An empirical examination of the effects of family commitment in education on student achievement in seventh grade science

A national data base from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY) was employed to examine the effects of family commitment in education on student achievement in seventh grade science. The backward elimination procedure in the Statistical Analysis System (SAS) was adopted in this study to select significant variables of family commitment at α = .05. The results show that around 22% of the variance in student science achievement can be explained by the selected significant LSAY variables. An analysis of the impact of family commitment seems to indicate that parental education and encouragement are important factors in the improvement of student achievement. However, educators, including school personnel and parents, should exercise caution regarding how they help students with their homework and how they reward students for good grades.     

Merit: A debate

Louis Settembrini is the pseudonym of a former chairman of one of the social science departments at the University of Rochester.     

Possible selves of older adults entering a life plan community

This study examined the possible selves, goals, and perceptions of “time left” of older adults soon after they entered a life plan community as independent living residents. There has been little research regarding the effect of this life transition on older adults’ self-concept, hopes, and fears. Eighteen residents participated in one-hour personal interviews about their reasons for moving, their possible selves, goals, and perception of time left. Time left was measured in two ways: residents were asked to estimate the number of years they had left and were also asked to mark, on a novel visual analogue measure, how “limited” or “expanded” their time left felt to them. Residents were found to have an average of 6.18 possible selves in total, with more hoped-for possible selves (m = 4.39) than feared possible selves (m = 1.78). The majority of the goals were maintenance goals, followed by self-improvement goals and then avoidance goals. Residents estimated that they would live for 11.64 more years, and the majority reported that this felt like “a lot of time.” Based on their responses to the novel visual analogue measure of time left, two-thirds of the participants reported that their time left felt “expanded” rather than “limited.” Consistent with predictions based on socioemotional selectivity theory, participants with longer subjective life expectancies reported more self-improvement goals and more hoped-for selves. Participants identified more possible selves than documented in previous studies, including almost twice as many hoped-for possible selves.     

Career Problem Assessment: A Conceptual Schema for Counselor Training

Counseling students learn about various theories, models, and career assessment measures during their training. However, the transition to practicum and internship often challenges students to decide on when to apply career theories and measures to specific problems. An assessment schema is proposed to assist counselor trainees with a systematic approach to conceptualizing a client's career problem. With this assessment schema, counselor educators can help trainees organize data into meaningful categories, reduce conceptual confusion, and engage students in the study of careers.     

Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of "Accidental Napalm"

Thirty years after the fact, the Vietnam War continues to haunt the collective memory of the United States. One of the primary embodiments of that haunting is the image of a naked girl running down a road toward the camera, screaming in pain and terror from the napalm burns on her back and arms. The photograph, often dubbed “accidental napalm,” provides a complex construction of viewer response that was uniquely suited to the conditions of representation in the Vietnam era, while it reflects a continuing struggle within public culture since that time. In this essay, we offer a close reading of the photograph as a performance of public judgment, and we explore its subsequent history of appropriation. We argue that the photograph functions as a powerful emotional and inventional resource for animating moral deliberation and democratic dissent as it mediates the “stranger relationality” central to public engagement. At the same time, the image also motivates dominant narrative responses that reinscribe liberal ideology to inhibit collective memory and public accountability. This ambivalence in the circulation of the iconic image is grounded in fundamental affinities between photographic representation, public culture, and mass media.