‘Is it because I’m a woman?’ Gender-based attributional ambiguity in higher education administration

This study examines gender-based attributional ambiguity among higher education administrators in the US, specifically academic deans. Attributional ambiguity involves situations in which members of underrepresented groups cannot determine whether interactions both negative and positive have occurred because of their minority status or for some unrelated yet plausible reason. A conceptual model of attributional ambiguity in higher education administration is presented highlighting the types of situations that produce this ambiguity, two variants of attributional ambiguity (i.e. cognitive and social), and the psychological and organizational consequences of such ambiguity. Reasons that attributional ambiguity is inherent to higher education administration are examined including the fluidity of gender roles, the culture of academia, and leaders’ minimization of discriminatory experiences. Implications for professional practice are also presented such as the need for curricula, trainings, mentoring, and coaching that addresses attributional ambiguity and greater publicity related to women’s underrepresentation in leadership roles in higher education.     

Team Hyena Puppet: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Making and Teaching Science Through Art

In 2016, professors representing Biology, Dance, Music, and Theatre and dance program students created Dunes, a performance piece that depicts the ecological succession of Michigan's sand dunes. The process used to make this work is a direct representation of the steps that Team Hyena Puppet, a collective of teaching artists and scientists, takes in their science-based art collaborations, which are used to reflect on and depict scientific research and simultaneously teach student participants and audience members science through the performing arts.     

Teachers’ Lives in Context: A Framework for Understanding Barriers to High-Quality Teaching Within Resource Deprived Settings

There is a profound for more effective schools, especially within resource-poor communities in low- and middle-income countries. A wide range of literature identifies teachers as the most critical component of schools in regards to student learning. Despite this, there is a dearth of literature on how teachers' experiences influence their ability to attend school, remain in the teaching profession, and provide high quality teaching within the classroom. This study presents a theoretical framework for understanding the role of teachers' lives in context (skills, knowledge, and attitudes; poverty and health; contextual supports/barriers to teaching) in influencing teacher effectiveness. This framework builds upon Tseng and Seidman's (2007) systems framework for understanding youth social settings in order to incorporate teachers' lives into a larger model of educational effectiveness. This synthesis reveals significant gaps in our understanding of teachers' experiences and how they affect teaching. At the teacher attendance, attrition, and pedagogical quality and a key moderator of educational interventions. Implications for research, practice, and policy are discussed.     

Examining Chi-Square Test Statistics Under Conditions of Large Model Size and Ordinal Data

This study examined the effect of model size on the chi-square test statistics obtained from ordinal factor analysis models. The performance of six robust chi-square test statistics were compared across various conditions, including number of observed variables (p), number of factors, sample size, model (mis)specification, number of categories, and threshold distribution. Results showed that the unweighted least squares (ULS) robust chi-square statistics generally outperform the diagonally weighted least squares (DWLS) robust chi-square statistics. The ULSM estimator performed the best overall. However, when fitting ordinal factor analysis models with a large number of observed variables and small sample size, the ULSM-based chi-square tests may yield empirical variances that are noticeably larger than the theoretical values and inflated Type I error rates. On the other hand, when the number of observed variables is very large, the mean- and variance-corrected chi-square test statistics (e.g., based on ULSMV and WLSMV) could produce empirical variances conspicuously smaller than the theoretical values and Type I error rates lower than the nominal level, and demonstrate lower power rates to reject misspecified models. Recommendations for applied researchers and future empirical studies involving large models are provided.     

Classifying the Context Clues in Children's Text

This study aimed to determine which types of context clues exist in children's texts and whether it is possible for experts to identify reliably those clues. Three experienced coders used Ames’ clue set as a foundation for a system to classify context clues in children's text. Findings showed that the adjustments to Ames’ system resulted in 15 clues that can be used to capture the majority of clues found in children narrative and expository text. This study adds to the limited empirically validated systems available for classifying different context clues. A usable classification of context clues has application to reading research that considers or controls for text factors as well as teaching reading strategies in K–12 classrooms.     

Implicit attitudes toward children may be unrelated to child abuse risk

Objective

To explore whether adults possess implicit attitudes toward children and whether those attitudes are especially negative among respondents who are high in child physical abuse (CPA) risk.

Methods

The present study used an implicit evaluative priming procedure. In this procedure, participants were instructed to make decisions about the evaluative implications of target words. These words were preceded by photographs of child faces or adult faces displaying positive, neutral, or negative expressions. Reaction times for the evaluative decisions were used as an index of the extent to which photos invoked negative or positive evaluative reactions.

Results

Results from 2 studies, the first conducted on a student sample (N = 90) and the second on a parent sample (N = 95), demonstrated that evaluative congruence between the facial expressions displayed in photographs and the target words facilitated responses. Furthermore, the results suggested that regardless of CPA risk, child faces, relative to adult faces, facilitated responses to negative target words, suggesting an out-group bias. This implicit out-group bias was not moderated by respondents’ CPA risk status.

Conclusions

Faces of children, relative to faces of adults, appear to activate negative information structures that facilitate evaluative decisions of negative stimuli, suggesting an out-group bias. Given that out-group biases typically lead to less favorable treatment of out-group members, additional research is needed to examine the pervasiveness of negative evaluative biases towards children and the potential implications of such biases on children's lives. Further, research examining whether high CPA risk parents and low CPA risk parents differ in how they manage initial negative evaluative reactions is needed.     

Organization of Concepts Relevant to Emotions and their Regulation During Test Taking

The purpose of this study was to assess aspects of college students' organization of concepts related to emotions and their regulation during test taking. The authors also evaluated whether students who report having problems with test anxiety hold a different conceptual organization about test taking compared with students who do not report having such problems. Concepts relevant to emotions and their regulation during test taking were sampled from the emotion and emotional regulation literature. Participants rated how similar these concepts were during test taking. These ratings were then submitted to multidimensional scaling analyses (MDS). The resulting arrangement of concepts provides insight into the underlying organizational conceptions held by low, moderate, and high test-anxious participants. Students' organizational schemes surrounded 2 dimensions: (a) task-focus and (b) pleasantness. High test-anxious participants had differing conceptual organizations about test taking than moderate and low test-anxious participants with regard to pleasantness. In addition, the high test-anxious participants saw task-focused processes such as reading directions during test taking as more highly related to unpleasant emotions like anxiety than moderate and low test-anxious participants.     

Theme and variations: one middle school’s interpretation of mandated action research

In the current climate of accountability, action research is one way for teachers to evaluate instructional changes designed to improve assessment results. It may become increasingly common for administrators to mandate teacher involvement in action research, yet few studies have been conducted in such settings. This article focuses on one middle school where the principal mandated action research for all teachers. Projects were carried out within academic departments, and department chairs were given latitude in how to organize and implement projects. This study explores project implementation and teacher perceptions of the action research. Interviews were used as an appropriate tool to explore teacher perceptions, with document analysis providing triangulation. Results from interviews of administrators, department chairs, and department members suggest an overall positive attitude toward action research, as well as variation in how action research projects were carried out. Differences occurred across several dimensions of action research, including context, motivation/ purpose, definition of action research, and organization of projects. Variations appeared to be influenced by each department chair’s experience with action research and approach to departmental work, and each department’s history of working together on instructional improvement efforts. This study suggests that administrators who mandate teacher participation in action research projects need to think about both the positive (providing teacher ownership and interest within the mandated context) and problematic (possibly leading to variation in the instructional impact of projects) aspects of project variation.     

Effects of an Early Family Intervention on Children's Memory: The Mediating Effects of Cortisol Levels

Developmental psychologists have long been concerned with the ways that early adversity influences children's long-term outcomes. In the current study, activity of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis of medically at-risk (e.g., preterm) infants was measured as a result of maternal participation in a novel cognitively based home visitation program (versus a Healthy Start home visitation program). Maternal participation in the cognitive intervention predicted lower basal cortisol levels among infants—with reduced levels of maternal avoidance/withdrawal serving as a mediator of this relation. Lower cortisol levels in infancy, in turn, predicted higher verbal short-term memory (STM) at age 3. STM represents a cognitive ability that has importance for children's later educational outcomes. Findings provide experimental evidence concerning the pathway by which an early intervention may produce hormonal changes that can, in turn, influence children's learning outcomes.     

Validation of a stages of exercise change questionnaire

The purpose of this study was to examine evidence for the validity of a stages of change measure of the Transtheoretical Model for exercise behavior. Participants were 152 university students (53.3% women, 71.6% Caucasian, M age = 19.18 years) who completed processes of change, self-efficacy, decisional balance, stages of change, and exercise behavior questionnaires as well as a maximal treadmill test. Participants in the action and maintenance stages had the highest strenuous (PC/C/P < A/M) and moderate (PC/C < A/M) self-reported exercise behavior. Those in the maintenance stage had the highest estimated aerobic fitness (PC/P < MA). The differences between the early stages (PC, C, and P) and the later stages (A and M) as described by the first function were primarily due to the behavioral process of change. The differences between the extreme stages (PC and M) and the middle stages (C, P, and A) were due to the experiential processes of change and the pros of decisional balance. The hypothesized patterns of stage differences were partially supported. Failure to obtain full support may have been due to methodological issues or inherent difficulties in detecting evidence for the validity of stages of change measures.