Attachment Security and Developmental Patterns of Growth in Executive Functioning During Early Elementary School

Despite the extensive research demonstrating the importance of child executive functioning (EF) for school adjustment, little longitudinal work has formally examined developmental change in EF during the early school years. Based on a sample of 106 mother–child dyads, the current longitudinal study investigated patterns of growth in child performance on three executive tasks between kindergarten (M_age = 6 years) and Grade 3 (M_age = 9 years), and the predictive role of earlier mother–child attachment security in these patterns. The results suggest that early elementary school is a period of significant developmental improvement in child EF, although child performance on different EF tasks follows distinct trajectories across time. The study also provides evidence for a sustained relation between children's early attachment security and their ongoing acquisition of executive skills.     

Online Course Design in Higher Education: A Review of National and Statewide Evaluation Instruments

This research identifies six online course evaluation instruments used nationally or in statewide systems. We examined the characteristics (i.e., number of standards and criteria) and coded the criteria that guide the design of online courses. We discussed the focus of the instruments and their unique features.     

Decolonising the curriculum: using graduate qualities to embed Indigenous knowledges at the academic cultural interface

The context of this paper is a strategy at a large Australian university that involves embedding a new graduate quality ‘cultural competence’ and lifting the profile of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, experiences and histories. It has been argued that the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges is essential for the decolonisation of our higher education institutions. Decolonisation involves removing the barriers that have silenced non-Western voices in our ‘multi-cultural’ higher education system and combatting the epistemic injustices of a system dominated by Western thought. In this paper, we suggest that our university’s suite of graduate qualities can provide a locus for work at the cultural interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges. While these qualities may be firmly embedded within Western ways of knowing, being and doing, they can nonetheless be used to interrogate and revisit Western disciplinary knowledge construction and pedagogy so as to help bring about institutional change.     

The ‘good life’ and the ‘rich portfolio’: young women,schooling and neoliberal subjectification

This paper explores the ways two young women, living in Australia, make sense of themselves, their activities, and futures. The two young women come from two different schooling contexts—a prestigious private school and a government school. We analyse their self‐narratives in relation to neoliberal discourse, and consider how, and with what effects, their school contexts privilege and make available neoliberal discourses, and work to produce different subjectivities and notions of ‘worthwhile’ or ‘good’ lives. Conceptualising schools as sites of subjection, we analyse the discourses that their respective schools make available to the young women, and how they have appropriated them. We suggest that the different exposure and access to neoliberal discourses position the women very differently in terms of future possibilities and work‐life scenarios in the neoliberal economy. In that way, the article seeks to make a contribution towards understanding schools as implicated in social (re)production and in the (re)production of classed subjectivities.     

The effect of narrative cues on infants' imitation from television and picture books

Infants can imitate a novel action sequence from television and picture books, yet there has been no direct comparison of infants' imitation from the 2 types of media. Varying the narrative cues available during the demonstration and test, the current experiments measured 18- and 24-month-olds' imitation from television and picture books. Infants imitated from both media types when full narrative cues (Experiment 1; N = 76) or empty, meaningless narration (Experiment 2; N = 135) accompanied the demonstrations, but they imitated more from television than books. In Experiment 3 (N = 27), infants imitated from a book based on narration alone, without the presence of pictures. These results are discussed in relation to age-related changes in cognitive flexibility and infants' emerging symbolic understanding.     

Internalizing and externalizing in adolescence: the roles of academic self‐efficacy and gender

This study examines academic self‐efficacy and gender as predictors of internalizing and externalizing behaviors in adolescence. In addition, the role of gender was considered as a moderator in the relationship between academic self‐efficacy and internalizing/externalizing difficulties. Participants were 4,318 predominantly African American, low‐income high school students who completed self‐report measures on the constructs of interest. Academic self‐efficacy and gender were both significant predictors of risk for internalizing problems, whereas only academic self‐efficacy predicted risk for externalizing (hyperactivity/distractibility) problems. Gender did not predict externalizing difficulties, nor did gender serve as a moderator in any analysis. Implications include focusing on academic self‐efficacy in the development of strategies for prevention and intervention of internalizing and externalizing problems.     

Temporal specificity in patterning of the rabbit nictitating membrane response

Rabbits were trained in either positive patterning (AX+, A−, X−) or negative patterning (A+, X+, AX−) using one of four intervals between the onset of A and the onset of X on AX trials. These intervals were 0, 800, 2,400, and 5,600 msec. In each task, all groups acquired an appropriate pattern of discriminative responding. Following acquisition, all rabbits were tested with the four different A-X intervals. All positive patterning groups showed an excitatory gradient, in which the highest level of responding occurred at the interval used in training. Conversely, all but one of the negative patterning groups showed an inhibitory gradient, in which the lowest level of responding occurred at the interval used in training. The one exception was the negative patterning group trained with simultaneous AX stimuli (0 msec), which showed a low, broad gradient, indicating transfer of inhibition across all the intervals. The results are discussed with respect to temporal encoding mechanisms and accounts of conditional discriminations.     

The effect of feature-target intervals in conditional discriminations on acquisition and expression of conditioned nictitating membrane and heart rate responses in the rabbit

Nictitating membrane (NM) and heart rate (HR) responses were investigated in a conditional discrimination (A→X+ vs. B→X−), using feature-target intervals of 0, 5, 15, and 45 sec. Conditional control of NM responses, but not of HR responses, was acquired to the 400-msec X stimulus in all the groups tested. However, differential conditioning of both the NM and the HR responses to A versus B feature cues appeared for the three shorter intervals. Following acquisition, all the rabbits were tested with the four different feature-target intervals. All the groups showed a gradient of NM responding to X, in which the highest level of responding occurred at or near the interval used in training. The results are discussed with respect to the relationship of simple conditioning of the feature cues to their control over responding during presentation of the target stimulus, the putative role of HR as an index of preparatory processes during presentation of feature cues, and mechanisms of temporal specificity in conditional discriminations.     

The Nature and Consequences of Essentialist Beliefs About Race in Early Childhood

It is widely believed that race divides the world into biologically distinct kinds of people—an essentialist belief inconsistent with reality. Essentialist views of race have been described as early emerging, but this study found that young children (n = 203, M_age = 5.45) hold only the more limited belief that the physical feature of skin color is inherited and stable. Overall, children rejected the causal essentialist view that behavioral and psychological characteristics are constrained by an inherited racial essence. Although average levels of children's causal essentialist beliefs about race were low, variation in these beliefs was related to children's own group membership, exposure to diversity, as well as children's own social attitudes.