Adolescents' Perceptions of Opportunities in the U.S. South: Postracial Mirage or Reality in the New Black Mecca?

The scholarly community has eagerly assessed adults' perspectives on race and opportunity in the “postracial” era. Noticeably absent are studies that probe youths' perceptions of social and educational opportunity within this era, given the relationship between education and upward mobility, and the symbolism embodied in Obama's 2008 election as the first African-American president of the United States. This paper uses data drawn from a four-year longitudinal study that examined the educational experiences of Black adolescents in Metro Atlanta, Georgia—referred to as the “New Black Mecca.” Interview data from a subset of 75 Black adolescents participating in an ethnographic study, and 1,329 surveys from a racially diverse group of adolescents across three different high schools, capture: (a) how Black adolescents embraced meritocratic notions of opportunity—while inheriting a social awareness of race-based opportunities, (b) Black adolescents' use of destigmatization strategies to thwart prejudice, and (c) the protective role a predominantly Black suburban context plays in mitigating the effects of day-to-day encounters with racial discrimination.     

Explicit instruction in orthographic structure and word morphology helps Chinese children learn to write characters

Previous research in alphabetic languages had shown that children learning to write are sensitive to morphological information, and that it serves as a resource that they draw upon as they acquire writing skills. In Chinese as well, sensitivity to morphological and orthographic information had been found to predict children’s ability to read characters. The present study investigated whether raising children’s awareness of the morphemic and orthographic structure of Chinese words would lead to beneficial results in their learning to write Chinese. An experimental group of 144 first graders from two primary schools in Beijing, China were given instruction designed to increase their knowledge of the orthographic and morphological structure of Chinese words. After two semesters, the experimental group’s ability to copy Chinese characters and to write them from memory were both found to be significantly better than a control group. Theoretical implications are discussed, including how writing benefits from the types of linguistic knowledge that underlie lexical storage and retrieval in reading and speech. Educational implications are also discussed, such as how drawing children’s attention to the morphemic components of Chinese words and the systematic features of Chinese orthography provides them with multiple sources of information they may utilize in learning to write.     

The broader aspects of speech training

Need gratification, expectation fulfillment, equivocality reduction, and constraint‐reinforcement conceptualizations have been proposed for the satisfaction construct. Analysis and application of these perspectives to communication satisfaction reveal a number of serious shortcomings. A new perspective, the discriminative fulfillment approach, was developed to overcome these problems. The perspective defines satisfaction as the reinforcement of behavior associated with discriminative stimuli and suggests the investigation of performing and perceiving discriminative stimuli and producing appropriate behaviors and reinforcement.     

Child sexual abuse prevention education: A review of school policy and curriculum provision in Australia

The past four decades have seen increasing public and professional awareness of child sexual abuse. Congruent with public health approaches to prevention, efforts to eliminate child sexual abuse have inspired the emergence of prevention initiatives which can be provided to all children as part of their standard school curriculum. However, relatively little is known about the scope and nature of child sexual abuse prevention efforts in government school systems internationally. This paper assesses and compares the policies and curriculum initiatives in primary (elementary) schools across state and territory Departments of Education in Australia. Using publicly available electronic data, a deductive qualitative content analysis of policy and curriculum documents was undertaken to examine the characteristics of child sexual abuse prevention education in these school systems. It was found that the system-level provision occurs unevenly across state and territory jurisdictions. This results in the potential for substantial inequity in Australian children’s access to learning opportunities in child abuse prevention education as a part of their standard school curriculum. In this research, we have developed a strategy for generating a set of theoretically-sound empirical criteria that may be more extensively applied in comparative research about prevention initiatives internationally.