Children's developing commitments to joint goals

This study investigated young children's commitment to a joint goal by assessing whether peers in collaborative activities continue to collaborate until all received their rewards. Forty-eight 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children worked on an apparatus dyadically. One child got access to her reward early. For the partner to benefit as well, this child had to continue to collaborate even though there was no further reward available to her. The study found that 3.5-year-olds, but not 2.5-year-olds, eagerly assisted their unlucky partner. They did this less readily in a noncollaborative control condition. A second study confirmed that 2.5-year-old children understood the task structure. These results suggest that children begin to appreciate the normative dimensions of collaborative activities during the 3rd year of life.     

Reading training by means of disappearing text: effects on reading performance and eye movements

The Reading Acceleration Program (RAP), which uses adaptively increasing text erasure rates to enforce reading rate improvements, has been positively evaluated in various languages, reader and age groups. The current study compared the established incremental increase of text erasure rate with a training using fixed erasure rates in two groups of young, non-impaired German adults. Eye-tracking measures prior and post training examined training-related changes of eye-movement patterns. Equal gains in reading performance in both training groups led to the conclusion that not the adaptive increase but already text erasure at fixed rates provides an economically efficient tool for the enhancement of reading rates. Furthermore, eye-tracking results suggest that text erasure training affects word processing not only at one specific level, but simultaneously at pre-lexical, lexical, and post-lexical stages. Although these outcomes are promising, further research is necessary to determine the optimal individual erasure rates that preserve good comprehension at varying levels of text difficulty and in different orthographies.     

Online emotional inferences in written and auditory texts: a study with children and adults

Emotional inferences are conclusions that a reader draws about the emotional state of a story’s protagonist. In this study, we examined whether children and adults draw emotional inferences while reading short stories or listening to an aural presentation of short stories. We used an online method that assesses inferences during reading with a reaction time paradigm. Children aged 8 and 10 years and adults took part. We varied whether the short stories emphasized a certain goal of the protagonist in order to proof our assumption that protagonist-goals in stories help readers to build emotional inferences. Additionally, we assessed the updating capacity of our participants’ working memories assuming a positive influence. Results reveal that participants of all age groups drew emotional inferences. Type of text presentation, goal-emphasis, and updating capacity influence whether emotional inferences are built and how precise these inferences are. The way in which these variables influenced emotional inferences was moderated by the age of the participants.     

Conceptualizing a Spatial Data Infrastructure for the Social Sciences: An Example from Germany

There is an increasing demand for spatial data within the social sciences as such data promise to contribute to a better understanding of how the concrete living environment influences individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. Spatial data can complement data from surveys; however, as of yet there is no spatial data infrastructure for the social sciences in Germany that facilitates merging of spatial data with survey data. This article explores avenues for creating such a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) for the social sciences in Germany. We examine the role that librarians, archivists, and curators can play in offering spatial data infrastructure services for social scientists, and show the scope and nature of necessary tasks in areas such as harmonization, archiving, dissemination, and user support. As the case of Germany is similar to that of other European countries, we expect our results to be helpful in the creation of SDIs in other countries as well. This article suggests technical and organizational measures for merging survey data and spatial data in compliance with German privacy legislation. Measures for storage and dissemination of enriched survey data, for example by providing restricted access to the data in a secured environment, also are explored.     

State-Dependent Memory in Infants

Why do infants remember some things and not others? Human infants frequently cycle through different states such as calm attentiveness, wakeful activity, and crying. Given that cognitive processes do not occur in isolation, such fluctuations in internal state might influence memory processing. In the present experiment, declarative memory in 9-month-old infants (N = 96) was heavily state dependent. Infants exhibited excellent retention of a deferred imitation task after a 15-min delay if their state at encoding was identical to their state at retrieval (e.g., calm). Infants failed to exhibit retention if their state at encoding was different from their state at retrieval (e.g., calm vs. animated). Infant memory processing depends on internal cues.     

“It’s worth it”1 practitioner research as a tool of professional learning: starting points,conclusions and benefits from the perspective of teacher-students

ABSTRACT

The current study focuses on the concept PPS-PR (Personalized Professionalization in Pedagogical Fields through Practitioner Research), an approach that integrates practitioner research projects during internships. A central aim is to encourage teacher students´ professional learning (Bachelor of Primary Education). 312 Austrian teacher students carried out practitioner research projects and were invited to participate in an online survey at the end of the semester. The results show that the majority of respondents choose research topics predominantly related to the fields of methodical competences (e.g. classroom management strategies) and report consistent conclusions and long term benefits. The findings indicate that professional learning of teacher students can be supported by the PPS-PR concept. Therefore, practitioner research can be seen as a tool for developing competences that are stable and can furthermore be transferred to other situational contexts.     

Vicarious Traumatization,Trauma‐Sensitive Supervision,and Counselor Preparation

Counselor educators have an ethical responsibility to prepare counselors and supervisors to detect and resolve vicarious traumatization in themselves and their supervisees. This article reviews relevant literature on vicarious traumatization and strategies to mitigate it. Also included is a review of the American Counseling Association's (2005) ACA Code of Ethics and the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs' (2007) proposed 2009 standards as each relates to trauma counseling and vicarious traumatization. Specific counselor preparation practices are suggested.