Family Instability and Young Children's School Adjustment: Callousness and Negative Internal Representations as Mediators

This study examined the mediating roles of children's callousness and negative internal representations of family relationships in associations between family instability and children's adjustment to school in early childhood. Participants in this multimethod (i.e., survey, observations), multiinformant (i.e., parent, teacher, observer), longitudinal study included 243 preschool children (M_age = 4.60 years) and their families. Findings from the lagged, autoregressive tests of the mediational paths indicated that both children's callousness and negative internal representations of family relationships mediated longitudinal associations between family instability and children's school adjustment problems over a 2‐year period (i.e., the transition from preschool to first grade). Findings are discussed in relation to the attenuation hypothesis (E. J. Susman, 2006) and emotional security theory (EST; P. T. Davies, M. A. Winter, & D. Cicchetti, 2006).     

Year 12 students’ attainment of scientific investigation skills

One of the main goals of science education is the development of scientific investigation skills (Bryce & Robertson, 1985; Woolnough & Allsop, 1985). This paper describes a practical test instrument developed to assess students’ attainment of skills associated with problem analysis and planning experiments, collecting information, organizing and interpreting information, and concluding. During administration of the test, students verbalized their thoughts as they worked on the task and their performance was videotaped for analysis. Preliminary results reveal important areas of student weakness and lead to recommendations for curriculum reform. Specializations: Science teacher education, development of problem-solving expertise, concept development and conceptual change, assessment of laboratory work. Specializations: Chemistry education, concept development and conceptual change, role of laboratory work.     

“Because if we don’t talk about it,how are we going to prevent it?”: Lucidity,a narrative-based digital game about sexual violence

This paper describes the development and evaluation of an interactive, narrative-based, multimedia game to promote learning and communication about sexual violence and health topics. High school-aged participants created the game concept in a three-week workshop, after which assets were assembled and refined by a university-based game design lab. The outcome, Lucidity, was a multimedia game with a nonlinear narrative that led to two different outcomes based on player decisions. The narrative followed the life of one character, an African American woman named Zaria who remembers and grapples with a sexual assault from her past. The player discovers parts of the story by reading comics, watching videos, navigating interactive websites and playing short videogames. The final evaluation consisted of gameplay, a post-game focus group and follow-up interviews. Twenty-four young people participated in three focus group discussions (n = 9, n = 5, n = 10); 23 participated in the follow-up interviews. Salient themes identified in the focus group discussions included: overall approval of the game, the acquisition of new knowledge and minimal past exposure to conversations or education about sexual violence. At follow-up, almost all (n = 22) had initiated a conversation about sexual violence with a parent, peer and/or teacher. Lucidity succeeded in engaging young people and facilitating communication with adults and peers regarding sexual violence and other sexual health topics. Ultimately, a game-based intervention such as this represents a feasible approach for introducing issues of sexual violence, with potential for future implementation in educational settings.     

“Blips of Meaning”: The Transformation of Reader and History Text

The study focused on the interpretations of eight “good” or effective Secondary One teachers. It suggests that the teachers interpreted the “text” (consisting of 12 elements) on the basis of their practical knowledge. The teachers tended to describe the literal meaning of the content. This, however, is a rather restricted form of interpretation which ignores the role of both the reader and the plurality of meanings in the message(s) of the text. To be receptive to the text, the teachers need to reflect on their often taken-for-granted knowledge and practices. The repertory grid was used to elicit such tacit knowledge. Like a mirror, the grid reflected to the teacher his or her own frame of reference for his or her consideration. This is a vital first step in the transformation of both the teacher and his or her interpretation of the text.     

The design of tasks in support of teachers’ development of coherent mathematical meanings

We examine the role of tasks that have the intended effect of teachers re-conceiving the mathematics they teach as comprising a coherent body of meaningful ideas. We ground our discussion in ideas of trigonometry and modular functions and draw from a professional development research project to illustrate our approach. In this project, many teachers experienced dissonance that was rooted in their commitments to their curricular knowledge of trigonometry. Teachers who built new meanings into a coherent whole were those who coordinated them at a micro level. Teachers who saw implications of their own reasoning for student learning were also successful at expressing that reasoning in natural language. We saw a similar pattern in the case of teachers' creation of meanings for action and process conceptions of mod(f(x),g(x)). Teachers who gained insight into implications of their own activities for student learning were the teachers who reasoned at a micro level in regard to the meaning of mod, who coordinated that meaning with a covariational perspective on the behavior of functions, and who expressed that coordination in natural language. We conclude that a primary feature of tasks that promote teachers' construction of coherent mathematical meanings is that they support an overall effort to have teachers engage in the coordination of meanings in the context of explaining significant ideas and relationships.     

Rotational stress influences sensitized,but not habituated,exploratory behaviors in the woodlouse, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Porcellio scaber</Emphasis>

Terrestrial isopods (or woodlice), like the members of the other arthropod taxa, have a sophisticated nervous system that makes them sensitive to specific environmental factors. They can search for survival-related opportunities (e.g., approaching food sources or avoiding sunny areas). Two experiments examined how rotational stress could influence the propensity of common woodlice, Porcellio scaber to exhibit survival-related behaviors such as traveling and rearing up in a hostile environment. Experiment 1 assessed the behaviors of stressed and nonstressed woodlice exposed to a familiar or a novel environment without rewards. Experiment 2 assessed the effects of stress in woodlice given a free choice between a familiar and a novel environment without rewards. In the nonstressed individuals, the results showed a decrease in locomotor activity (habituation) and an increase in the time spent rearing up (sensitization) on the arena’s walls over time. In the stressed individuals, repeated rotation had a detrimental effect on the time spent rearing up, but locomotion was decreased only in the stressed individuals that were not preexposed to the test environment beforehand. In addition, immobilization periods—as a plausible indicator of stress—were longer in the absence of preexposure. It is suggested that preexposure had some antistress protective effects on habituated but not on sensitized, exploratory behaviors in woodlice.     

Training School Counselors as Developmental Advocates

Counselor educators continue to debate the persistent questions of the role and function of the school counselor. School counselor education faculty can address the issue of the school counselor's role by using contemporary developmental research to train counseling students to serve as developmental advocates. The primary role of a developmental advocate is to promote positive student developmental outcomes and the research‐identified types of environments that nurture those outcomes (J. Galassi & P. Akos, in press‐a). The authors present a training philosophy, a summary of selected developmental research, and curricular examples that demonstrate a programmatic focus on Developmental Advocacy.