Developing a measure to understand young children’s Internet cognition and cyber-safety awareness: a pilot test

Abstract

Advancements in technology have increased preschool children’s access to the Internet. Very little research has been conducted to identify pre-school-aged children’s understandings of the Internet and ramifications of being ‘online’. Without an understanding of children’s thinking about the Internet, it is difficult to provide age- and pedagogically appropriate cyber-safety education. This study developed and pilot-tested an interview schedule that focuses on the Internet thinking and cyber-safety awareness of Australian children aged 4–5 years. The schedule is informed by sociocultural theory, cyber-safety education research and approaches for researching with young children. The schedule shows potential to elicit children’s understandings of the Internet and cyber-safety awareness. Adjustments are required to allow more contextualised responses from children.     

Progress report on the development of child abuse prevention, identification, and treatment systems in Eastern Europe

PROBLEM: After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1989, it became apparent that there was little recognition of the problems of child abuse and neglect, professionally, legally, or societally. There were no effective systems or laws in place to deal with these problems. METHOD: Beginning in 1995 the Children's Mental Health Alliance, in conjunction with the Open Society Institute began conducting trainings in Eastern Europe [Journal of the American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry 39 (2000) 660]. Originally 18 countries from the Baltics to the Balkans participated. A program was elaborated which would proceed in several stages: (1) training mental health professionals to deal with child abuse and neglect (CAN); (2) teaching multidisciplinary team work and fostering the development of multidisciplinary NGOs focused on CAN; (3) promoting the self-sufficiency of these NGO's which would then facilitate social and legal reform and increase public awareness of the problem. Specific methods included multi-national trainings, assignment of mentors to the developing teams who maintained weekly contact with the teams and made yearly site visits to their countries, and overseeing project grants from OSI. RESULTS: NGO's had been established and registered in 11 countries, many establishing a network of programs within their countries. By 2000, over 3800 mental health professional had been trained, either directly by the program or by the trainees of the program. By the end of 2000, over 17,000 other professionals (lawyers, police, judges, educators, other physicians, etc.) had been trained by the network. CONCLUSION: While more work needs to be in this region, the teams in 11 countries have made solid starts.     

Mothers' Worries During Pregnancy: A Content Analysis of Reddit Posts

Qualitative investigations into maternal worries during pregnancy are limited. The aim of this study was to identify the content of women''s pregnancy-related worries by completing a content analysis of posts on Reddit. A total of 217 posts by 196 unique users were analyzed. Most worries related to infant factors (32.6%), individual factors (27.1%), and antenatal care factors, such as medical procedures (25.2%). The remaining worries related to situational factors (10.9%) and the partner relationship (4.3%). Although most fears related to fetal well-being, other concerns included problems with family members, women''s own mental health, and not being a “good mother.” These findings support calls for antenatal education to more adequately address women''s psychosocial concerns.     

Visualizing diversity: the Oregon Health & Science University Educational Use Photo Diversity Repository

Background:Health science education needs images that represent both the diversity of patients served and the diversity of its students and clinicians. To begin to address this need, a nurse educator and librarian collaborated to launch the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Educational Use Photo Diversity Repository. This online resource provides educators of health professional students with access to photos of pathophysiological conditions in skin of various colors so their students can increase their awareness of issues related to health and diversity and prepare themselves for more effective clinical work with their future patients.Case Presentation:The OHSU Educational Use Photo Diversity Repository became a university-wide project, leveraging the thoughts of an image advisory board, clinicians, faculty members, administrators, and students. Key considerations were given to the workflows used to submit photos as well as the controlled vocabulary for submitting images. The repository was started with photos already in existence, with future plans to have images taken specifically for the repository.Conclusions:This repository is playing an important role as OHSU and the health sciences in general reflect on the role of systemic racism in health care and clinical education. Negotiating issues of consent, patient health information, and privacy around using different technologies to take photos is a complex and ongoing process. The repository provides opportunities for closely examining these processes and creating improvements that result in more equitable education.     

Anticipated future interaction and conversational memory using participants and observers

For interactants to build a relationship over the course of several encounters they must be able to remember at least some of what transpired in earlier interactions. This study investigated two questions: do expectations about future interactions influence conversational memory, and do conversational participants remember more than observers? Subjects with a choice about whether to interact with their partner again (or about whether to interact with one of the persons they observed) remembered less in general than those expecting to interact with the same person or expecting to interact with a different person. This may be because interactants with a choice focused on securing non‐discursive information in order to reduce uncertainty, rather than on remembering details of what was said in the conversation. Participants remembered significantly more conversational information using cued recall than observers. They also remembered more than observers using recognition items for actual communication behavior. Participants are likely to have stronger memory traces than observers, which explains generally superior memory performance.     

Exploiting the Links between Theory and Practice: Developing Students' Cross-cultural Understanding through an International Study Tour to China

This paper describes and critiques a study tour to China of undergraduate and postgraduate business students in a large business faculty in a university with an emerging focus on internationalisation through building links with global business and industry. The study tour was designed to fit with the emerging trend towards internationalisation of business education wherein universities perceive themselves as being international universities based in one city rather than city-based universities who have international students. The literature on the difficulties of cross-cultural understanding and adjustment when business people sojourn to other countries is well documented. Yet, the same difficulties being encountered by students on short-term cultural immersion tours are yet to be adequately documented. This paper serves to address this gap in the literature by examining the experiences of 50 Australian and international students when confronted with a three week immersion into China's business, cultural and social practices. The paper explores the contributions of the study tour to academic understanding of globalisation.     

Modeling Self-Regulation as a Process Usinga Multiple Time-Scale Multiphase Latent Basis Growth Model

Measurement burst designs, wherein individuals are measured intensively during multiple periods (i.e., bursts), have created new opportunities for studying change at multiple time scales. This article develops a model that might be useful in situations where the functional form of short-term change is unknown, might consist of multiple phases, and might change over the long term. Specifically, we combine measurement of intraindividual entropy, a latent basis growth model, a multiphase growth model, and a growth model with covariates into a unified framework that could help accommodate the complexity of patterns that emerge in multiple time-scale categorical data streams. Empirical data from a longitudinal study of young children’s behavior during laboratory tasks designed to induce frustration are used to illustrate the utility of the proposed model for simultaneously describing intratask (short-term) change in self-regulation and developmental (long-term) shifts in intratask change.     

Teachers' Attitudes Toward Technology in a Two-Way Dual-Language Program

This study examined the attitudes of nine teachers in a two-way dual-language program in regard to using technology to support the linguistic and academic development of emergent bilinguals. Using a phenomenological, multiple case-study approach, teachers' perceptions about using technology in education and the potential of technology to advance the students' bilingualism and biliteracy were analyzed. Results showed that teachers had a positive outlook about the potential of technology as a tool to support the academic and linguistic growth of the students. However, several significant challenges were identified, most notably among them the scarcity of technological hardware at the school and the shortage of Spanish-language educational resources. The teachers' perception was that a greater availability of digital technologies, including resources in the Spanish language, would greatly enhance student learning.