Contexts,Original Orders,and Item-Level Orientation: Responding Creatively to Users' Needs and Technological Change

This article questions traditional assumptions that archival aggregations must always be rigidly defined. Technology allows archival institutions to respond to users' diverse requirements by empowering them to create multiple groupings and variable orders. To take advantage of these capabilities as archives become increasingly digital, a shift toward item-level orientation will be crucial. Users will still need information about context, but the digital future will almost certainly necessitate abandoning current methods in favor of documenting contextual relationships at item level. Respect for “fonds” and original order will retain some value but will no longer be the primary means of capturing context.     

Independent Contributions of Mothers’ and Fathers’ Language and Literacy Practices: Associations With Children’s Kindergarten Skills Across Linguistically Diverse Households

Research Findings: Home language and literacy inputs have been consistently linked with enhanced language and literacy skills among children. Most studies have focused on maternal inputs among monolingual populations. Though the proportion of American children growing up in primarily non-English-speaking homes is growing and the role of fathers in early development is increasingly emphasized, less is known about these associations in primarily non-English-speaking households or how mothers and fathers independently contribute to children’s skills. Using a subsample of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort (N = 5,450), this study assessed the frequency of maternal and paternal inputs during early childhood and their prospective connections with children’s English language and literacy skills at age 5 across White, Mexican, and Chinese children from linguistically diverse households. Analyses revealed significant differences in inputs by ethnic/language group membership and significant associations between both maternal and paternal inputs and children’s skills. These associations did not differ across ethnic/language group membership. Practice or Policy: These results point to the importance of promoting rich home language and literacy environments across diverse households regardless of the language in which they take place or the parent from which they derive.     

Loss of Institutional Trust Among Racial and Ethnic Minority Adolescents: A Consequence of Procedural Injustice and a Cause of Life‐Span Outcomes

This research tested a social‐developmental process model of trust discernment. From sixth to eighth grade, White and African American students were surveyed twice yearly (ages 11–14; Study 1, N = 277). African American students were more aware of racial bias in school disciplinary decisions, and as this awareness grew it predicted a loss of trust in school, leading to a large trust gap in seventh grade. Loss of trust by spring of seventh grade predicted African Americans’ subsequent discipline infractions and 4‐year college enrollment. Causality was confirmed with a trust‐restoring “wise feedback” treatment delivered in spring of seventh grade that improved African Americans’ eighth‐grade discipline and college outcomes. Correlational findings were replicated with Latino and White students (ages 11–14; Study 2, N = 206).     

Overshadowing not potentiation of illness-based contextual conditioning by a novel taste

In four experiments using rat subjects, we investigated the effects of presenting a novel flavor cue at the time of pairing an environmental context with illness. In each experiment, the subjects were allowed to spend time in a distinctive cage before receiving an injection of LiCl. For some, plain water was made available on these conditioning trials; for others, a novel taste (HCl) was presented. We measured the strength of the context aversion by assessing the ability of the contextual cues to block the acquisition of an aversion to sucrose in a further phase of training. We found that initial training with HCl present made the context less effective as a blocking cue and concluded that the HCl had overshadowed learning about the context. We suggest that this blocking procedure provides a more accurate assessment of contextual aversion than does the consumption test that has more usually been used and that taste-context overshadowing may be a more robust phenomenon than has thus far been thought.     

Reading,spelling and two types of irregularity in word recognition

How do good and poor readers, and good and poor spellers, vary in their decisions about words which have varying spelling-to-sound correspondences? This experiment isolates the effects of visual and phonological characteristics of words with schoolchildren of varying reading and spelling ability, aged between 9 and 11.5 years. Three groups of children were tested: good readers and good spellers, good readers who were poor spellers, and children who were both poor readers and poor spellers. The difference between‘good’and‘poor’was about two years according to the standardised tests which were used. The children performed a lexical decision task, deciding whether each letter-string was a word or not. Response times to three types of words were compared: standard regular words (e.g. SLOT, SPADE), words with common orthography but irregular spelling-to-sound relationships (e.g. HAVE, FEVER), and words with unusual orthography as well as irregular spelling-to-sound relationships (e.g. BISCUIT, ANSWER). The performance of good readers but not of poor readers was impaired on the words which were phonologically irregular (compared with regular words). Poor spellers were worse again on the dually irregular words, although not significantly, while the good spellers performed almost as well on these words as on the regular words. These results have a number of implications: that the regularity effect is phonologically and not orthographically mediated, that good readers use a predominantly phonological strategy in lexical decision while poor readers do not, and that for the best readers/spellers as tested here the orthographically and phonologically irregular words have some sort of special status which allows them to gain fast and accurate responses.     

Multi-Method Assessment of ADHD Characteristics in Preschool Children: Relations between Measures

Several forms of assessment tools, including behavioral rating scales and objective tests such as the Continuous Performance Test (CPT), can be used to measure inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive behaviors associated with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). However, research with school-age children has shown that the correlations between parent ratings, teacher ratings, and scores on objective measures of ADHD-characteristic behaviors are modest at best. In this study, we examined the relations between parent and teacher ratings of ADHD and CPT scores in a sample of 65 preschoolers ranging from 50 to 72 months of age. No significant associations between teacher and parent ratings of ADHD were found. Parent-ratings of both inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity accounted for variance in CPT omission errors but not CPT commission errors. Teacher ratings showed evidence of convergent and discriminant validity when entered simultaneously in a hierarchical regression. These tools may be measuring different aspects of inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity.     

Professional Development: An LEA Adviser's Perspective

This paper represents a summary and discussion of the findings of a single site case study which investigated the causes, reactions, and coping strategies relating to teacher stress in a comprehensive high school. Data analysis suggested that the problem of stress was multi‐dimensional in nature; levels of stress depended upon the interaction of any number of stressors which may be modified by experience, status, and the individual coping process. Coping strategies were found to be complex patterns of actions which were palliative or direct‐action, used in sequence or simultaneously to combat stress. The findings suggest pointers for the multi‐level management of stress which may need to extend beyond self‐management strategies.     

Outside the library: Early career researchers and use of alternative information sources in pandemic times

Presents findings from a study into the attitudes and practices of pandemic-era early career researchers (ECRs) in regard to obtaining access to the formally published scholarly literature, which focused on alternative providers, notably ResearchGate and Sci-Hub. The study is a part of the Harbingers project that has been exploring the work lives and scholarly communication practices of ECRs in pre-pandemic times and during the pandemic, and utilizes data from two rounds of interviews with around 170 ECRs from the sciences and social sciences in eight countries. Findings show that alternative providers, as represented by ResearchGate and Sci-Hub, have become established and appear to be gaining ground. However, there are considerable country- and discipline-associated differences. ECRs' country-specific level of usage of the alternative providers is partly traceable to the adequacy of library provisions, although there are other factors at play in shaping ECRs' attitudes and practices, most notably convenience and time saving, as well as the fact that these platforms have become embedded in the scholarly dashboard. There is a dearth of evidence of the impact of the pandemic on ECRs' ways of obtaining scholarly papers.     

Peer contagion of aggression and health risk behavior among adolescent males: an experimental investigation of effects on public conduct and private attitudes

Peer contagion of adolescent males' aggressive/health risk behaviors was examined using a computerized "chat room" experimental paradigm. Forty-three 11th-grade White adolescents (16-17 years old) were led to believe that they were interacting with other students (i.e., "e-confederates"), who endorsed aggressive/health risk behaviors and whose ostensible peer status was experimentally manipulated. Adolescents displayed greater public conformity, more internalization of aggressive/health risk attitudes, and a higher frequency of actual exclusionary behavior when the e-confederates were high in peer status than low. Participants' level of social anxiety moderated peer contagion. Nonsocially anxious participants conformed only to high-status peers, whereas socially anxious participants were equally influenced by low- and high-status peers. The role of status-maintenance motivations in aggression and risk behavior, and implications for preventive intervention, are discussed.