Conflict Resolution in Preschool Social Interactions

Conflict has frequently been hypothesized to play an important role in development, and yet, until recently, little empirical work has been conducted on preschoolers' social conflicts. The aim of this study was to investigate the types of social issues that produce conflicts, the extent to which children respond positively to protests from others, and how conflicts are resolved. Children were observed in two contexts: semi-structured peer groups in which adults did not intervene, and school-time free-play. The results showed that even when adults do not intervene, children are often responsive to protests from others and resolve conflicts on their own. Differences were also observed for the types of issues that generate conflicts in the two settings and the types of conflicts that children respond to most often. These results indicate that children's conflicts are not solely negative or aggressive and that children's social interactions and their social contexts are multi-dimensional. The findings point to interpersonal aspects of settings, such as the differential role of adults and peers, and to contextual features of settings, such as free-play and sustained play, that should be considered by teachers and parents when structuring social interactive opportunities for young children.     

Examining Personal,Perceived, Treatment,and Self-Stigma in College Students: The Role of Parent Beliefs and Mental Health Literacy

ABSTRACT

Although college student mental health concerns are on the rise, many struggling students do not seek psychological treatment when needed. Stigma toward psychological treatment has been demonstrated to influence intent to seek treatment in college student populations. This study aimed to identify factors that predict treatment stigma in college students by examining other forms of student-held stigma, parent-held stigma, and mental health literacy. Results indicated that student-held personal, perceived, and self-stigma all predicted student attitudes toward treatment, while parent-held personal stigma was found to predict self-stigma in students. Those individuals who had received previous education about psychological disorders had lower levels of personal stigma, and, surprisingly, higher levels of self-stigma. Implications for campus outreach programming are discussed.     

Conflict-Related Emotions During Peer Disputes

The aim of this study was to investigate young children's conflict emotions during peer disputes. Twenty-seven 4- to 5-year-old children participated in four 15- minute sessions in which groups of 3 children played with table toys. Videotapes of these sessions were used to identify all conflicts and conflict roles (initiator, recipient, and observer) and all conflict-related displays of facial emotions (using the AFFEX coding system). Results indicated that initiators', recipients' and observers' emotions differed in the conflict and postconflict periods, but that there were no initial preconflict differences. Overall, conflict initiators almost exclusively expressed happiness, whereas conflict recipients expressed mostly sadness and anger. In addition, children's conflict emotions were related to the frequency with which they initiated and received conflicts. Children who expressed higher percentages of negative emotions as conflict recipients both initiated and received more conflicts, and children who expressed more happiness when initiating conflicts also initiated more conflicts. These findings have implications for how young children develop methods of conflict resolution, and how they form concepts about sociomoral emotions.     

The Lived Experiences of Men in a Master's Counseling Program

Using phenomenological methodology, the authors explored the experiences of 11 men in a master's‐level counseling program. Participants described the challenges and advantages of being a minority in number, being in a relational environment, and having an awareness of a patriarchal system. These findings suggest the importance of counselor educator awareness of the unique barriers male students face.     

Emotion Regulation Strategies and Parenting Practices among Parents of Children With Clinic-Referred Conduct Problems

Objective. This study examined the cognitive-affective strategies used by parents of young children with conduct problems to regulate emotions. Key questions concerned the extent to which these emotion regulation strategies are associated with positive and negative parenting practices and predict quality of parenting through interplay with parental depression. Design. Participants were families of toddlers (n = 84) referred to a tertiary-level health service for the treatment of disruptive behavior problems. Parenting practices were indexed through observational coding of parent–child interactions and self-report data on multiple dimensions of positive and negative parenting. Parents self-reported their use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression—the two emotion regulation strategies that are most robustly associated with psychosocial functioning in adults. Results. Associations between emotion regulation strategy and quality of parenting were moderated by parental depressive symptom severity, with distinct effects seen for positive and negative parenting practices. In terms of positive parenting, more frequent use of cognitive reappraisal was associated with increased use of labeled praise among parents with lower levels of depressive symptoms, whereas parents who had higher levels of depressive symptoms engaged in less such praise regardless of how frequently they used reappraisal. In terms of negative parenting, frequent use of cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression were associated with reduced levels of negative parenting, but only among parents with high levels of depression. Conclusions. These findings add to growing support for the integration of emotion regulation strategies into family process models of early-onset conduct problems and related clinical interventions.     

DEVELOPMENT, EVALUATION, AND VALIDATION OF A PAPER-AND-PENCIL TEST FOR MEASURING TWO COMPONENTS OF BIOLOGY TEACHERS’ PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE CONCERNING THE “CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM”

One main focus of teacher education research concentrates on teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). It has been shown that teachers’ PCK correlates with teaching effectiveness as well as with students’ achievement gains. Teachers’ PCK should be analyzed as one of the main important components to evaluate professional development programs. On this account, it is necessary to develop standardized measures of biology teachers’ topic-specific PCK that are labor-efficient. This paper presents a study on the development, evaluation, and validation of a paper-and-pencil test to measure biology teachers’ declarative PCK on the topic of blood and the human cardiovascular system. The development of the test was based, among other considerations, on a review of research literature on PCK and an analysis of 50 videotaped biology lessons. The final test instrument was comprised of 15 items distributed across 2 scales. The findings of the main study—with 93 preservice and in-service biology teachers and 12 biologists—confirmed that this measure of biology teachers’ declarative PCK was reliable, objective, and valid. In-service biology teachers scored higher on the test than preservice teachers (effect size Cohen’s d, 0.65) on one hand and, also, than biologists (Cohen’s d, 1.00) on the other hand. Future versions of this test should explore enlarging the scales and measuring procedural aspects of PCK.     

Parental influences and adolescent career behaviours in a collectivist cultural setting

Using social cognitive career theory, we examined the relationships between parental variables (parental career expectations, adolescent–parent career congruence) and adolescent career aspirations and career actions (planning, exploration) in a sample of Grade 10 Indonesian high school students. We found good support for a model that revealed various routes by which the two parental variables were associated with adolescent career aspirations and career actions, although the main influence of the parental variables was by way of self-efficacy. The findings demonstrate important roles for parental career expectations and adolescent–parent career congruence in adolescents’ career aspirations and actions.     

Does poor spelling equate to slow reading? The relationship between reading,spelling, and orthographic quality

High quality lexical representations in memory, characterized by accuracy and stability, are said to underpin fluent reading. Here, the relationship between orthographic quality and reading speed was examined by asking undergraduates (N = 74) to repeatedly read and spell words. Spelling performance over five trials indicated orthographic quality. Single word reading speed was measured using E-Prime technology. A within-participant repeated measures analysis revealed that words which participants spelled consistently accurately, were read faster than words which were misspelled. This pattern also held in a within-word analysis; the same words were read faster by individuals who always spelled them correctly, compared to those who did not. Further, it was found that when words were spelled using the same incorrect letter patterns across trials (i.e., in the same erroneous way), they were read faster than when they had an incorrect but less stable representation (i.e., inconsistent spelling across trials). Hence, the difference in reading speed appears to be a function of both the accuracy and stability of the orthographic representations stored in memory, rather than due to characteristics of individual participants or words. These results lend support for a central role of lexical quality in both spelling and reading, and are discussed with reference to the lexical quality hypothesis.     

Challenging Gender Stereotypes: Resistance and Exclusion

The likelihood of resisting gender‐stereotypic peer group norms, along with expectations about personal resistance, was investigated in 9‐ to 10‐year‐olds and 13‐ to 14‐year‐olds (N = 292). Participants were told about a stereotype conforming group (boys playing football; girls doing ballet) and a stereotype nonconforming group (boys doing ballet; girls playing football). Contrary to expectations from gender‐stereotyping research, participants stated that they would personally resist gender‐stereotypic norms, and more so than they would expect their peers to resist. However, expecting peers to resist declined with age. Participants expected that exclusion from the group was a consequence for challenging the peer group, and understood the asymmetrical status of gender stereotypes with an expectation that it would be more difficult for boys to challenge stereotypes than for girls.     

The Influences of Socioscientific Issues on General Science Teaching Self-Efficacy

Research in Science Education - Two common reasons elementary preservice teachers have low self-efficacy with science teaching is their lack of content knowledge and past negative experiences with...