation did occur, and there the Mondex experiment produced some surprising successes. In this perspective, the story of Mondex not only offers lessons on why technologies fail, but also offers insight how short-term failures can contribute to long-term transformations. This suggests the need to rethink the dichotomy of success and failure.     

Migratory plans of Portuguese adolescents

A substantial proportion of northern Portuguese adolescents belonging to lower and middle socioeconomic levels plan to eventually migrate abroad. Migratory plans therefore join academic and career plans in forming adolescents' overall personal plans. This paper considers motivations, awareness, and characteristics of 511 8th graders living in Oporto and the Braganca area who stated their intentions to migrate. The intention to migrate proved especially significant in the personal plans of youths from rural areas and of low socioeconomic status. In proportions comparable to that found among migrant workers, unemployment, low pay, and thwarted aspirations fueled the desire to migrate. The percentage of youths firmly committed to relocating increased with age, while overall increased desire to emigrate has been linked to rising domestic unemployment. Respondents were also largely aware of the potential physical, emotional, and psychological problems of living and working abroad. Migration plans were found to directly interfere with students' academic and careers plans. Those planning to migrate were less likely to consider further education and engagement in highly skilled occupations.