Entertainment We Watch and Entertainment We Appreciate: Patterns of Motion Picture Consumption and Acclaim Over Three Decades

An analysis of 582 film titles spanning the years from 1980 to 2010 was conducted to examine the attributes and characteristics that predicted both viewership (e.g., box-office revenues) and critical acclaim (e.g., awards, audience ratings). Overall, viewership was highest for action/adventure films and lowest for dramas. In contrast, acclaim was highest for more dramatic fare, and for films that featured dark, contemplative, and emotional themes. The results are discussed in terms of the entertainment gratifications reflecting both enjoyment and appreciation.     

Museum Monsters and Victorious Viruses: Improving Public Understanding of Emerging Biomedical Research

Although microbes directly impact everyone's health, most people have limited knowledge about them. In this article, we describe a museum and media public education campaign aimed at helping diverse audiences better understand emerging knowledge about microbes and infectious disease. Funded primarily by the Science Education Partnership (SEPA) program of the National Institutes of Health, this campaign involved crosscutting programs designed to extend impacts throughout a broad public audience. Collaborations with partners from public media, libraries, science education, the social sciences, and biomedical research centers extended our outreach to local and national audiences of adults and youth. Our campaign developed programs for radio broadcast, schools, libraries, museums, and publishers to ultimately reach over eight million people. In addition, we conducted a series of research studies focused on understanding the mental models that people create of the complex concepts of microbes and infectious disease and on how to engage hard‐to‐reach adolescents with this science content. These studies furthered our understanding of how people reason about unseen phenomena, the kinds of materials that might intrigue youth who claim little interest in science, and how to begin to combat misinformation pervasive in this field. Our comparisons of expert, teacher, and teen reasoning about microbes revealed their distinct mental models on the topics of infection, vaccination, and immune response. Our investigation of comics confirmed their power to motivate teenagers to want to read more about science. Across all levels of science identity, we found that youth were more engaged with the comics than with comparable essays. Together, these findings provide insights into how to educate a diverse public about emerging biomedical research.     

A stigma power perspective on digital government service avoidance

The digital-by-default policy for government services implemented in many European countries can pose challenges to marginalized citizens, such as people with disabilities. Prior research on electronic inclusion and the digital divide has mainly considered technology-related concerns, such as Internet anxiety, preventing people with disabilities from using digital government services. Yet, these concerns may insufficiently account for the fact that people with disabilities may suspect that governments provide new services only to reduce costs and forgo the need for more meaningful social change. Therefore, we draw from stigma power theory to understand how perceptions of stereotyping and discrimination contribute to the avoidance of digital government services among people with disabilities. Our results indicate that overcoming underutilization of digital government services among people with disabilities requires a holistic approach by addressing technology-related as well as stigma-related concerns.     

Using video analysis to support prospective K-8 teachers’ noticing of students’ multiple mathematical knowledge bases

As part of a larger research project aimed at transforming preK-8 mathematics teacher preparation, the purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which prospective teachers notice children’s competencies related to children’s mathematical thinking, and children’s community, cultural, and linguistic funds of knowledge or what we refer to as children’s multiple mathematical knowledge bases. Teachers’ noticing supports students’ learning in deep and meaningful ways. Researchers designed and enacted a video analysis activity with prospective teachers in their mathematics methods course. The activity served as a decomposition of practice in order to support prospective teachers in engaging in an approximation of the practice of noticing. Our findings showed that prospective teachers evidenced noticing of mathematics teaching and learning as early as the mathematics methods course. We also found that the prompts and structure of the activity supported prospective teachers by increasing their depth of noticing and their foci in noticing, moving from attending primarily to teacher moves (and merely describing what they saw) to becoming aware of significant interactions (and interpreting effects of these interactions on learning). Implications for teacher educators interested in designing and enacting activities to support noticing are discussed.     

Phonological recoding,orthographic decoding,and comprehension skills during reading acquisition

To become skillful readers, children have to acquire the ability to translate printed words letter by letter into phonemic representations (phonological recoding) and the ability to recognize the written word forms holistically (orthographical decoding). Whereas phonological recoding is the key for learning to read and useful for recognizing unknown or low-frequent words, orthographical decoding is often more efficient and takes less time, thus facilitating reading processes on the sentence and text level. Several studies with English-speaking children provided evidence for the relevance of the two routes but the question whether and to what extent both word recognition skills contribute to reading comprehension in young German readers requires further clarification. Based on data from a cross-sectional study with German primary school children we investigated whether and to what extent both types of word recognition skills are associated with sentence (N = 666) and text comprehension skills (N = 149) and how these relationships develop from Grade 2 to 4. The results indicate that both phonological recoding skills and orthographical decoding skills are important for reading comprehension skills. Their relative weight does not change across grade levels.     

THE EFFECT OF KNOWLEDGE LINKING LEVELS IN BIOLOGY LESSONS UPON STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURE

Knowledge structure is an important aspect for defining students’ competency in biology learning, but how knowledge structure is influenced by the teaching process in naturalistic biology classroom settings has scarcely been empirically investigated. In this study, 49 biology lessons in the teaching unit blood and circulatory system in 9th grade German classrooms were videotaped and analyzed. Before the lesson, a questionnaire was administered to the students to solicit their responses about learning motivation. After the lesson, students’ learning outcomes on knowledge structure were examined with the concept mapping method. The video coding used in this study focused on the knowledge linking levels during the biology lesson. Out of the 49 classes, those with the highest and those with the lowest linking levels were selected based on the coding results. In high-linking classes, interrelated facts were introduced more often in the lessons, whereas in the lessons of the low-linking classes, isolated pieces of knowledge were predominant. The results from the concept mapping task showed that the students in the high-linking classes constructed more correct relations among the concepts compared to the students in the low-linking classes. The results remained stable even after controlling for learning motivation. These findings confirm the importance of teaching interrelated facts and concepts instead of isolated facts for fostering students’ knowledge structure. As a result, based on the Bavarian biology curriculum, we develop materials and programs to enable students, student teachers, and teachers to focus on interrelated facts and basic concepts instead of isolated facts in biology lessons.