Relating early childhood teachers’ working conditions and well-being to their turnover intentions

High turnover rates of early care and education teachers reduce the quality of education; unsatisfied teachers, suffering from stress or emotional exhaustion, are less equipped to promote children’s development and more likely to leave the classroom. We used data from a national survey of US early childhood educators (n?=?1129) to examine associations between teachers’ working conditions, well-being, and motivation with professional commitment and turnover intentions to move, leave, or remain. Multiple regression analyses revealed that more intrinsically motivated teachers were more likely to report intentions to move over leave, emotionally exhausted teachers were more likely to report intentions to leave, and lower teacher-reported working conditions predicted intentions to move or leave the field over staying. The results suggest that teachers’ well-being and perceived working conditions relate with their intentions to remain at their job or within the field and to their commitment to the profession.     

“‘I Was Gonna Go Off,but My Best Friend is White.”: Hispanic Students’ Co-Cultural Reasoning in a Hispanic Serving Institution

The researchers engaged in a qualitative analysis (using journaling and focus group methodology) of the communicative behaviors of Hispanic students with White institutional members at a medium-sized, Southwest HSI. Utilizing Co-Cultural Theory and Elaborative Coding analysis, the authors mapped how Hispanic students narrated their co-cultural communication and reasoning (i.e., why they engage in one strategy rather than another). The findings show that, although Hispanic students used almost all co-cultural strategies, their responses were clustered primarily around assimilationist strategies – indicating that they engage in a high degree of self-monitoring and self-censorship when interacting with White institutional members in an HSI. These results suggest that even when Hispanic students constitute a large or majority part of the institution’s population, they still feel the need to engage in behaviors that navigate White norms. The study concludes by examining the findings for co-cultural theorizing as well as providing insights for instructors who wish to engage in inclusive teaching practices.     

Gendered perceptions of typical engineers across specialties for engineering majors

Young women do not choose to be engineers nearly as often as young men, and they tend to cluster in particular specialties when they do. We examine these patterns and the role of gender schemas as applied to perceptions of typical engineers in understanding the choices that women make in terms of engineering specialties. We use Part 1 of two waves of survey data collected from first-year engineering students at a large Midwestern university in the fall of 2014. Respondents scored typical engineers on 60 items from the Bem Sex-Role Inventory [Bem, S. L. 1974. “The Measurement of Psychological Androgyny.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 42: 155–162]. Preliminary results show that women consider the typical engineer to be more masculine compared to the impressions gathered from men. Additionally, engineering gender schemas predict some specialty areas but not all, suggesting that gendered perceptions may not affect choice of specialty. Our results provide insight into the decisions that women make once entering engineering.     

Balance in Positive Emotional Expressivity Across School Contexts Relates to Kindergartners’ Adjustment

Positive emotional expressivity has been associated with increased social competence and decreased maladjustment in childhood. However, a few researchers have found null or even positive associations between positive emotional expressivity and maladjustment, which suggests that there may be nuanced associations of positive expressivity, perhaps as a function of the social context in which it is expressed. We examined whether observed positive emotional expressivity balance across peer-oriented/recreational and learning contexts predicted kindergarten children’s adjustment (N = 301). Research Findings: Higher positive expressivity during lunch/recess compared to positive expressivity in the classroom was associated with lower teacher–student conflict, externalizing behaviors, and depressive symptoms. In addition, overall positive emotional expressivity predicted lower externalizing behaviors as well as lower depressive and anxiety symptoms. Practice or Policy: The results suggest the importance of assessing observed positive emotional expressivity in context as a potential indicator of children’s maladjustment risk and the need for children to adapt their emotions to different contexts. Implications for assessing and supporting positive emotional expression balance and training emotional regulation in school are discussed.     

College Students Perceptions Toward Carrying Concealed Weapons on College Campuses

This study uses a survey of undergraduate college students at two schools in the eastern United States to investigate their attitudes toward carrying concealed weapons on campus. We found that politically conservative white men who own guns are more likely to be in favor of qualified students and faculty carrying concealed weapons on campus than politically liberal non-whites and women who do not own guns. Neither academic major nor age had a significant effect on any of our dependent variables.     

The Adolescent in the Online Game

This article addresses the need for changes in current views on adolescent development. It presents observations of adolescent behavior in the online game Dragon Nest that were conducted by specialists from the Crossroads Center for Social and Psychological Adaptation and Adolescent Development, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education, in 2013. These observations helped form theories about age-specific tasks arising in adolescence. The restorative approach was selected as the theoretical basis for this work. This approach represents the practical application of the cultural-historical theory and the activity theory to the provision of social and psychological assistance to adolescents. An analysis of adolescent activity in a game, the structure of communication, and observations of adolescent relationships in online gaming space make it possible to form theories on the role of communication among peers in today’s society in terms of adolescent individuation and development.     

A New Perspective on the Effects of Covariates in Mixture Models

In this simulation study, we explored the effect of introducing covariates to a growth mixture model when covariates were also generated by a mixture model. We varied the association between the latent classes underlying the growth trajectories and the covariates, the degree of separation between the latent classes underlying the covariates, the number of covariates included, and amount of missing data in the growth data. We found that adding covariates to the growth mixture model generally hurt class recovery except where the latent classes underlying the growth trajectories and the covariates were the same or very strongly associated, and there was a large degree of separation between the classes underlying the covariates. We found that when covariates were introduced, entropy might no longer be an accurate indicator of the distinctiveness of the growth trajectory classes.     

Examining the Etiology of Reading Disability as Conceptualized by the Hybrid Model

A fairly recent definition of reading disability (RD) is that in the form of a hybrid model. The model views RD as a latent construct that is manifested through various observable unexpected impairments in reading-related skills and through inadequate response to intervention. The current report evaluated this new conceptualization of RD from an etiological perspective. The sample consisted of 2,737 twin pairs in 1st through 4th grade (M_age = 8.52) from the Florida Twin Project on Reading. Using twin analyses, results showed that a substantial proportion of genetic variance, a small proportion of shared environmental, and a small proportion of nonshared environmental variance was attributed to the RD factor. Findings suggest that the etiological architecture of RD closely mirrors the structure of the hybrid model of RD.     

‘Children’s clans’; social organisation and interpretive reconstruction as aspects on development of peer-groups in outdoor play

The focus of this article is children’s self-organisation of peer-groups through play. The play was initiated by encounters with the environment. The use of ethnographic methods in early childhood research has proved helpful to elucidate, interpret, and understand children’s experiences and the creation of meaning in their everyday lives. This inquiry draws on field notes, informal conversations with the children, and photos from a study of kindergarten children’s experiences of outdoor places and landscapes in Norway. Going out of doors together with the children regularly over a period of 10 months revealed aspects of how children’s interactions in play connect to their use of natural landscapes and its place in peer-group social organisation. The data are presented as ‘narrative maps’ and episodes written as ‘emplotted’ narratives.