Common Core History for Young Europeans

The prospect of European integration calls urgently for educational provision which will enable Europe's school‐leavers to understand and appraise the process. Essentially, this provision is historical. What is distinctive about Europe? What made us what we are? It is suggested that modem Europe is, at bottom, the result of two related things‐‐conflict and ideas‐‐and that the conflicts have arisen because of the ideas, and have constituted their final working‐out. Three ideas, with their related conflicts, seem fundamental, and these three pairings indicate the appropriate content for a history course for Europe's senior pupils. The three ‘ideas ‘ are the Reformation, the Enlightenment and Nationalism, and the related conflicts are the 30 Years’ War, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the World Wars of this century. The coverage of the first pairing is sketched as an example of how the whole course may be mounted and to introduce a master theme of European history for the last 300 years. The paper ends with a brief discussion of why other seemingly crucial factors are not selected and discussed.     

Accumbens D2: Raters of the Loss Outcome

Zalocusky et al. (Nature 531:642–646, 2016) recently showed that activity in D2R+ cells in the nucleus accumbens is associated with loss sensitivity to prior outcomes and reduced subsequent risky choice, and that optogenetic stimulation of these cells decreased risky choices in risk-prone rats. While their findings are important for understanding trait-level risk-taking, future research should aim to examine the neuronal mechanisms of a broader range of facets of gain and loss processing with respect to different potential reference points.     

The Structure and Substance of Teachers’ Opportunities to Learn about Teacher Evaluation Reform: Promise or Pitfall for Equity?

Despite growing momentum to overhaul teacher evaluation policies and practices, scant research examines how educators at the street level of such reform—principals and teachers—make sense of them, and almost no research examines the implications of current evaluation reforms for equity. This article provides findings based on a study of 14 districts implementing a new teacher evaluation policy in Connecticut. It focuses on how principals shaped teachers’ opportunities to learn about the new policy. We find that the majority of teachers’ opportunities to learn were formal and in whole group or one-on-one formats. We find important differences in the quantity and quality of learning opportunities at the district level, with districts serving greater shares of low-income students, students of color, and English language learners generally offering teachers fewer and lower quality opportunities to learn about the new reform than their counterparts. As such, this article builds on prior research illustrating the potential of new evaluation systems to exacerbate inequities and raises important cautions regarding the extent to which the unprecedented teacher evaluation reforms (currently underway) may exacerbate inequities among school districts.     

Distributional effects of educational improvements: Are we using the wrong model?

Measuring the incidence of public spending in education requires an intergenerational framework distinguishing between what current and future generations—that is, parents and children—give and receive. In standard distributional incidence analysis, households are assumed to receive a benefit equal to what is spent on their children enrolled in the public schooling system and, implicitly, to pay a fee proportional to their income. We show that, in an intergenerational framework, this is equivalent to assuming perfectly altruistic individuals, in the sense of the dynastic model, and perfect capital markets. But in practice, credit markets are imperfect and poor households cannot borrow against the future income of their children. We show that under such circumstances, standard distributional incidence analysis may greatly over-estimate the progressivity of public spending in education: educational improvements that are progressive in the long-run steady state may actually be regressive for the current generation of poor adults. This is especially true where service delivery in education is highly inefficient—as it is in poor districts of many developing countries—so that the educational benefits received are relatively low in comparison with the cost of public spending. Our results have implications for both policy measures and analytical approaches.     

Discriminating between reward-produced memories: Effects of differences in reward magnitude

The greater the dissimilarity between exteroceptive stimuli, the easier it is to discriminate between them. To determine whether a similar relationship holds for memories produced by reward events, rats in three runway investigations received trials in pairs, the number of food pellets (0.045 g) occurring on Trial 1 indicating whether reward or nonreward would occur on Trial 2. In each investigation, discriminative responding on Trial 2 was better the larger the difference in reward magnitude on Trial 1. This finding was obtained under a wide variety of conditions: for example, when the larger of two reward magnitudes on Trial 1 signaled nonreward on Trial 2 (Experiment 1, 10 vs. 2 pellets); when the smaller of two reward magnitudes on Trial 1 signaled nonreward on Trial 2 (Experiment 2, 10 vs. 2 pellets); and when the same magnitude of reward on Trial 1 signaled nonreward on Trial 2 (Experiment 3, either 5 pellets or 0 pellets). The findings obtained here indicate that the greater the dissimilarity between reward magnitudes, the greater the dissimilarity between the memories they produced and, thus, the easier it is to discriminate between them. It is suggested that the present results may provide a basis for understanding findings obtained in other instrumental learning investigations in which reward magnitude is varied.     

Gardnerella vaginalis infection and sexual contact in female children

Gardnerella vaginalis (GV) infection has been reported as being acquired via sexual contact in adults and as an indicator of sexual contact in female children (DeJong, 1985). The purpose of this study was to determine if GV infection was more commonly found in 191 female children who gave a history of sexual contact and/or were infected with Neisseria gonorrhoeae (GC) or Chlamydia trachomatis (CT) (Group 1), compared with 144 female children evaluated for possible sexual abuse and found to have no such history or infection with GC or CT (Group 2), or 31 female children (friends of the authors) without such a history or GC or CT infection (Group 3). Vaginal GV was found in 5.3% of Group 1, 4.9% of Group 2 and 6.4% of Group 3 (p > .05). Also, vaginal GV infection was not related to the type of sexual contact or race, but did increase with age in white female children. Because vaginal GV infection is not more commonly found in children with a history of sexual contact than those without such a history, the finding of GV in a vaginal culture in an individual case would not be a reliable marker of sexual contact. Routine culturing for GV is not recommended as part of a sexual abuse workup.