Faith Ringgold’s Quilts and Picturebooks: Comparisons and Contributions

Faith Ringgold, best known for Tar Beach, her 1991 Caldecott award winning picturebook, has been addressing social issues in her art since the early 1960s. The purchase of her Tar Beach story quilt by the Guggenheim Museum demonstrates the acceptance of her fabric art by the fine arts community. An examination of the connections between Ringgold’s fabric art and picturebooks, including connections between themes, characters, narrative style and her use of visual elements, points to the conclusion that her quilts and picturebooks are related in their use of literary and fine art elements. Using Ringgold’s work as an example, this article supports the view that picturebooks should be considered a fine art form. Joyce Millman is an art teacher in the Philadelphia public schools and teaches in the Art Education Department at Moore College of Art and Design. As a teacher and former Philadelphia Writing Project Scholar, she continues to explore art and literacy.     

Quality in the early field experiences: A product of grade level and cooperating teachers training

Data collected for the study indicate that grade level and the supervisory training status of the cooperating teacher affect the quality of the early field experiences. Field experience students likely to have the most active, sequential, systematically evaluated experience were those placed in elementary settings with trained cooperating teachers. The authors discuss planning considerations for teacher educators suggested by this differentiation of quality by grade level and supervisory training.     

The greater fragility of females' versus males' closest same-sex friendships

Sixty females and 60 males between 10 and 15 years of age were interviewed about difficulties in current and past close same-sex friendships. Based on prior studies, it was hypothesized that females' closest same-sex friendships would be more fragile than those of males. Analyses comparing only the closest same-sex friendship of the two sexes demonstrated that females' current friendships were of a shorter duration, that females were more distressed than males when imagining the potential termination of their friendships, that more females' than males' friends already had done something to hurt the friendship, and that females had more former friendships that had ended than males had. Possible reasons are discussed for the greater vulnerability of this type of relationship for females.     

A validational study of the structured interview of symptoms associated with sexual abuse (SASA) using three samples of sexually abused, allegedly abused, and nonabused boys

Objective: With the rapid rise of sexual abuse allegations, there is a growing need to develop instruments to help clinicians determine the likelihood that sexual abuse has occurred.Method: This study evaluated the discriminant validity of a structured parent interview regarding emotional, behavioral, and physical symptoms by comparing results among three subsamples of age matched boys: 22 sexually abused boys whose perpetrator confessed, 47 boys evaluated in a sexual abuse clinic but without a history of perpetrator confession and 52 nonabused boys selected after rigorous screening.Results: In comparison with the nonabused (NA) boys, the sexually abused boys were significantly more likely to demonstrate sudden emotional and behavioral changes, frequent stomachaches, more knowledge about sex and sexual activities than expected for age, unusual agressiveness toward playmate or toy's private parts, crying easily, difficulty getting to sleep, and a change to poor school performance. The internal reliability of the SASA was determined to be .83 and scoring of an abbreviated 12-item scale demonstrated a sensitivity of 90.9% and a specificity of 88.5%.Conclusions: The findings suggest that Structured Interview of Symptoms Associated with Sexual Abuse (SASA) is an effective tool which may help in the comprehensive assessment of boys who may have been sexually abused.     

“Same/different” symbol use by pigeons

Pigeons learned to respond at one spatial position when a pair of stimuli matched and at a different spatial position when they mismatched. All birds were then transferred to novel stimuli on an orthogonal dimension. For the positive-transfer group, the correct positions for matching and mismatching stimuli remained as they were during training. For the negative-transfer group, the correct positions were reversed. In Experiment 1, the birds were trained with shape stimuli and transferred to hue stimuli. Significant group differences were found, in spite of considerable stimulus-specific learning. In Experiment 2, when the same birds (counterbalanced for Experiment 1 transfer group) were transferred to steady-intermittent stimuli, even larger group differences were found. The data indicate that pigeons have some capacity for representing the concepts “same” and “different” with arbitrary stimuli (i.e., symbols). The data further suggest that distinctions that have been made between matching/oddity transfer tasks and same/different tasks may be procedural rather than conceptual.     

Teaching evolutionary biology: Pressures,stress, and coping

Understanding what teachers need to be more comfortable and confident in their profession is crucial to the future of effective teachers and scientific literacy in public schools. This study focuses on the experiences of Arizona biology teachers in teaching evolution, using a clinical model of stress to identify sources of pressure, the resulting stresses, and coping strategies they employ to alleviate these stresses. We conducted focus groups, one‐on‐one interviews, and written surveys with 15 biology teachers from the Phoenix area. On the basis of their responses, teachers were clustered into three categories: “Conflicted,” who struggle with their own beliefs and the possible impact of their teaching, “Selective,” who carefully avoid difficult topics and situations, and “Scientists,” who see no place for controversial social issues in their science classroom. Teachers from each group felt that they could be more effective in teaching evolution if they possessed the most up‐to‐date information about evolution and genomics, a safe space in which to reflect on the possible social and personal implications with their peers, and access to richer lesson plans for teaching evolution that include not only science but personal stories regarding how the lessons arose, and what problems and opportunities they created. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 41: 791–809, 2004     

Normal versus abnormal genital findings in children: How well do examiners agree?

In order to determine how well medical examiners agree on the significance of certain anogenital findings in children, preselected colposcopic photographs of the anogenital area of 16 patients were shown to 170 medical examiners (82% pediatricians) who were blinded as to the history on each patient. Findings rated most frequently as being suggestive or indicative of penetrating injury included immediate anal dilatation with no stool present (85%), hymenal transection (84%), marked narrowing of the hymenal rim with notching (81%), and a posterior fourchette scar (75%). The agreement between the participants and the experts on the abnormal cases (mean 81%) was significantly higher than on the normal cases (mean 71%, p < .001) and on genital findings (78%) than on anal findings (63%, p = .000). Higher experience level (more cases seen per month) was associated with significantly higher agreement between the participants and the experts on five of eight normal cases and two of four abnormal cases. Use of a colposcope was also associated with higher overall agreement with the experts (74% vs. 44%, p < .0001).     

Contact and Interactivity: Social Constructionist Pedagogy in a Video-Based, Management Writing Course

In this study of a management writing course delivered via interactive television (ITV) and video streaming (VS), we examine the impact of video-based media on the instructor's pedagogy. Using grounded theory as a methodological lens, we arrive at two core categories, contact and interactivity, and four subcategories, presence, control, dialogue, and liveliness. After a careful analysis of these categories, we claim that video-based delivery deserves attention because it represents a promising component of distance learning writing instruction. Video allows an instructor to reintroduce talking as a means of learning into the arena of distance education, which tends to be dominated by text-heavy, Web-based methods of delivery. In fact, the emergence of liveliness as a category suggests that, for distant students, active learning occurs during spontaneous discussions made possible by video components. Video-based media that complement text-based interactivity can support social constructionist pedagogy in distance learning.