I'm Going to Instagram It! An Analysis of Athlete Self-Presentation on Instagram

Using Goffman's notions of self-presentation and gender displays, the following study examines the Instagram feeds of 27 professional athletes to determine how athletes are using the visual social media site for self-presentation. A mixed methods approach examined the photographs and captions to determine what behaviors and themes emerged. Through content analysis, the self-presentation styles of athletes of both genders, as well as the main differences between them were examined, and significant differences emerged that confirmed the previously established gender norms. Through textual analysis, findings with respect to captions align with previous research on athlete self-presentation on social media. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as directions for future research are discussed.     

Explaining Media Choice: The Role of Issue-Specific Engagement in Predicting Interest-Based and Partisan Selectivity

This study analyzes the predictors of 2 types of media selectivity: interest-based (i.e., choice of entertainment over politics) and partisan (i.e., choice of pro-attitudinal over counter-attitudinal or balanced news). Relying on a large survey-based experiment, we find that issue-specific engagement variables, including perceived issue understanding, issue importance, and issue attitude strength, predict interest-based and partisan selectivity above and beyond the influence of general political knowledge, news interest, and strength of political leanings. These results show that the drivers of selectivity are more complex than general political attributes; rather, they are contextual and reflect people’s engagement with particular issues.     

Seeing in the Dark: Embodied Cognition in Amateur Astronomy Practice

We add to research on embodied cognition by investigating the observational practices of amateur astronomers. Specifically, we take an interactionist perspective and examine how the body is recruited, moment by moment, as a resource for producing and communicating meaning during field activity. The data corpus is a set of ethnographic video records and field notes on the routines of a community of astronomers, especially small-group interactions during planning, searching for, observing, and confirming sight of a celestial target. Within this space, our analysis highlights how different modalities of embodied action and reasoning (gestures, tool use, gaze, touch, and others) were deployed and coordinated throughout the process of observing a celestial object and how those emerged in the transactions among participants. Our findings rehearse many issues and topics in the contemporary literature (e.g., gesturing for measuring or representationally) but also reveal important, novel forms of embodied action and reasoning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics practices (e.g., training the eyes in averted vision and inscribing a celestial scene onto one’s hand). More broadly, these findings further affirm the power of interactionist analyses of knowing and learning while also surfacing areas in which expanded theorizing is needed to account for the full set of cognitive phenomena we observed.     

Letting the village be the teacher: a look at community-based learning in Northern Thailand

ABSTRACT

Higher education in the U.S. sees global learning as critical to student development. Over the last seventy years, study abroad has emerged as the method of choice for teaching global knowledge and intercultural competence. In this context, community-based global learning programs are a type of program where students live in communities to learn directly from people and place. Looking at a field studies program in Northern Thailand, this paper explores the educational mobility of study abroad and impact on host communities. It shares findings on the experiences of two communities who have hosted study abroad students for almost twenty years. Best practices and recommendations for faculty and institutions running community-based global learning programs are shared, including the centrality of community voice in curriculum, benefits of applying a range of pedagogical methods on course, the critical nature of adequately preparing students for cultural immersion, and compensating communities justly for their work.     

Assessing anxiety in youth with autism spectrum disorder

Anxiety is now recognized as one of the most common co-occurring conditions in youth diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Despite the prevalence of this comorbid condition, accurate assessment and diagnosis of anxiety in ASD has proven difficult. This paper will address the considerable research literature on assessing anxiety in youth with ASD, including difficulties related to assessment and differential diagnosis. In addition, this paper will describe relevant tools and methods for assessing anxiety in this complex population.     

Classroom instructional quality,exposure to mathematics instruction and mathematics achievement in fifth grade

This study examined the quality of teacher–child interactions and exposure to mathematics instruction as predictors of 5th grade student’s mathematics achievement. The sample was a subset of the children involved in the NICHD–SECC longitudinal study (N = 657). Results indicate that, even after controlling for student demographic characteristics, more exposure to mathematics instruction was related to increased fifth grade mathematics achievement for both calculations and applied problems assessments, but there was no main effect for improved instructional quality. Findings also indicate that, in classrooms where lower instructional quality was observed, greater exposure to mathematics instruction predicted improved mathematics achievement. Findings are discussed in terms of differing aspects of mathematics instruction and the possible compensatory role of exposure to instruction in classrooms of lower quality.     

Infants’ and Young Children's Imitation of Linguistic In‐Group and Out‐Group Informants

Although children can use social categories to intelligently select informants, children's preference for in‐group informants has not been consistently demonstrated across age and context. This research clarifies the extent to which children use social categories to guide learning by presenting participants with a live or video‐recorded action demonstration by a linguistic in‐group and/or out‐group model. Participants’ (N = 104) propensity to imitate these actions was assessed. Nineteen‐month‐olds did not selectively imitate the actions of the in‐group model in live contexts, though in‐group preferences were found after watching the demonstration on video. Three‐year‐olds selectively imitated the actions demonstrated by the in‐group member regardless of context. These results indicate that in‐group preferences have a more nuanced effect on social learning than previous research has indicated.     

Online collaborative documents for research and coursework

Conclusion Garrison’s (2000) review of distance education theories describes the current need for ”sustained real two-way communication ... that refiect(s) a collaborative approach to distance education” (p. 13). One way to apply such theories to research and coursework is to use collaborative documents to promote transactions culminating in deliberation among the key players. Such deliberation can create ”a particular kind of democratic public culture among the deliberators: listening as well as talking, sharing resources, forging decisions together rather than only advocating positions taken earlier, and coming to disagreement” (Parker, Ninomiya, & Cogan, 1999, p. 129). Her research interests are collaborative learning in distance education, impact of culture on online learners, and design of online instruction for constructivist learning environments. Her primary research interests are in design considerations for collaborative online environments and in the powers of shared multimedia for enhancing personal growth, multicultural understanding, and global awareness. She investigates visual messages: how they can be shared and interpreted by learners, their impact, and how their impact can be researched. Her research interests are in computer and network-based foreign language and cultural learning.     

The effect of a human agent’s external regulation upon college students’ hypermedia learning

In this study we examined the effectiveness of self-regulated learning (SRL) and externally regulated learning (ERL) on college students’ learning about a science topic with hypermedia during a 40-min session. A total of 82 college students with little knowledge of the topic were randomly assigned either to the SRL or ERL condition. Students in the SRL condition regulated their own learning, while students in the ERL condition had access to a human tutor who facilitated their self-regulated learning. We converged product (pretest–posttest declarative knowledge and qualitative shifts in participants’ mental models) with process (think-aloud) data to examine the effectiveness of SRL versus ERL. Analysis of the declarative knowledge measures showed that the ERL condition group mean was statistically significantly higher than the group mean for the SRL condition on the labeling and flow diagram tasks. There were no statistically significant differences between groups on the matching task, but both groups showed statistically significant increases in performance. Further analyses showed that the odds of being in a higher mental model posttest group were decreased by 65% for the SRL group as compared to the ERL group. In terms of SRL behavior, participants in the SRL condition engaged in more use of selecting new information sources, re-reading, summarizing, free searching, and enacting control over the context of their learning. In comparison, the ERL participants engaged in more activation of prior knowledge, utilization of feeling of knowing and judgment of learning, monitoring their progress toward goals, drawing, hypothesizing, coordination of information sources, and expressing task difficulty. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the international conference of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AI-Ed 2007), Los Angeles, LA (July, 2007).