Correlates of emotional congruence with children in sexual offenders against children: A test of theoretical models in an incarcerated sample

Emotional congruence with children is a psychological construct theoretically involved in the etiology and maintenance of sexual offending against children. Research conducted to date has not examined the relationship between emotional congruence with children and other psychological meaningful risk factors for sexual offending against children. The current study derived potential correlates of emotional congruence with children from the published literature and proposed three models of emotional congruence with children that contain relatively unique sets of correlates: the blockage, sexual deviance, and psychological immaturity models. Using Area under the Curve analysis, we assessed the relationship between emotional congruence with children and offense characteristics, victim demographics, and psychologically meaningful risk factors in a sample of incarcerated sexual offenders against children (n = 221). The sexual deviance model received the most support: emotional congruence with children was significantly associated with deviant sexual interests, sexual self-regulation problems, and cognition that condones and supports child molestation. The blockage model received partial support, and the immaturity model received the least support. Based on the results, we propose a set of further predictions regarding the relationships between emotional congruence with children and other psychologically meaningful risk factors to be examined in future research.     

School mathematics registers in a context of low academic expectations

We investigate the different school mathematical discourses that are made available for students who all share an unfavourable social and economical position and experiences of low achievement in primary school, and who have been streamed into three different ability groups at the very beginning of secondary school. Our investigation is built on the premise that schools distribute different forms of knowledge to different social groups and thus provide different opportunities to develop consciousness. We look at teacher–student interactions as expressions of social structure at the micro-level and as constituents of social structure on the macrolevel. Employing analytic tools from social semiotics, we carried out a register analysis of the school mathematical discourse in each stream. We found systematic differences and linked them to the work of Dowling (1998) on the construction of ability and its implications for social hierarchies. As a result, the upper of the three streams was freed from a discourse of low expectations, while such a discourse was reinforced for the lower stream. Finally, we will discuss our findings in relation to the contemporary debate about the role of mathematics education in social stratification.     

Making Meaning on the Mall: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival as a Constructivist Museum

George Hein, museum education theorist, asserts that there are five qualities a “constructivist exhibition” must have (1998, 35). The authors, assembling observations of visitor engagement and qualitative data from the 2013 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, compare the event to Hein's constructivist exhibition criteria, to assess whether the Festival allowed visitors to “make meaning,” and to see whether visitor meaning‐making meshed with the goals of the curators. The answers have the potential to help improve visitor experiences and learning outcomes at museums and other curated cultural events.     

A conceptual approach to secure electronic elections based on patterns

Electoral processes are complex and need to be secure, reliable, and auditable. It is then important to define ways to evaluate their functional completeness and correction as well as their security and reliability. Many solutions to specific aspects of voting have been proposed but we do not know of any holistic view of this process. We present a unified approach to elections based on a conceptual model built using software patterns. A set of analysis patterns describe the structure and management of an election. The patterns describe voter registration, ballot structure, election day management, voting process, and the complete election. A conceptual model is built from the analysis patterns and defines precisely the functional properties of such a system together with its security requirements. The conceptual model is defined using UML diagrams that can be extended or complemented with formal methods to make the system verifiable. We show how to continue to the design phase for this system. While the model will not apply exactly to all elections it can be used as a reference architecture for voting applications and to show explicitly the security considerations for these kind of events. It can also be used for existing elections to verify that they have the required security provisions. The model can also be used as a reference for researchers to integrate their solutions in the complete process.     

Developmental Trajectories of Acculturation: Links With Family Functioning and Mental Health in Recent‐Immigrant Hispanic Adolescents

The present study was designed to examine acculturative changes, and their effects on mental health and family functioning, in recent‐immigrant Hispanic adolescents. A sample of 302 Hispanic adolescents was assessed five times over a 2½‐year period. Participants completed measures of Hispanic and U.S. practices, collectivist and individualist values, and ethnic and U.S. identity at each time point. Baseline and Time 5 levels of mental health and family functioning were also assessed. Latent class growth analyses produced two‐class solutions for practices, values, and identifications. Adolescents who increased over time in practices and values reported the most adaptive mental health and family functioning. Adolescents who did not change in any acculturation domain reported the least favorable mental health and family functioning.     

How to correct teaching methods that favour plagiarism: recommendations from teachers and students in a Spanish language distance education university

The presentation of the intellectual work of others as their own by students is believed to be common worldwide. Punishments and detection software have failed to solve the problem and have important limitations themselves. To go to the root of the problem, we applied an online questionnaire to 344 university students and their 13 teachers. Our objective was to compare their views on plagiarism and to test nine hypotheses about causation. We found that both students and teachers know what plagiarism is and that each group blames itself to some extent. Students blamed their own attitude but also mentioned their need to cope with an unnecessarily heavy workload imposed by teachers. Teachers blamed impunity and their own failure in providing meaningful and creative student work. Only 8% of the students admitted to plagiarising contents and admission was independent of need for higher scores, years in the university, sex, age, occupation, career or living in a small city where educational resources are more limited. We found that Spanish language literature has given more attention to the students’ point of view than much of its English counterparts, and conclude that plagiarism can be prevented by an approach based mainly on a workload defined by teacher teams instead of isolated teachers; reduction of rote learning (associated with texts that are easy to copy and paste); assignment of individualised work that cannot be plagiarised (workshops, exhibitions, forums, portfolios, solving real cases, applying concepts to the student’s personal experience); and accompanying students along the whole process of producing the written work.     

An interdisciplinary and application-oriented approach to teach microfluidics

Microfluidics is a relatively novel interdisciplinary research area with broad applications in chemistry, physics, material science, and biology. Despite the rapid growth of the field, students'' exposure to microfluidic technologies is still limited and often insufficient to appreciate the advantages over other commonly used technologies. To this end, we designed a five-day course, “Microfluidics for microbial ecology,” in which students with very different backgrounds learn the basics of microfluidic technologies and sample a range of applications in microbial ecology. The course was created for Master and Ph.D. students interested in applying microfluidics to their research and, therefore, followed an application-oriented approach. The presentation of critical aspects of fluid flow phenomena at the microscale and an outline of the advantages and constraints of the technology provide students with the background to design and perform microfluidics-based experiments. In order to improve the effectiveness of learning in a class with diverse interests and backgrounds, two active learning exercises were implemented. The first comprised the design of an individualized microfluidics experiment in parallel with the lectures: students were guided to apply each module to their personalized application and discuss it in groups. The second was a group experimental activity, in which students jointly set up, performed, analyzed, and presented a microfluidics-based experiment. Given the multidisciplinary teaching context, the course was able to foster common conceptual ground and promote discussion among students. This application-oriented approach built upon experimental activities and in-class discussion is well suited to promote learning in a technology-related subject such as microfluidics.     

Learner Autonomy and ICT: A Web-based Course of English for Psychology

The purpose of this paper is to show how the use of the World Wide Web (WWW) as a tool may change not only the contents, but also the teaching procedures and the scope of the material covered, as well as its relevance for the students of a discipline which is no exclusively focused on English. In class we use the WWW as a source of authentic material for the study of English in the field of psychology. The students have access to current on-line material, and they can work with such diverse web sites as departments of psychology web sites, on-line atlases of the brain, resource web sites, career orientation and professional information web sites, etc. By so doing, the students become proficient in English and become also acquainted with vocabulary related to their main discipline, i.e. psychology. The result is a more dynamic approach to teaching English, so that the students gain autonomy, with the instructor acting only as co-ordinator, supervisor and tutor.

L'autonomie de l'enseigné et les ICT: un cours Web en Anglais sur la psychologie

Le but de cet article est de montrer comment l'utilisation du Web comme outil peut changer non seulement les contenus, mais aussi les procédures d'enseignement et l'importance des documents convus aussi bien que son adaptation pour les étudiants d'une discipline qui n'est pas centrée exclusivement sur l'Anglais. En classe, nous utilisons le Web comme source des documents authentiques pour l'étude de l'Anglais dans le domaine de a psychologie. Les étudiants ont accès aux documents en ligne et ils peuvent travailler avec des sites web divers comme ceux des départements de psychologie des atlas en ligne du cerveaux, des sites de ressources, des sites d'orientation des carrières et d'information professionnelle, etc. Ce faisant, les étudiants deviennent compétant en Anglais et s'habitent au vocabulaire de leur discipline principale, la psychologie. Le résultat est une approche plus dynamique de l'enseignement de l'Anglais de sorte que les étudiants acquièrent une autonomie, l'instructeur agissant seulement comme coordinateur, superviseur et tuteur.

Lerner-Autonomie und IKT: Ein webbasierter Englischkurs für Psychologie

Dieses Papier soll zeigen, wie durch die Nutzung des World Wide Web als Tool u.U. nicht nur der Inhalt sondern auch Unterrichtsschritte und das benutzte Lernmaterial sich ändern kann, wie auch seine Bedeutung für Studenten einer Disziplin, die keineswegs auf Englisch ausgerichtet ist. Im Unterricht benutzen wir das WWW als Quelle für authentisches Material für das Studium von Englisch im Bereich der Psychologie. Die Studenten haben Zugang zu aktuellem Online-Material und können mit diversen Websites von Psychologie Departments, Online-Atlanten des Gehirns, Quellen- und Hilfsmittel-Websites, Berufswahl- und Berufsinformations-Websites usw. Dadurch werden die Studenten erfahrener im Gebrauch des Englischen und erhalten dabei gleichzeitig Vertrautheit mit den Fachbegriffen ihres Studienfachs, z.B. Psychologie. Als Resultat profitiert auch der Englisch- Unterricht , so daß die Studenten selbständiger werden und der Unterrichtende mehr als Koordinator, Superviser und Tutor tätig werden kann.