Do Individual Perceptions Matter in Pornography Effects? How Perceived General Acceptance and Influence of Pornography May Impact Agreement With Sex-Role Attitudes

Pornography use is often associated with less-progressive sex-role attitudes, such as endorsement of a sexual double standard between heterosexual partners, but the process by which this relationship occurs is still largely unexamined. The present study was conducted to examine how perceptions about pornography may play a role in the relationship between pornography use and sex-role attitudes. Perceived general acceptance and perceived influence of pornography on most people partially mediated the relationship between pornography use and sex-role attitudes. The more participants reported using pornography, the more they believed pornography was generally accepted and had a positive influence; however, conversely to what was hypothesized, the more positive they perceived pornography’s influence, the less likely they were to report sex-role attitudes that endorse a sexual double standard.     

Rats remember not wisely but too well

Rats were trained in a three-alternative spatial delayed matching-to-sample task in a starburst maze. Samples consisted of rewarded forced choices of one arm, and retention was indicated by rats’ returning to that arm after a 90-sec delay. If a rat made an error on its first choice, it was returned to the start compartment and allowed a second choice. Unlike in previous experiments with this task, all three arms were available during the animals’ second choices. The rats tended to perseverate in their second choices by returning to the arm that they had erroneously visited on their first choice. In Experiment 1, the accuracy of second choices following first-choice errors was below chance during the first block of sessions, when a 90-sec delay intervened between the first choice and the second choice, and at chance during the second block of sessions, when a short (5–6 see) delay intervened between first and second choices. In Experiment 2, long-delay and short-delay sessions were randomly presented to naive subjects. Similar results were obtained. In both experiments, the tendency to repeat the erroneous first choice was greater when long delays separated the two choices than when short delays were used. The results suggest that rats make their first-choice errors because they erroneously encode or remember the location of the sample and that they base their second choices on the same erroneous-memory. The increase in perseveration at long delays implies some kind of rehearsal-like mechanism that slows forgetting of the memory controlling the first choice.     

Legacies in Black and White: The Racial Composition of the Legacy Pool

Selective universities regularly employ policies that favor children of alumni (known as legacies) in undergraduate admissions. Since alumni from selective colleges and universities historically have been disproportionately white, admissions policies that favor legacies have disproportionately benefited white students. For this reason, legacy policies lead to additional costs in terms of reductions in racial diversity. As larger numbers of minority students graduate from colleges and universities and have children, however, the potential pool of legacy applicants will change markedly in racial composition. This analysis begins with a review of the history and objectives of the preference for children of alumni in undergraduate admissions. We then consider the specific case of the University of Virginia and employ demographic techniques to predict the racial composition of the pool of potential legacy applicants to the university. Significant changes in the racial composition of classes that graduated from the University of Virginia from the late 1960s through the 1970s foreshadow similar changes in the characteristics of alumni children maturing through the next two decades.     

The Effectiveness of a Brief Mindfulness-Based Intervention for College Freshmen Who Have Aged out of Foster Care

This study investigated the effects of a brief meditation intervention on perceived stress, mindfulness, and sleep quality for college freshmen who have aged out of foster care. Thirty-six youth who had aged out of foster care and enrolled at a large midwestern 4-year university (n?=?16 experimental group, n?=?20 control group) participated in a study in which they were assessed three times on the dependent variables. Students also participated in a focus group after the intervention ended. Four sessions of the brief mindfulness intervention resulted in significant short-term reductions in stress levels and increases in sleep quality. Finding effective personal interventions to increase chances for college success for students with histories in foster care can also offer potential insight toward the development of educational models and resources for other vulnerable college student populations.     

Understanding student pathways in context-rich problems

This paper describes the ways that students’ problem-solving behaviors evolve when solving multi-faceted, context-rich problems within a web-based learning environment. During the semester, groups of two or three students worked on five physics problems that required drawing on more than one concept and, hence, could not be readily solved with simple “plug-and-chug” strategies. The problems were presented to students in a data-rich, online problem-based learning environment that tracked which information items were selected by students as they attempted to solve the problem. The students also completed a variety of tasks, like entering an initial qualitative analysis of the problem into an online form. Students were not constrained to complete these tasks in any specific order. As they gained more experience in solving context-rich physics problems, student groups showed some progression towards expert-like behavior as they completed qualitative analysis earlier and were more selective in their perusal of informational resources. However, there was room for more improvement as approximately half of the groups still completed the qualitative analysis task towards the end of the problem-solving process rather than at the beginning of the task when it would have been most useful to their work.     

‘Education for equality’ and ‘education for life’: examining reading literacy and reading interest in Papua New Guinea primary schools1

Reading literacy and reading interest was examined in four primary schools in Papua New Guinea: in an international, suburban, settlement and village school. In this paper we present a summary of findings located within a local context and examine the implications as viewed through two lenses. From an ‘educational for equality’ perspective, the findings suggest a critical need to re‐evaluate the use of national testing to select children for further education and address the serious shortage of reading books in school libraries. From an ‘education for life’ perspective, the findings indicate a continuing need for community‐based actions together with innovative teacher education programs aimed at developing ways of strengthening the connections between home and school.     

Structuring Dialogue with Students via Learning Tasks

We discuss a teaching approach that we believe promotes deep learning and diminishes the powerful voice of the teacher, thereby allowing students and the teacher to reason actively and inquire together in the classroom. This teaching approach is based on an integration of the concepts of dialogue and of mediation and utilizes learning tasks to structure dialogue with students during classroom meetings and outside the classroom, when students work independently. Students' experiences of this approach within the two courses reported on in the article were generally positive.