Children: Ethnic and Political Violence

Violence stemming from ethnic and political tensions is a problem of increasing proportions throughout the world, and many indicators show that large numbers of children are directly or indirectly exposed to war, political repression, torture, and terrorism. There is growing evidence to suggest that children are at risk under these conditions, and that the consequences of growing up amid danger, chaos, and deprivation can be severe. The articles contained in this special section were assembled to foster greater awareness of this important topic among the readers of Child Development and, hopefully, stimulate new research on ethnic and political violence in many of the disciplines that are represented within the Society for Research in Child Development.     

Examining the Usefulness of Student-Produced PSAs to Learn Advocacy in a Human Behavior and the Social Environment Course

ABSTRACT

Advocacy is a complex set of applications that applies knowledge of human behavior in the social environment to promote the rights of others. The purpose of this study was to explore the usefulness of student-created public service announcements (PSAs) to help BSW students learn cause-based advocacy. Our results suggest that assigning a PSA project supports competencies in cause-based advocacy, professional identity development social work, critical thinking, engagement with research-informed practice, and capacity to respond to contexts.     

Parental educational level,gender differences,and seniors' aspirations for advanced study

Many factors affect an undergraduate student's postbaccalaureate plans. Academic interests, career-related factors, finances, and various psychological and sociological factors all have been found to be related to interest in advanced education. Few studies, however, are gender-specific in examining the relation of parental educational attainment to their children's aspirations. Such data would be helpful in the attempts to understand the continued underrepresentation of women in most fields requiring advanced degrees. All seniors at a large Midwestern university with at least a 3.0 cumulative grade point average planning to graduate in spring or summer of 1986 were sent questionnaires dealing with their postgraduation plans. Of these 1900 surveys, 791 (42%) were returned. Results reported here examine the relation of future educational plans to gender of student, educational level of parent, and field of study. A modeling effect not noted in previous literature is discussed.     

School Readiness: Are There Social Prerequisites?

The position advocated within this article is that the construct of “school readiness” has a social component, and that attempts to evaluate children's interpersonal readiness for kindergarten should be judged in relation to their likely success at mastering specific social school entry tasks. Social school entry tasks, which most likely stem from diverse sociocultural sources, are conceptualized here as interpersonal challenges that children confront as they enter formal schooling—challenges that are inherent within kindergarten classrooms and predictive of children's future school adjustment. A related contention is that attempts to enhance children's readiness for kindergarten should be guided by research on the prerequisites of social task mastery—that is, evidence gathered during the preschool years that forecasts children's later success at social school entry tasks. Evidence bearing on these premises is reviewed as a means of considering the validity and heuristic utility of these propositions for future research on school readiness.     

Opinion and the world of possibilities

Editor's Note: This is the concluding essay in a three-part series in which Professor Morson examines the intellectual maladies of the intelligentsia. The first essay, which appeared in the Spring 1993 issue, drew upon Russian intellectual history to clarify the concept of “the intelligentsia” and suggested its utility for an understanding of the politicized segment of the American professoriate. In the second essay, which appeared in the Winter 1993–94 issue, he contrasted the deterministic theories so attractive to both these groups with choice as experienced in the day-to-day realm of contingent events. Continuing this analysis, Professor Morson now examines “chronocentrism,” the view that the present moment is intellectually privileged in comparison with the past, showing it to be another of the basic elements of utopian thought. Exploring the relationship of multiple possibilities to intellectual freedom and pluralism, Professor Morson argues that there is a close connection between the appreciation of “open time” on the one hand, and the belief in free-wheeling dialogue, the tolerance necessary for democracy, intellectual modesty in the face of the world's complexity, and a rich sense of opinion, on the other. This essay is an adaptation of the final chapter of his new book,Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, and appears by the generous permission of Yale University Press.     

Spontaneous partitioning: Pre-schoolers and discrete items

This study addresses the question of whether a dealing strategy that is widely used by young children in clinical interviews occurs in less structured situations. Our findings are that it did not in the setting we examined, namely the performance of a routine counting task, by pre-schoolers with the opportunity of sharing sweets when the task was completed. We discuss reasons for the apparent discrepancies between the results for clinical interviews and less structured situations.     

University class size: Is smaller better?

This study investigates the relationship between class size and achievement at the college level. Recent meta-analyses have found a strong relationship between class size and student achievement, but few of the studies examined class size larger than 40 or university-age populations. This analysis examines a university's testing-center data-archives representing 305 sections from 24 different courses. Section sizes ranged from 13 to 1,006. A total of 16,230 test scores were analyzed. The results of this investigation reveal that at the college level, class size may be less important an influence on student achievement than some educators have thought.     

Enhancing rice resistance to fungal pathogens by transformation with cell wall degrading enzyme genes from Trichoderma atroviride

INTRODUCTION Rice sheath blight (Rhizoctonia solani) and rice blast (Magnaporthe grisea) are two serious plantdiseases in China. Rice cultivars with high level and durable resistance to these two pathogens are noteasy to obtain by traditional breeding methods due to the lack of germplasm resistant to R. solani and the high genetic diversity of M. grisea. Cell wall degrading enzyme (CWDE) genes from biocontrol fungi belonging to the genus Trichoderma have been demonstrated to encode …