Factors impacting the rapid transition of anatomy curricula to an online environment in response to Covid-19

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many academic institutions had to rapidly transition education to a remote online environment. While a hurdle for most educators, this transition posed an even greater challenge for anatomy educators, many of whom were forced to depart from the traditional cadaver-based laboratory to a virtual format. Recent publications have discussed the rapid transition to online formats necessitated by Covid-19 and the accompanying difficulties, but none have identified specific factors that influenced the difficulty of this transition. Anatomy educators were surveyed to examine how this transition was accomplished and perceived. Of the 165 educators who responded, the majority utilized cadaver-based laboratory instruction. Educators felt that transitioning the laboratory portion of their courses was significantly more difficult and required more time than converting lecture materials. Factors that impacted the difficulty of the transition included a number of pedagogical aspects of the pre-Covid-19 curricula, including the delivery format of prior content, availability of pre-existing electronic materials, and the laboratory technique previously used. Additionally, the length of time an educator had been teaching prior to Covid-19 impacted their perception of difficulty, with newer and more senior educators finding this much more challenging than mid-tenure educators. Ease of transition may be related to previous exposure to curricular reform, experience with multiple anatomy pedagogies, and educator adaptability. While not surprising that converting a cadaver-based laboratory to an online format was challenging, knowledge of the alignment of this difficulty with prior educator pedagogy can help guide future innovations to anatomy education.     

Interactional power and support in digital inclusion of an adult with intellectual disabilities: a case study analysis

Digital inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities is not commensurate with those without disabilities. Societal, political, financial, individual and interpersonal barriers help explain this disparity. Caregivers can act as both support and gatekeeper to internet access and use by adults with intellectual disabilities. This study investigated micro-level interpersonal factors influencing access and use of the internet by an adult with intellectual disabilities to explore the balance and interplay of power and support around the processes of digital inclusion and online risk taking. Taking a case study approach, perspectives of three key stakeholders were gathered via interviews: the person with intellectual disabilities, his mother and a paid support worker. Perspectives and experiences were contrasted using systemic functional linguistic analysis of discourse to explore the ways power and support were represented in the language of negotiated digital inclusion. Dynamics between the parent and person with intellectual disabilities and between the parent and paid staff clearly influenced processes of digital inclusion and were affected by varying priorities, positions and perceptions of power to allow, disallow and monitor access and use of the internet. These had the power to shape and drive internet access. Language choices by the person with intellectual disabilities showed that he was not fully aware of the risks involved in engaging with certain aspects of digital inclusion but how he spoke about the internet indicated some autonomy in technology use. Supporting the development of digital competence, confidence and resilience in people with learning disabilities should be combined with support to increase self-awareness regarding digital risk. Those supporting people with intellectual disabilities towards digital inclusion need additional guidance on how to do this effectively for the people they support.     

You've Been Warned: Does Information About Pitfalls of Technological Toys Affect Caregiver Behavior?

Although the presence of toys in childhood has remained steady for decades, the types of toys that fill children's toy boxes have changed, especially over the last 10–15 years. Many of today's toys are marked by technological enhancements, from a shape sorter driven by a singing bear to robotic plastic animals designed to match a toddler's favorite television show. Although examining the effects of these changes is still an unexplored area, research to date suggests that there may be costs to the quality of caregiver–child interaction when using these toys together. This leads to two possibilities: (1) the design of the enhancements themselves hurt interactions; or (2) these toys can still be beneficial to interactions, but caregivers simply need to be aware of the potential pitfalls. In this study, we explore whether providing caregivers with a subtle cue about the potential negative impacts of technological toys on caregiver–child interaction affects their behavior.     

Social goals as predictors of children's in vivo emotional responses to social challenges

This study examined the role of social goals in shaping children's in vivo emotional responses during a challenging dyadic peer interaction. In all, 132 children (M_age = 9.46 years, SD = 0.33; 50% girls; 72% White) participated in a dyadic social challenge (conflict-of-interest situation) and reported their social goals and emotions during the task, and observers coded child emotions and dyad negativity. Mastery goals predicted more positive emotions unless interactions were highly negative. Performance-avoidance goals predicted more negative emotions, particularly in the context of negative interactions and disappointing outcomes. Performance-approach goals predicted less negative displayed emotions but more negative self-reported emotions. Findings provide novel insights into how context-specific social goals contribute to affective social competence during peer interactions.     

Do more hours in center-based care cause more externalizing problems? A cross-national replication study

Whether high quantities of center-based care cause behavior problems is a controversial question. Studies using covariate adjustment for selection factors have detected relations between center care and behavior problems, but studies with stronger internal validity less often find such evidence. We examined whether within-child changes in hours in center-based care predicted changes in externalizing problems in toddlers and preschoolers (N = 10,105; 49% female; data collection 1993–2012) in seven studies, including from Germany, Netherlands, Norway, two from Canada and two from the U.S. Race/ethnicity data were only collected in the United States (57% and 80% White; 42% and 13% African-American; 1.2% and 5% Latinx). Meta-analyses showed no association (r = .00, p = .88) between hours in center-based care and externalizing problems.     

Cheating among elementary school children: A machine learning approach

Academic cheating is common, but little is known about its early emergence. It was examined among Chinese second to sixth graders (N = 2094; 53% boys, collected between 2018 and 2019) using a machine learning approach. Overall, 25.74% reported having cheated, which was predicted by the best machine learning algorithm (Random Forest) at a mean accuracy of 81.43%. Cheating was most strongly predicted by children's beliefs about the acceptability of cheating and the observed prevalence and frequency of peer cheating at school. These findings provide important insights about the early development of academic cheating, and how to promote academic integrity and limit cheating before it becomes entrenched. The present research demonstrates that machine learning can be effectively used to analyze developmental data.     

Developmental trajectories of behavioral inhibition from infancy to age seven: The role of genetic and environmental risk for psychopathology

The present study leveraged data from a longitudinal adoption study of 361 families recruited between 2003 and 2010 in the United States. We investigated how psychopathology symptoms in birth parents (BP; M_age = 24.1 years; 50.5–62.9% completed high school) and adoptive parents (AP; M_age = 37.8 years; 80.9% completed college; 94% mother–father couples) influenced children's behavioral inhibition (BI) trajectories. We used latent growth models of observed BI at 18 and 27 months, and 4.5 and 7 years in a sample of adopted children (Female = 42%, White = 57%, Black = 11%, Multi-racial = 21%, Latinx = 9%). BI generally decreased over time, yet there was substantial variability in these trajectories. Neither BP nor AP psychopathology symptoms independently predicted systematic differences in BI trajectories. Instead, we found that AP internalizing symptoms moderated the effects of BP psychopathology on trajectories of BI, indicating a gene by environment interaction.     

How students reason about matter flows and accumulations in complex biological phenomena: An emerging learning progression for mass balance

In recent years, there has been a strong push to transform STEM education at K-12 and collegiate levels to help students learn to think like scientists. One aspect of this transformation involves redesigning instruction and curricula around fundamental scientific ideas that serve as conceptual scaffolds students can use to build cohesive knowledge structures. In this study, we investigated how students use mass balance reasoning as a conceptual scaffold to gain a deeper understanding of how matter moves through biological systems. Our aim was to lay the groundwork for a mass balance learning progression in physiology. We drew on a general models framework from biology and a covariational reasoning framework from math education to interpret students' mass balance ideas. We used a constant comparative method to identify students' reasoning patterns from 73 interviews conducted with undergraduate biology students. We helped validate the reasoning patterns identified with >8000 written responses collected from students at multiple institutions. From our analyses, we identified two related progress variables that describe key elements of students' performances: the first describes how students identify and use matter flows in biology phenomena; the second characterizes how students use net rate-of-change to predict how matter accumulates in, or disperses from, a compartment. We also present a case study of how we used our emerging mass balance learning progression to inform instructional practices to support students' mass balance reasoning. Our progress variables describe one way students engage in three dimensional learning by showing how student performances associated with the practice of mathematical thinking reveal their understanding of the core concept of matter flows as governed by the crosscutting concept of matter conservation. Though our work is situated in physiology, it extends previous work in climate change education and is applicable to other scientific fields, such as physics, engineering, and geochemistry.     

Code-switching 101: Black women counselor educators’ personal and professional identity development

The perceptions of personal and professional identity development from four Black women counselor educators were examined through a collaborative autoethnography methodology. Themes identified include (a) intentionality of code-switching, (b) inextricable identities, (c) fight for and with authenticity, and (d) mutual development of personal and professional identities.