1977 annual meeting in Seattle

You are invited to Seattle for the 1977 Annual Meeting, its theme to be "Change, Comparison, and Controversy." Suggestions are made for activities in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, including the cohost city, Vancouver, British Columbia.     

The role of parents and peers in understanding female adolescent sexuality – testing perceived peer norms as mediators between some parental variables and sexuality

Previous research has confirmed peers and parents as significant agents of socialisation with respect to young people’s sexuality. The aim of this cross-sectional cohort study was to examine how parental and peer variables predict young women’s sexual behaviour and sexuality-related thoughts and emotions, and whether perceived peer influences mediate the relationship between parental variables and young person sexuality. A total of 560 female high school students of 1st (mean age 15.56 years) and 3rd grade (mean age 17.55 years), selected by means of two-stage stratified probability sampling participated in the research. Results confirmed that peer variables explained considerably more variance in participant sexuality than parental variables. Indirect parental communication about sexuality was a significant positive predictor of sexual behaviour and sexuality-related thoughts and emotions in both subsamples. The strength of direct and indirect influences of parents and peers on young people’s sexuality is determined by the age of the young person and specific aspects of adolescent sexuality. Perceived percentage of sexually active peers was the only mediator in older participants, while in the younger subsample, additional peer variables mediated the association between some parental and sexuality variables. In the discussion, special attention is given to implications of these results for planning future forms of comprehensive sexual education.     

FísicActiva: applying active learning strategies to a large engineering lecture

This paper presents and analyses the results obtained by applying Active Learning techniques in overcrowded Physics lectures at the University of the Republic, Uruguay. The course referred to is Physics 1, the first Physics course that all students of the Faculty of Engineering take in their first semester for all the Engineering-related careers. Qualitative and quantitative data corresponding to three semesters are shown and discussed, indicating that the students that attended these lectures outperformed the students that followed the course in the traditional way: the pass rates increased, whereas the failure rates decreased. The students highly valued this methodology, in particular, the interactive and relaxed dynamics, highlighting the concern of professors to answer questions by means of new questions so as to promote reasoning. The results obtained point to a work path that deserves to be deepened and extended to other Engineering courses.     

Central and South America mass communication: Selected information sources

The current experiment employed a mixed design to assess word learning in 70 infants under the age of 2. Infants (4–24 months) were randomly assigned to watch 1 of 2 educational DVDs in their homes, 6 times over a 2-week period. The 2 DVDs were identical except that each contained 3 different low frequency words (e.g., lens). In addition, participants were randomly assigned to a mediation condition, where parents were told to watch with their child and call attention to the DVD and the words being taught; controls were instructed to allow their child to watch alone. The stimulus DVDs were designed to mimic a commercially available DVD such as Baby Einstein. Following the 2-week exposure period, participants were brought to the testing location and tested on all 6 words, both those that were included in the DVD they were exposed to and those that appeared in the other DVD. Results suggested that infants 17 months and older benefitted from repeat exposure to the DVD; whereas younger infants did not. In addition, mediation did not seem to aid in children's learning from the DVD; although not all parents in the mediation condition complied.