Reducing Risk for Substance Use by Economically Disadvantaged Young Men: Positive Family Environments and Pathways to Educational Attainment

Using prospective, longitudinal data spanning 10 years (age = 10–20) from a study of 295 economically disadvantaged males, the current investigation evaluated a developmental model that links early family environment and later educational aspirations, extracurricular activities, and educational attainment to substance use in early adulthood. The results indicate that a positive family environment during adolescence (low family conflict, high family warmth, and effective child management) predicted educational involvements during adolescence that promoted educational attainment during early adulthood. Finally, higher levels of educational attainment were associated with less substance use in early adulthood, even after controlling for adolescent substance use. These findings suggest that positive parenting promotes educational achievements that increase resilience to substance use for economically disadvantaged males.     

I Forget What That's Called! Children's Online Processing of Disfluencies Depends on Speaker Knowledge

Speech disfluencies can convey information to listeners: Adults and children predict that filled pauses (e.g., uhh) will be followed by referents that are difficult to describe or are new to the discourse. In adults, this is driven partly by an understanding that disfluencies reflect processing difficulties. This experiment examined whether 3½‐year‐olds' use of disfluencies similarly involves inferences about processing difficulty. Forty children were introduced to either a knowledgeable or a forgetful speaker, who then produced fluent and disfluent utterances. Children exposed to the knowledgeable speaker looked preferentially at novel, discourse‐new objects during disfluent utterances. However, children who heard the forgetful speaker did not. These results suggest that, like adults, children modify their expectations about the informativeness of disfluencies on a speaker‐specific basis.     

Mindfulness‐Based Awareness and Compassion: Predictors of Counselor Empathy and Anxiety

Mindfulness‐based awareness and compassion were examined as predictors of empathy and anxiety among 152 master's‐level counseling interns. Results of hierarchical multiple regression analysis supported that awareness and compassion differentially contributed to explaining the variance in counselor empathy and anxiety. Implications for counselor education are discussed.     

Science in Action: How Middle School Students Are Changing Their World Through STEM Service-Learning Projects

The purpose of Science in Action (SIA) was to examine the relationship between implementing quality science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) service-learning (SL) projects and the effect on students' academic engagement in middle school science, civic responsibility, and resilience to at-risk behaviors. The innovative project funded by the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) included 6,000+ middle school at-risk students (eligible for at least 50% free or reduced-cost lunch), 126 science teachers who integrated STEM problem-based SL pedagogy into science instruction to teach students to solve real problems in schools and communities. The project involved 20 schools and communities with assistance from 120 community partners. Participants completed pre- and post-SL surveys on academic engagement, civic responsibility, and resilience; qualitative data were collected from journals, interviews, focus groups, observations, and field notes. Results highlight exemplary SL projects that demonstrated increased student academic engagement and achievement for students living in high poverty areas with potential at-risk behavior. Implications for future research and educational practices are discussed.     

Development of students’ conceptual thinking by means of video analysis and interactive simulations at technical universities

Video analysis, using the program Tracker (Open Source Physics), in the educational process introduces a new creative method of teaching physics and makes natural sciences more interesting for students. This way of exploring the laws of nature can amaze students because this illustrative and interactive educational software inspires them to think creatively, improves their performance and helps them in studying physics. This paper deals with increasing the key competencies in engineering by analysing real-life situation videos – physical problems – by means of video analysis and the modelling tools using the program Tracker and simulations of physical phenomena from The Physics Education Technology (PhET?) Project (VAS method of problem tasks). The statistical testing using the t-test confirmed the significance of the differences in the knowledge of the experimental and control groups, which were the result of interactive method application.     

Evaluating the Efficacy of a Short Aging Simulation Workshop for an Interdisciplinary Group of Health-care Employees at a Veterans Affairs Medical Center

Several interventions aimed at increasing positive attitudes towards older adults among health-care professionals have been introduced. These interventions tend to focus on a small subset of clinical employees, ignoring other clinical and nonclinical hospital staff. The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a short aging simulation workshop toward increasing positive attitudes towards older adults among a multidisciplinary group of workshop participants using a pre/post quasiexperimental design. Four hundred seventy six new employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs completed the Kogan's Attitudes Toward Old People Scale (KOP) immediately before and after participating in a short aging simulation workshop. Significant pre- to-posttest increases in KOP scores were identified for nurses, physicians, psychologists, other clinical employees, and nonclinical employees, but not among medical support assistants, nurse assistants, and social workers. There existed no significant differences between each group's pretest scores; however, staff of higher educational achievement had significantly higher posttest scores as compared to persons of lower educational status. This short aging simulation workshop was successful in increasing positive attitudes towards older adults among staff who had higher educational achievement.     

“Why Give Up Something That Works So Well?”: Retirement Expectations Among Academic Physicians

For individuals with strong work identities, the decision to retire can be particularly challenging. For academic physicians, retirement is an important personal decision that also has far-reaching implications for the healthcare system. This is because academic physicians are responsible for producing the research from which key medical decisions are made, for training future healthcare providers, and for providing specialized care for patients. For this study, we conducted focus groups with academic physicians from a large research university in Canada and then performed inductive thematic analyses to examine perceptions and concerns about later life career transitions. This study highlights tensions between professional experiences for the next generation of physicians and individual struggles with personal identity. Findings suggest improvements to institutional programs that support flexible, agentive, and respectful retirement transitions will not only be beneficial but necessary as medical and university systems continue to grapple with issues of balanced recruitment and succession.