Engendering Democratic Participation via the Net: Access, Voice, and Dialogue

Information technology in the form of the Internet and its commercial offspring (referred to in this article collectively as the Net) has received much attention as a vehicle to increase political participation. In this article, we explore the potential of the Net, a vast, loosely coupled system of electronic forums, for facilitating and hindering democratic participation. In so doing, we identify five assumptions that undergird the claim that the Net will enhance democratic participation and suggest that increased democratic participation rests on three fundamental characteristics: access, voice, and dialogue. In order for this network of electronic forums to facilitate democratic participation, educational, economic, and cultural barriers to access, voice, and dialogue must be overcome. The final part of this article raises additional challenges to realizing democracy via the Net.     

The Interpersonal Context of Emotion: Anger with Close Friends and Classmates

While a great deal of work in recent years has focused on the role of cognitive evaluation of events in the elicitation of anger, little has been said about how the interpersonal context of events colors such evaluation. In this study, we varied critical features of events identified by theorists (provocation, intent, and apology) along with the interpersonal context of the events. We examined the reactions of preadolescent and young adolescent boys and girls to hypothetical situations involving anger-provoking actions by best friends and classmates (casual acquaintances). The situations involving best friends elicited higher ratings of personal violation, more intense and prolonged negative emotion (including sadness and hurt feelings in addition to anger), and more coping attempts geared toward relationship preservation than did the situations involving classmates. Girls seemed to be particularly sensitive to relationship differences, consistently reporting different responses when friends and classmates were involved. Findings associated with the theoretical features of anger elicitation (provocation, intent, and apology), while generally fitting predictions, were less clear and convincing, overall, than the effects of relationship context. Findings related to age were limited but were consistent with research on the changing nature and meaning of friendship as children enter adolescence. Overall, our findings underscore the importance of relationship context as a backdrop against which emotional experience must be viewed.     

The emperor has no clothes: examining the impossible relationship between gendered and academic identities in middle school students

Despite the social equity work that still needs to be done in schools and society, many researchers, politicians, and social commentators claim that gender equity work in schools has been accomplished. These people assume that actions in school lead to gender equity outside it. But, there may be two problems with this assumption: 1) achieving equity in academic work may mask still‐inequitable gender work in schools and 2) girls’ and boys’ equal academic achievement does not promise social equality, inside or outside schools. The following study offers evidence from a recent middle school study that reveals how children’s gender identities are naturalized as neutral “student” identities, making the effects of children’s gender identity work invisible. This author argues that schooling at best maintains the inequity of the American gender status quo, and perhaps may work to actually lessen chances for women and men’s equitable life opportunities.     

The subversion of healthy development and play: Teachers' reactions to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

In the spring of 1990, theTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) movie was released to the biggest grossing box office sales of a spring release movie in history. The movie followed on the heels of more than a year of the TMNT television cartoon and its accompanying line of toys. After the movie's release, interest in the Turtles was kept high by the daily dose of the TV cartoon, TMNT home videos, video games, and the presence of more than 1,000 toys and other products marketed with the TMNT logo. And then, a year after the first movie, on March 22, 1991, the sequel,TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze, opened at cinemas around the country.Nancy Carlsson-Paige is Associate Professor of Education, Lesley College Graduate School, Cambridge, MA. Diane E. Levin is Associate Professor of Education, Wheelock College, Boston, MA.     

Interventions for reading difficulties: a comparison of response to intervention by ELL and EFL struggling readers

This article explores whether struggling readers from different primary language backgrounds differ in response to phonologically based remediation. Following random assignment to one of three reading interventions or to a special education reading control program, reading and reading-related outcomes of 166 struggling readers were assessed before, during, and following 105 intervention hours. Struggling readers met criteria for reading disability, were below average in oral language and verbal skills, and varied in English as a first language (EFL) versus English-language learner (ELL) status. The research-based interventions proved superior to the special education control on both reading outcomes and rate of growth. No differences were revealed for children of EFL or ELL status in intervention outcomes or growth during intervention. Oral language abilities at entry were highly predictive of final outcomes and of reading growth during intervention, with greater language impairment being associated with greater growth.     

An implementation and outcome evaluation of a multicomponent sexuality education programme for high school students

Numerous classroom-based interventions have aimed to improve sexual health outcomes for young people, yet few have shown strong, lasting effects. Ecological approaches that address multiple levels of a young person’s environment offer largely untapped potential to positively change sexual behaviour. This paper presents results of a cluster-randomised trial of a multicomponent sexuality education intervention that integrated a classroom curriculum, parent education workshops and materials, peer advocate programme, and sexual health services at 10 urban high schools. An implementation evaluation, employing quantitative and qualitative instruments, was conducted to examine whether the individual components of the intervention were delivered as planned and how they were received by the target populations. Multilevel modelling was used to evaluate the effect of the multicomponent intervention on outcomes at one-year follow-up. Results showed that the intervention components were successfully implemented with and well received by target populations. Students receiving the multicomponent intervention reported greater increases in the use of sexual health services (odds ratio [OR] = 1.73, 95% CI = 1.09–2.75) and the likelihood of carrying a condom (OR = 2.71, 95% CI = 1.44–5.09) relative to those receiving a control condition. No effects were found for other behaviours, possibly due to low prevalence of sexual activity in the sample and the small number of schools randomised.     

Self-reports of forgetting and remembering childhood sexual abuse in a nationally representative sample of US women

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this article is to describe patterns of forgetting and remembering childhood sexual abuse (CSA) in a nationally representative sample of US adult women. METHOD: The respondents were a national probability sample of 711 women, aged 26 years to 54 years, residing in noninstitutional settings in the contiguous 48 states. In a 1996 face-to-face interview survey, trained female interviewers asked each respondent whether she had experienced any sexual coercion by family members or nonfamily members while growing up; whether she believed that she had been sexually abused (by family members or others); and whether she had ever forgotten the CSA experiences and, if so, how she had subsequently remembered them. RESULTS: Twenty-one and six-tenths percent of respondents reported having sexually coercive experiences while growing up; of these, 69.0% indicated that they felt they had been sexually abused. More than one-fourth of respondents who felt sexually abused reported that they had forgotten the abuse for some period of time but later remembered it on their own. Only 1.8% of women self-described as sexually abused reported remembering the abuse with the help of a therapist or other professional person. CONCLUSIONS: The findings indicate that, among women who report CSA, forgetting and subsequently remembering abuse experiences is not uncommon. According to the women surveyed, however, very few (1.8%) of those who felt abused recovered memories of CSA with help from therapists or other professionals. As one of the few studies of CSA memories in a nationally representative sample, this study suggests that therapist-assisted recall is not a major source of CSA memories among women in the US general population.