Reducing Children's Implicit Racial Bias Through Exposure to Positive Out‐Group Exemplars

Studies with adults suggest that implicit preferences favoring White versus Black individuals can be reduced through exposure to positive Black exemplars. However, it remains unclear whether developmental differences exist in the capacity for these biases to be changed. This study included 369 children and examined whether their implicit racial bias would be reduced following exposure to positive Black exemplars. Results showed that children's implicit pro‐White bias was reduced following exposure to positive Black exemplars, but only for older children (M_age = ~10 years). Younger children's (M_age = ~7 years) implicit bias was not affected by this intervention. These results suggest developmental differences in the malleability of implicit racial biases and point to possible age differences in intervention effectiveness.     

Understanding the Researcher Identity Development of Counselor Education and Supervision Doctoral Students

Counselor education and supervision (CES) doctoral students play an important role in contributing to knowledge in the counseling profession. CES doctoral students were interviewed to explore their researcher identity, a unique self‐concept that possibly includes research self‐efficacy and interest. Issues critical to facilitating researcher identity development included confidence, the researcher voice, faculty support, and opportunities for research.     

Exploring Emotional Intelligence Among Master's‐Level Counseling Trainees

The authors explored the relationship between counseling trainees' emotional intelligence (EI), empathy, stress, distress, and demographics. Results indicated that higher levels of EI were associated with lower stress and distress, higher affective and cognitive empathy, and age. These findings suggest curricular integration of EI and potential utility of EI measures to evaluate students' progress throughout the program.     

Embellishing Problem-Solving Examples with Deep Structure Information Facilitates Transfer

Appreciation of problem structure is critical to successful learning. Two experiments investigated effective ways of communicating problem structure in a computer-based learning environment and tested whether verbal instruction is necessary to specify solution steps, when deep structure is already embellished by instructional examples. Participants learned to solve algebra-like problems and then solved transfer problems that required adjustment of learned procedures. Experiment 1 demonstrated that verbal instruction helped learning by reducing learners' floundering, but its positive effect disappeared in the transfer. More importantly, students transferred better when they studied with examples that emphasized problem structure rather than solution procedure. Experiment 2 showed that verbal instruction was not necessarily more effective than nonverbal scaffolding to convey problem structure. Final understanding was determined by transparency of problem structure regardless of presence of verbal instruction. However, verbal instruction had a positive impact on learners by having them persist through the task, and optimal instructional choices were likely to differ depending on populations of learners.