Interactions between Family Environment and Friendship and Associations with Self-Perceived Well-Being during Early Adolescence

Using a sample of 138 early adolescents and their parents, we examined the hypothesis that family and friendship measures would moderate each other's associations with measures of children's perceptions of their adjustment and well-being. Family environment was assessed by asking parents to complete the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Scale II. A sociometric nomination procedure and the Friendship Quality Scale were completed by the subjects as assessments of reciprocity and quality in their best friendship relations. The Perceived Competence Scale for Children was used to assess children's adjustment. Stronger associations were observed between the family measures and the adjustment measures in children without a close friendship than in children with such a relationship. Also, friendship was more strongly linked to outcome measures for children from low adaptive and low cohesive families than for children in more adaptive and cohesive families. These findings indicate that experiences in the family and friendship domains interact in their associations with children's impressions of their adjustment during early adolescence.     

Cognitive Prerequisites for Generative Learning: Why Some Learning Strategies Are More Effective Than Others

This study examined age-related differences in the effectiveness of two generative learning strategies (GLSs). Twenty-five children aged 9–11 and 25 university students aged 17–29 performed a facts learning task in which they had to generate either a prediction or an example before seeing the correct result. We found a significant Age × Learning Strategy interaction, with children remembering more facts after generating predictions rather than examples, whereas both strategies were similarly effective in adults. Pupillary data indicated that predictions stimulated surprise, whereas the effectiveness of example-based learning correlated with children’s analogical reasoning abilities. These findings suggest that there are different cognitive prerequisites for different GLSs, which results in varying degrees of strategy effectiveness by age.     

Formative assessment and intrinsic motivation: The mediating role of perceived competence

Formative Assessment (FA) refers to eliciting evidence about students’ understanding and using the information to support learning, e.?g. via individual feedback. There is evidence that FA fosters students’ motivation, but less is known about the underlying processes. The present study investigates direct effects of FA on intrinsic motivation as well as the mediating role of students’ perceived competence, drawing on Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory. In a randomized, controlled trial, primary school teachers were either assigned to an FA training (n?=?17) or to a control group (CG; n?=?11). All teachers then taught two science units in their classrooms (FA: n?=?319 students, CG: n?=?232). Multilevel regression analyses showed a higher perceived competence and a marginally higher intrinsic motivation for FA students after unit 1. After unit 2, both intrinsic motivation and perceived competence were higher in the FA condition, and the impact on intrinsic motivation was significantly mediated by students’ perceived competence after the first unit. These results confirm and extend previous findings on the effectiveness of formative assessment on motivational outcomes.     

Morphological structures in visual word recognition: the case of Arabic

This research examined the function within lexical access of the main morphemic units from which most Arabic words are assembled, namely roots and word patterns. The present study focused on the derivation of nouns, in particular, whether the lexical representation of Arabic words reflects their morphological structure and whether recognition of a word involves recognition of its morphological constituents. The morphology of Arabic language constitutes two main systems: inflectional morphology and derivational morphology. Inflectional morphology is used to express grammatical relations and derivational morphology deals with the formation of new words in language; it contains two types of word patterns: verbal and nominal. In this study, it was assumed that roots are lexical entities that can facilitate lexical access to a large cluster of words that derive from them, whereas word patterns are not lexical entities and have no role in access to words assembled by them. The lexical representations of the main morphemic units were examined in four experiments using skilled readers applying masked priming technique tasks: lexical decision and naming. The results indicated that previous exposure to a word sharing the same word pattern had no marked facilitating effect on lexical decision or on naming. The main conclusion of this study on the morphology of Arabic is that roots and word patterns have no essential role in word organisation in the mental lexicon. In addition, words in nominal pattern in derivational morphology are represented in their whole shape in the mental lexicon and each word has an independent representation.     

Unveiled Sentiments: Gendered Islamophobia and Experiences of Veiling among Muslim Girls in a Canadian Islamic School

The practice of veiling has made Muslim women subject to dual oppressions—racism and Islamophobia—in society at large and patriarchal oppression and sexism from within their communities. Based on a narrative analysis of the politics of veiling in schools and society, the voices of young Muslim women attending a Canadian Islamic school speak to the contested notion of gender identity in Islam. The narratives situate their various articulations of Islamic womanhood in ways that both affirm and challenge traditional religious notions. At the same time they also are subject to Orientalist ¹ 1. Orientalism refers to a set of discursive relations and practices that structured colonial relations between Europe and its Muslim colonies. Through Orientalist discourses, “the Orient” comprising the Middle East and Asia was constructed as a barbaric, anachronistic space outside of the progress and civility of European modernity. These colonial narratives served ideologically to rationalize and justify European expansion and exploitation within Muslim lands as part of the “white man's burden” to civilize the savage races. Orientalism still maintains currency within the Western imagination and serves to legitimize more contemporary neo-imperialist practices and to maintain positional superiority of the West in relation to Islam and Muslim societies. representations of veiled and burqa clad women that represent them as oppressed and backward. Focusing on ethnographic accounts of veiling among Muslims girls who attended a gender-segregated Islamic high school in Toronto, this discussion allows a deeper understanding of how gendered religious identities are constructed in the schooling experiences of these Muslim youth.     

The Knowing In Playing

David Fairchild explains that sport is an evocative symbolic system that demonstrates the apparently ‘natural’ division of humans into two separate and dichotomous genders, and also demonstrates the apparently ‘genetically based’ hierarchy between the genders in terms of sporting results. Additionally, this hierarchy of performance translates into a hierarchy of authority, such that men occupy the most powerful positions in coaching, administration and the sports media. The initial section of this paper will follow on from Fairchild to suggest some changes that are necessary before women will gain semantic authority over their participation in sport. The paper will then suggest that the expansion of the discursive space in sport to include alternate standpoints produced by women [and other marginalised groups] can follow tactics employed by feminist standpoint theorists to expand discursive space in other fields. The final section of the paper will look at how a feminist politics in discursive sport will need to challenge what William Morgan has suggested is the recently acquired dominant position of ‘interpretative broad internalism’ in sport philosophy as one of the foundational underpinnings of internalism explains sport as a perfect practice. This underpinning has been used in substantive practice to undermine the knowledges of women athletes and commentators. This final section will look at some examples of translating private authorship into political authority for women in sport.     

TURKISH AND U.S. ATTITUDES TOWARD AGING

As people live longer and the number of older adults increases worldwide, it becomes important to understand the factors that influence how we understand and perceive our own aging as well as how we construct our attitudes toward older adults. Although studies have indicated that later adulthood can be a healthy, productive, and satisfying time of life, ageism or prejudice and discrimination against older adults and a fear of the aging process, continues to be a widespread phenomena. The purpose of this study was to compare attitudes and anxieties toward aging of young and middle-aged men and women from the United States and Turkey. The results indicate that significant country and gender differences exist in how people feel about getting older and the age at which they consider themselves to be “old.” Contact with elders as well as education regarding the process of aging appear to have a significant impact on attitudes toward aging.     

The influence of gender composition in a field of study on students' drop‐out of higher education

Combining Tinto's classical model of student drop‐out with Kanter's assessment of minorities, this article examines the influence of gender composition in a field of study on drop‐out from higher education. Our empirical analysis is based on a sample of students who left German higher education in 2014. Our results confirm previous findings that women in gender‐atypical subjects show a higher drop‐out risk than their male fellow students. We assess several mechanisms which could contribute to explain this effect. Contrary to our expectations, social integration, in the sense of contact with lecturers, seems to be a protective factor for women and men in gender‐atypical subjects. For women in gender‐atypical fields of study, contact with peers is an additional protective factor against drop‐out. The most important mechanism to explain higher education drop‐out is women's more negative self‐assessment of their suitability for male‐dominated subjects.