Child and Adolescent Predictors of Personality in Early Adulthood

This study investigated development of the Big Five personality traits from early childhood into adulthood. An initial group of 137 Swedish children were assessed eight times between ages 2 and 29 years. Initial decreases in extraversion leveled off in early adulthood; agreeableness and conscientiousness increased from ages 2 to 29; neuroticism initially increased, leveled off in later childhood and adolescence, and decreased throughout early adulthood; while openness to experience showed an initial increase, then decreased and leveled off in early adulthood. Individual developmental trajectories varied significantly, particularly in relation to gender. Personality traits became increasingly stable, and the fact that childhood scores predicted scores in adulthood indicated that personalities are fairly stable across this portion of the life span.     

Creating pretence and sharing friendship: modal expressions in children's play

Friendships and play provide children with opportunities for mutual engagement, which both require and facilitate children's language use. Modality is a semantic system in the language associated with children's learning. One way in which modality is realised is through linguistic expressions which allow speakers to moderate the degree of certainty about the truth of propositions (expressions of possibility) and the degree of necessity with respect to proposals (expressions of obligation). No research has explored the relationship between friendship and children's use of modality. This paper reports on the use of both types of modal expression during play between five- and six-year-old children in two friendship contexts. Results showed that possibility expressions occurred at similar rates in both contexts while obligation expressions occurred significantly more often in play in high-level friendships than in low-level friendships. Findings suggest that in high-level friendships modality was used cohesively to create and extend pretend play, whereas in low-level friendships it was used to regulate behaviour. Because modal expressions are important resources for managing interpersonal relationships, for talking about ideas and situations beyond the here and now and for writing for a non-present audience, our findings provide valuable insights for educators of young children.     

Investigating Microadaptation in One-to-One Human Tutoring

The authors investigated whether some advantages of tutoring over other instructional methods are due to microadaptation, or, tutors basing their actions on assessments of tutees they develop during tutoring. In a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment, independent variables were shared experience (tutors either worked with the same or a different tutee in each of four segment of the tutoring session) and communication context (face-to-face or computer-mediated). Although there were no overall learning differences across experience conditions, tutees who worked with the same tutor demonstrated better learning of concepts initially discussed during the final tutoring segment. Shared experience led to accurate competence assessments only in the computer-mediated context, suggesting that cognitive load influences assessment development. However, there was no evidence of micro-adaptation.     

Introduction to the Special Forum on Critical Making as Research Program

This special issue spotlights the growing diversity of critical making practices in a range of disciplinary contexts both inside and outside of the academy, and begins to develop perspectives that will foster the emergence of critical making as a coherent field. On one hand, we see great value in incorporating material practices into existing information systems (IS) and science and technology studies (STS) research programs. In particular, forms of material engagement can help overcome the ineffectual linguistic bias of traditional critiques of technoscience. On the other hand, we believe that current material practices can benefit from the conceptualization of knowledge and social organization that are foundational to IS and STS research. In this introduction to the special issue we call attention to the mechanisms by which such practices may combine representational and material work to foster and support the development of new knowledge-making communities and institutions. We believe such work can serve as a framework for others engaged in critical making practices to better contextualize and expand the relevance of their work. We intend this special issue to serve as a “stake in the ground” for research on new forms of material-conceptual critique and their incorporation in the repertoire of critical technoscience scholarship.     

Revisiting Cross-document Structure Theory for multi-document discourse parsing

Multi-document discourse parsing aims to automatically identify the relations among textual spans from different texts on the same topic. Recently, with the growing amount of information and the emergence of new technologies that deal with many sources of information, more precise and efficient parsing techniques are required. The most relevant theory to multi-document relationship, Cross-document Structure Theory (CST), has been used for parsing purposes before, though the results had not been satisfactory. CST has received many critics because of its subjectivity, which may lead to low annotation agreement and, consequently, to poor parsing performance. In this work, we propose a refinement of the original CST, which consists in (i) formalizing the relationship definitions, (ii) pruning and combining some relations based on their meaning, and (iii) organizing the relations in a hierarchical structure. The hypothesis for this refinement is that it will lead to better agreement in the annotation and consequently to better parsing results. For this aim, it was built an annotated corpus according to this refinement and it was observed an improvement in the annotation agreement. Based on this corpus, a parser was developed using machine learning techniques and hand-crafted rules. Specifically, hierarchical techniques were used to capture the hierarchical organization of the relations according to the proposed refinement of CST. These two approaches were used to identify the relations among texts spans and to generate multi-document annotation structure. Results outperformed other CST parsers, showing the adequacy of the proposed refinement in the theory.     

How to conduct External Quality Assessment Schemes for the pre-analytical phase?

In laboratory medicine, several studies have described the most frequent errors in the different phases of the total testing process, and a large proportion of these errors occur in the pre-analytical phase. Schemes for registration of errors and subsequent feedback to the participants have been conducted for decades concerning the analytical phase by External Quality Assessment (EQA) organizations operating in most countries. The aim of the paper is to present an overview of different types of EQA schemes for the pre-analytical phase, and give examples of some existing schemes. So far, very few EQA organizations have focused on the pre-analytical phase, and most EQA organizations do not offer pre-analytical EQA schemes (EQAS). It is more difficult to perform and standardize pre-analytical EQAS and also, accreditation bodies do not ask the laboratories for results from such schemes. However, some ongoing EQA programs for the pre-analytical phase do exist, and some examples are given in this paper. The methods used can be divided into three different types; collecting information about pre-analytical laboratory procedures, circulating real samples to collect information about interferences that might affect the measurement procedure, or register actual laboratory errors and relate these to quality indicators. These three types have different focus and different challenges regarding implementation, and a combination of the three is probably necessary to be able to detect and monitor the wide range of errors occurring in the pre-analytical phase.