Identifying Indicators of Behavior Change: Insights From Wildfire Education Programs

Environmental educators are challenged to document behavior changes, because change rarely depends solely on outcomes of education programs, but on many factors. An analysis of 15 communities in the United States that have increased their preparedness for wildfire allowed us to explore how education programs encouraged individual and community change. Agency-sponsored adult educational programs helped communities change their philosophy about firefighting, pass ordinances that restrict individual property rights, and empower residents to reduce their wildfire risk. This article explores several outcomes of these programs and offers suggested indicators of change that might be useful for education program evaluation.     

Diversity and Power in Public Speaking Textbooks

The frequency of gender and ethnic groups in positions of power represented in photographs in the top 10 public speaking textbooks were investigated. Men are pictured in power positions more often than are women. In photos displaying multiple ethnicities, with or without Caucasians, people of other ethnicities were more likely to be shown in positions of power than were Caucasians. This discrepant finding is particularly interesting in light of the consistent finding on gender.     

Working Through Political Entertainment: How Negative Emotion and Narrative Engagement Encourage Political Discussion Intent in Young Americans

This study examines how a political entertainment film (Man of the Year) can impact an individual's political discussion intent after the same political topic is made salient in a subsequent news story. In addition, a process of communication influence is assessed when the roles of negative emotion and narrative engagement are considered as potential mediators of the relationship between political entertainment film viewing and political discussion intent. Seven hypotheses serve as the foundation for this experimental study, and structural equation modeling was used to test these hypotheses. Results reveal there was no direct influence of political entertainment film viewing on political discussion intent, but there was an indirect effect through negative emotion. Furthermore, narrative engagement emerged as a predictor of political discussion intent and a mediator of the association between negative emotion and political discussion intent.     

Measuring Teacher Attitudes Toward Instructional Technology: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the TAC and TAT

In this article the authors present a confirmatory factor analysis of the Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Computers (TAC) and the Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Information Technology (TAT) scales by Christensen and Knezek (1996, 1998) using large samples from three states. The TAC was reduced from 98 items and nine factors to 35 items and eight factors, while maintaining superior psychometric properties. The TAT was reduced from 50 items and five factors to 20 items measuring five factors, similarly maintaining excellent psychometric properties. The authors also developed a combined short form of both instruments using 42 items to measure 11 factors for use in situations where parsimony is critical.     

Cinematic Jujitsu: Resisting White Hegemony through the American Dream in Spike Lee's Malcolm X

Spike Lee's film Malcolm X (1992) presented Malcolm X's life story using the narrative framework of the American Dream myth central to liberal ideology. Working from Gramsci's notion of common sense in the process of hegemony, I explain how Lee appealed to this mythic structure underlying American popular culture to give a platform to Malcolm X's controversial ideas. By adopting a common sense narrative to tell Malcolm X's life story, this movie functioned as a form of cinematic jujitsu that invited critical consciousness about the contradictions between liberal ideology and the life experiences of racially excluded groups. Other formal devices in Lee's film incorporated Malcolm X's rhetoric within the common sense of mainstream politics and connected Malcolm X to more contemporary racial struggles. This analysis suggests that common sense framings of controversial figures may provide a limited space to challenge institutionalized forms of racism within popular culture.     

THE CONTRIBUTION OF SLEEP PROBLEMS TO ACADEMIC AND PSYCHOSOCIAL FUNCTIONING

The current study examined the concurrent and longitudinal relations among sleep problems with academic and psychosocial functioning in a prospective cohort study, the Tucson Children's Assessment of Sleep Apnea study (TuCASA). Children were assessed between the ages of 6 and 11 years and again approximately 5 years later. Sleep disordered breathing was assessed via polysomnography and sleep duration, sleep consistency, excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS), and insomnia symptoms were evaluated via parental and self‐report. Although regression models for sleep problems yielded minimum effect sizes in predicting standardized achievement scores, they jointly related to lower parent‐reported grades and adolescent‐reported school problems. Additionally, hierarchical multiple regression revealed that sleep parameters significantly predicted measures of psychosocial functioning with medium (Behavior Assessment Scales [BASC‐2] Parent Report Form [PRF]‐Behavioral Symptoms Index, Internalizing Behaviors Composite; Self‐Report of Personality [SRP] Emotional Symptoms Index, Internalizing Behaviors, Personal Adjustment Composite) to small‐medium effect sizes (BASC‐2 PRF Externalizing Problems, Adaptive Skills Composites, BASC‐2 SRP Inattention/Hyperactivity Composite) above and beyond sociodemographics and IQ. Similar findings occurred for BASC‐2 subscales. Parent‐reported current EDS and youth‐reported insomnia symptoms were the most consistent contributors. School psychologists should screen for and treat or make referrals for sleep problems, taking into account chronicity and multiple informants' perspectives, to maximize academic intervention benefits.     

Infants' Selective Attention to Reliable Visual Cues in the Presence of Salient Distractors

With many features competing for attention in their visual environment, infants must learn to deploy attention toward informative cues while ignoring distractions. Three eye tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether 6‐ and 8‐month‐olds (total N = 102) would shift attention away from a distractor stimulus to learn a cue–reward relation. While 8‐month‐olds showed evidence of increasingly selective attention toward the predictive cues, even when the distractors were highly salient, 6‐month‐olds shifted attention toward the predictive cues only when the distractors were equally (not more) engaging. These experiments suggest that attention in infancy is highly dependent on the relative weightings of predictiveness and visual salience, which may differ across development and context.     

Gender differences in inference generation by fourth‐grade students

The purpose of this study was to determine if there are gender differences among elementary school‐aged students in regard to the inferences they generate during reading. Fourth‐grade students (130 females; 126 males) completed think‐aloud tasks while reading one practice and one experimental narrative text. Females generated a larger number and a greater proportion of reinstatement inferences than did males (Cohen's d = .34, p = .01; Cohen's d = .26, p = .04, respectively). In contrast, there was no evidence for gender differences in other types of think‐aloud responses. These findings suggest that males and females differ in their use of cognitive processes that underlie reading comprehension, particularly with respect to the likelihood of retrieval of information from episodic memory.     

The Post-Nuclear Family and the Depoliticization of Unplanned Pregnancy in Knocked Up,Juno, and Waitress

This essay explores three films from 2007, Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress, which foreground young women's unplanned pregnancies. These movies depoliticize women's reproduction and motherhood through narratives that rearticulate the meaning of choice. Bypassing the subject of abortion, the women's decisions revolve around their choice of heterosexual partners and investment in romantic relationships. Although they question the viability of the nuclear family for single pregnant women, these films represent new iterations of post-feminism that ultimately restore conservative ideas that valorize pregnancy and motherhood as women's imperatives. We conclude by addressing how these movies present a distorted and short-sighted depiction of the politics of reproductive agency and the challenges that single mothers face.