Tensionalities in the collaborative instructional design process

This paper is a retrospective restorying of an instructional design project in which members of a large urban school board collaborated with faculty members of a large university to design and produce an interactive videodisc. This story has been told from a number of perspectives, but is reframed in this paper as a process of culture building in which the design family is the basis of meaning and action. Conversation-based design is suggested as the tool and the content of the family culture. In particular, conversation is a cultural artifact revealing stories of tensionalities in the design process that frame the theoretical constructs in this collaborative model.     

Reality testing in adult women who report childhood sexual and physical abuse

OBJECTIVE: To better understand how neighborhood and individual factors are related to child maltreatment. METHOD: Using an ecological framework, a multi-level model (Hierarchical Linear Modeling) was used to analyze neighborhood structural conditions and individual risk factors for child abuse and neglect. Parents (n = 400) of children under the age of 18 were systematically selected from 20 randomly selected census-defined block groups with different risk profiles for child maltreatment report rates. Parents were administered the Neighborhood Environment for Children Rating Scales, the Child Abuse Potential Inventory, the Zimet measure of social support, and the Conflict Tactics Scales as a measure of childhood experience with violence. RESULTS: Neighborhood factors of improverishment and child care burden significantly affect child abuse potential after controlling for individual risk factors. However, neighborhood effects are weaker than they appear to be in aggregate studies of official child maltreatment reports. Variation in child abuse potential within neighborhoods is greater than between neighborhoods. However, adverse neighborhood conditions weakened the effects of known individual risk and protective factors, such as violence in the family of origin. CONCLUSIONS: If individual potential for child maltreatment is more evenly distributed across neighborhoods than reported maltreatment, then neighborhood and community play an important, if as yet unspecified, role in child maltreatment. Multi-level models are a promising research strategy for disentangling the complex interactions of individual and contextual factors in child maltreatment.     

What's Gender Got To Do With It? Teachers' Perceptions Of Situation Severity And Requests For Assistance

There is currently a gap in the consultation literature related to how teacher and student gender may affect teacher perceptions of and responses to student behavior. In this study, 147 preservice and practicing teachers were presented with four “gender-neutral” student-centered problems in the form of short vignettes in which the gender of the student was rotated. Respondents rated these vignettes on problem severity, likelihood of seeking assistance, and from whom they would seek assistance. Data were analyzed by teacher status (preservice or practicing), teacher gender, and student gender. Results suggest teachers typically did not make different decisions based on student gender. However, female teachers often rated student situations as more severe than their male colleagues, with some differences between practicing and preservice teachers. The potential implication of this and related findings for the process of consultation are highlighted.     

The effects of maternal smartphone use on mother–child interaction

This study assessed the effects of maternal smartphone use on mother–child interaction. Thirty-three Israeli mothers and their 24- to 36-month-old toddlers (16 boys) from middle-high socioeconomic status participated in three within-subjects experimental conditions: maternal smartphone use, maternal magazine reading, and uninterrupted dyadic free-play. The mothers produced fewer utterances, provided fewer responses to child bids, missed child bids more often, and exchanged fewer conversational turns with their children when engaged with a smartphone or printed magazines compared to uninterrupted free-play. The quality of maternal responsiveness was also decreased. These findings suggest maternal smartphone use compromises mother–child interaction, which given smartphone ubiquity in daily life may have negative effects on child development in various domains, including language, cognition, and socioemotional regulation.     

Aligning experiences: comparing and contrasting K12 and post-secondary space,resources, and services to smooth the college transition

Abstract

In this study, researchers used basic qualitative research to understand the spaces, resources, and services available to K12 students in their school libraries. Using observation and semi-structured interviews with K12 teacher librarians, this research allowed for a comparison of the K12 and post-secondary environments through which the authors were able to identify similarities and differences in function and service. In this article, the authors explore strategies to ease the transition of K12 students to the college environment, including collaboration between post-secondary and K12 libraries, robust orientation programs, and alignment of information literacy initiatives. This article adds to the body of college readiness literature and suggests avenues for future research.     

Visual conceptualizations and models of science

This is the Guest Editor's introduction to the Special Issue on “Science of Science: Conceptualizations and Models of Science”, Journal of Informetrics. The introduction discusses challenges towards a theoretically grounded and practically useful science of science. It provides a brief chronological review of relevant work and argues for (1) the development of common frameworks for the comparison and combination of existing approaches, theories, laws, and measurements, (2) the combination of quantitative and qualitative studies of science, and (3) the operationalization of theoretical concepts in terms of measurement and empirical evidence. Next, three visual conceptualizations of science are discussed and compared. Each of them provides a framework for the comparison and combination of existing works, means to combine quantitative and qualitative data, and helps to operationalize and communicate theoretical concepts using empirical data. Last but not least, the contributions of and interlinkages among the papers included in this issue are discussed.