Examining Change in Cortisol Patterns During the 10‐Week Transition to a New Child‐Care Setting

The transition to out‐of‐home child care brings a number of challenges for children, including complex peer interactions and extended separations from parents. Children often show a midmorning to afternoon rise in cortisol on child‐care days, compared to the typical diurnal decline seen at home. Changes in cortisol were examined in a wide age range of children (N = 168; 1.2 months to 8 years, M = 3.27 years) during the 10‐week transition to a new child‐care setting. Structural equation modeling using latent change scores showed that children experienced an increase in the cortisol rise at child care across the 10‐week transition. Furthermore, child age moderated the difference between home‐ and child‐care cortisol patterns. Findings are placed in a developmental context, and potential implications and future directions are discussed.     

Do Parents Foster Self‐Esteem? Testing the Prospective Impact of Parent Closeness on Adolescent Self‐Esteem

Close parent–child relationships are viewed as important for the development of global self‐esteem. Cross‐sectional research supports this hypothesis, but longitudinal studies provide inconsistent prospective effects. The current study uses data from Germany (N = 982) and the United States (N = 451) to test longitudinal relations between parent–child closeness and adolescent self‐esteem. The authors used self‐, parent‐, and observer‐reported parent–child closeness and self‐reported self‐esteem from ages 12 to 16. Results replicated concurrent correlations found in the literature, but six longitudinal models failed to show prospective relations. Thus, the longitudinal effect of parent–child closeness and self‐esteem is difficult to detect with adolescent samples. These findings suggest the need for additional theorizing about influences on adolescent self‐esteem development and longitudinal research with younger samples.     

Internal structure of virtual communications in communities of inquiry in higher education: Phases,evolution and participants' satisfaction

This study investigates the phases of development of synchronous and asynchronous virtual communication produced in a community of inquiry (CoI) by analyzing the internal structure of each intervention in the forum and each chat session to determine the evolution of their social, cognitive and teaching character. It also analyzes the participating higher education students' satisfaction with the activities, with the professors' actions, and with themselves. We use a mixed methodology that includes content analysis of the virtual communications by crossing two categorization systems: (1) type of communication according to the model adopted from Garrison, Anderson and Archer (social, cognitive and teaching presence) and (2) phases in the evolution of the communication (initiation, proposal, development, opinion/closing and good‐byes). The data are relevant to the students' satisfaction and grades earned. The results suggest differences in the quantity and content of the communication in each phase and an evolution from social to cognitive elements, ending with social contributions. The students are satisfied with the virtual communications related to both the activities and the professors and evaluate themselves positively.     

Student perceptions of their learning and engagement in response to the use of a continuous e-assessment in an undergraduate module

Student engagement is an important issue in higher education, and is related to the quality of the student experience. Increasing student engagement is one way of enhancing quality at a higher education institution. An institution is able to influence student engagement in a number of ways, one being through curriculum design. The use of a low-stakes continuous weekly summative e-assessment had a positive influence on student engagement in an optional level 5 (second year) undergraduate geography module. Students considered their increased engagement was a direct consequence of this assessment method. It was also found that students thought they improved their learning, particularly their understanding, as a result of the continuous assessment. This study suggests that carefully designed assessments can be used to increase student engagement and learning, and, as a result, contribute to improving the quality of the overall student experience.     

Cross‐Cultural Management Learning Through Innovative Pedagogy: An Exploratory Study of Globally Distributed Student Teams

This article presents an innovative pedagogy based on student participation in globally distributed project teams. The study questions the link between student learning of intercultural competence and the global teaming experience. Data was collected from 115 students participating in 22 virtual intercultural teams. Results revealed that students learned from the teaming experience, especially those with more prior international experience. The study contributes to the body of knowledge on innovative and collaborative pedagogy on global student teams, provides an analysis of the impact of the teaming experience on student learning, and provides insights on international and collaborative course design.     

Learning through Feature Prediction: An Initial Investigation into Teaching Categories to Children with Autism through Predicting Missing Features

Individuals with autism have difficulty generalising information from one situation to another, a process that requires the learning of categories and concepts. Category information may be learned through: (1) classifying items into categories, or (2) predicting missing features of category items. Predicting missing features has to this point been little used in special education. Children with autism were taught novel category information through either classification or feature prediction tasks. Both methods resulted in successful category learning. Furthermore, feature prediction learning resulted in better performance when predicting missing features of items at test. These results suggest that while both tasks are valuable tools for teaching categories to children with autism, the feature prediction task provides more successful post-learning use of the information acquired.     

Exploratory Study of Spirituality and Psychosocial Growth in College Students

This study examined spirituality, personality, and psychosocial growth among 216 students at a small university in Maryland. Results demonstrated that faith maturity predicted unique variance in purpose in life. There was a main effect observed for gender among faith scores, as well as an interaction effect between gender and year in school among faith scores. The findings suggest that a culture that fosters students' spirituality may have positive effects on aspects of well‐being.