Therapeutic support for young people with learning difficulties: what enables effective practice?

Supporting children and young people’s mental health is a central aim of the UK government policy, with those with learning difficulties a particularly vulnerable group. This systematic review of research uses published literature to explore how access and participation in therapy might be facilitated for young people with learning difficulties. Twelve studies published 2000-2019 were identified, which described the experiences of access to, and participation in therapy for people with learning difficulties, although notably most of these involved adults. Findings indicated eight themes: pre-therapy, careful contracting, therapy is hard, idiosyncratic needs, therapeutic relationship, group therapy, reviewing therapy and it changed my life. These were organized into three chronological stages: setting up of therapy; therapeutic processes; and therapeutic outcomes. A number of strategies that can promote access and participation are suggested for professionals working therapeutically with young people with learning difficulties, around contracting, clear communication, the therapeutic alliance and the ending of therapy.     

At-Risk High School Students Recovering Course Credits Online: What We Know and Need to Know

The majority of American high school students enrolling in online education are doing so in credit recovery courses. These are online courses specifically for students who previously failed a face-to-face version of the course. Despite the popularity of credit recovery courses, the literature on online learning largely ignores credit recovery courses and students. Assuming credit recovery students are similar to other online learners can be misleading. In this article, the existing literature on credit recovery is reviewed in 3 specific areas: the proliferation of credit recovery courses, the student experience in credit recovery courses, and outcomes and impacts of credit recovery. Suggestions are given for how to advance the credit recovery literature in future research of online learning.     

Generative mechanistic explanation building in undergraduate molecular and cellular biology*

ABSTRACT

When conducting scientific research, experts in molecular and cellular biology (MCB) use specific reasoning strategies to construct mechanistic explanations for the underlying causal features of molecular phenomena. We explored how undergraduate students applied this scientific practice in MCB. Drawing from studies of explanation building among scientists, we created and applied a theoretical framework to explore the strategies students use to construct explanations for ‘novel’ biological phenomena. Specifically, we explored how students navigated the multi-level nature of complex biological systems using generative mechanistic reasoning. Interviews were conducted with introductory and upper-division biology students at a large public university in the United States. Results of qualitative coding revealed key features of students’ explanation building. Students used modular thinking to consider the functional subdivisions of the system, which they ‘filled in’ to varying degrees with mechanistic elements. They also hypothesised the involvement of mechanistic entities and instantiated abstract schema to adapt their explanations to unfamiliar biological contexts. Finally, we explored the flexible thinking that students used to hypothesise the impact of mutations on multi-leveled biological systems. Results revealed a number of ways that students drew mechanistic connections between molecules, functional modules (sets of molecules with an emergent function), cells, tissues, organisms and populations.     

Understanding patterns of food insecurity and family well-being amid the COVID-19 pandemic using daily surveys

This paper investigates economic and psychological hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic among a diverse sample (61% Latinx; 16% White; 9% Black; 14% mixed/other race) of socioeconomically disadvantaged parents (90% mothers; mean age = 35 years) and their elementary school-aged children (ages 4–11; 49% female) in rural Pennsylvania (N = 272). Families participating in a local food assistance program reported on food insecurity (FI) and parent and child mood and behavior daily from January to May 2020. Longitudinal models revealed that FI, negative parent and child mood, and child misbehavior significantly increased when schools closed; only FI and parent depression later decreased. FI decreased most among those who received the local food assistance program; Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program receipt uniquely predicted decreases in child FI.     

The effects of expressions of fear induced by background music on reading comprehension

Background

Research has suggested that background music can have a positive or negative effect that can influence the affective state of individuals. Although research has demonstrated that fear negatively influences our cognitive performance, there is a research gap in understanding the combined effects of different background music tempo and fear in influencing reading comprehension performance.

Methods

Data were collected from 70 participants enrolled at a public university in Canada. Participants were required to listen to background music of varying speeds with three conditions (no music, slow music and fast music). We adopted a cross-sectional multi-level modelling approach for the main analyses, and further analyses using t-test and ANOVA.

Results

Results indicated that expression of fear was not a significant predictor of participants' reading comprehension performance (Model 1). However, when music condition was added (Model 2) in addition to expression of fear, a significant relationship between reading comprehension performance and music condition was found, showing better reading comprehension performance in the slow music condition than in the no music condition. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction effect between music condition and expression of fear on reading comprehension performance (Model 3). Importantly, not all individuals were affected by the music to the same extent, with the possibility that baseline level of fear being the key issue in influencing comprehension performance.

Conclusions

Considering both expression of fear and music condition is required to understand the combined effects on cognitive performance. Expression of fear during cognitive tasks such as reading could be an essential signal that interventions should be applied. Such strategies may be especially beneficial for task performers with higher baseline levels of fear and possibly provide us with insights for best practice and research implications in the field of reading comprehension among individuals with special needs.