Racial stereotypes revisited

Fifty-one black and 66 white college students were administered the Katz and Braly Checklist (1933) and instructed to select five adjectives that best described first themselves, second, black Americans, and third, white Americans. They then rated each adjective on a favorability scale from 1 to 5. Changes in the content of stereotypes were determined by calculating the 10 most frequently checked adjectives for black and for white Americans and comparing that with data from Katz and Braly (1933), Bayton (1941) and Maykovich (1972). Currently, black Americans are described as musical, loyal to family ties, very religious, progressive, ambitious, and quick-tempered. White Americans are described as intelligent, materialistic, ambitious, industrious, conventional, and conservative. The content of the white stereotype remained more stable over the years than the black stereotype. The white stereotype has slowly decreased in favorability over the years while the black stereotype has increased. Black and white students rated themselves more favorably than they rated the other or their own race.     

Attending to spatial locations: a developmental study

In 2 experiments, 7- and 8-year-old children and college students performed a letter-detection task in which reaction time was the dependent variable. Expectancy was manipulated by varying the probability the stimulus would appear at the center of an imaginary circle rather than along the perimeter. Although both age groups responded consistently faster to stimuli presented in expected locations than to stimuli presented in unexpected locations, this expectancy effect was larger for the children than it was for the college students. In a third experiment, these results were replicated using a luminance-detection task with 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and college students as subjects. It was concluded that children as well as adults are able to expand or contract the breadth of their attentional focus in accordance with task demands and that there is a developmental change in the efficiency with which a stimulus presented in an otherwise empty field can be located. Furthermore, it was suggested that children may be more disrupted by the occurrence of an unexpected event than adults are.     

Identifying Robust Variations Associated With Reading Comprehension Skill: The Search for Pressure Points

ABSTRACT

This special issue of JREE features studies from three of the teams (Barnes, Stuebing, Fletcher, Barth, & Francis; Language and Reading Research Consortium, Arthur, & Davis; LaRusso et al.) supported by the Institute of Education Sciences—Reading for Understanding Research (RFU) Initiative. Each study examined the importance of comprehension-related variables (i.e., academic language, perspective taking, complex reasoning skill, suppression, and response to instructional dosage) in developing readers. In this commentary we apply Perfetti and Adlof's (2012) Perfetti, C. A., & Adlof, S. M. (2012). Reading comprehension: A conceptual framework from word meaning to text meaning. In J. Sabatini & E. Albro (Eds.), Assessing reading in the 21st century: Aligning and applying advances in the reading and measurement sciences. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education. [Google Scholar] concept of comprehension-related pressure points to help us assess whether the size of relation between the comprehension-related variables and reading comprehension skill are large enough to be of practical significance for assessment and intervention. In general, we conclude that none of the comprehension-related variables investigated in the special issue meet the criteria for inclusion as a pressure point. However, we caution that decontextualized assessments of potentially important comprehension-related skills applied as predictors to generic passage variance without concern for important reader-by-text interactions may result in underestimates of the importance of reader characteristics in certain texts.     

Effects of narrator gender on conceptual learning

Audiovisual materials for nursing students typically show a female nurse demon-strating activities as they are described (and sometimes directed) by a male narrator. Of obvious concern is the effect of such sex stereotyping on female students. Further, do students (male and female) learn as well from instructional video-tapes narrated by an equally competent female narrator? The investigator sought to control all variables but gender of narrator in this study of conceptual learning from videotapes.     

Visual Attention Movements: A Developmental Study

The pattern of attention movements underlying reorientation of visual selective attention independent of eye movements was studied developmentally in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, 8-year-old, 11-year-old, and college-age subjects first oriented their attention to a central location and were then cued to direct their attention either to the left or the right peripheral field. Following variable intervals, the target appeared at the cued location and reaction times were recorded. The data were interpretable in terms of the attentional spotlight theory since there was an interaction between distance of the target from fixation and SOA. In terms of this theory, the data indicate that the velocity of attention movements increases throughout the age range studied. Experiment 2, in contradiction to attentional spotlight theory, failed to find evidence of an interaction between distance and SOA. This experiment suggested that young children can covertly orient their attention by including valid, neutral, and invalid cues, and that these cues can both facilitate and inhibit attentional orientation. This experiment also extended the findings to central as well as peripheral cues.     

Intergenerational transmission of social anxiety: the role of social referencing processes in infancy

Responses to an unfamiliar adult were examined in infants of mothers with social phobia ( N = 79) and infants of nonanxious comparison mothers ( N = 77) at 10 and 14 months in a social referencing paradigm. On each occasion, a female stranger first interacted with the mother and then approached and interacted with the infant. Over time, infants of mothers with social phobia showed increasing avoidance of the stranger, particularly when they were behaviorally inhibited. In boys, maternal social phobia was associated with increasing fearful responses. Infant avoidance was predicted by expressed maternal anxiety and low levels of encouragement to interact with the stranger. The findings are discussed in relation to theories concerning the intergenerational transmission of social anxiety.     

Public Communication of Climate Change Science: Engaging Citizens Through Apocalyptic Narrative Explanation

Working from the premise that public input is essential to science policy deliberations, we analyze how two recent works of public communication about climate change (An Inconvenient Truth and Climate Change Show) draw on the rhetorical resource of apocalyptic narrative explanation to promote scientific fluency and inspire citizen engagement in the issues. By weaving together the proofs of ethos, logos, and pathos within a framework of cultural rationality, these narratives illustrate available means of persuasion for stimulating the public's informed participation in science policy discussions.     

Quality of Effort and Career Preparation Differences Between African American and White Community College Students

This study examined data from a random sample of 500 White students and 500 African American students who have taken the Community College Student Experiences Questionnaire to determine which factors in the environment impact their career preparation. The results showed that interaction with faculty had the strongest impact on career preparation for all students. Counseling services were significant for African American students. The African American students indicated they put more effort into student-faculty interactions and peer interactions than White students, and they reported greater gains in career preparation.