Perceived contingency of teacher administered reinforcements and academic performance of boys

To determine the relationships among perceived contingency of teacher administered reinforcements, locus of control, and academic achievement, 49 sixth-grade boys were studied. In general, subjects who perceived their teachers as contingently punitive to boys were internal in locus of control and performed well on measures of academic achievement. An internal locus of control was also predictive of academic achievement. Perceived contingency of teacher rewards was not related to locus of control or academic achievement. These results were discussed as supporting the identity of learned helplessness and locus of control and the Seligman, Maier, and Solomon (1971) theory of learned helplessness.     

The federal government and information technology standards: Building the national information infrastructure

For many years, standards have been important considerations in the Federal government's policies for the use of information technology. The Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology develops and issues technical standards that are used by the Federal government in its information technology systems. The new Federal initiative for the National Information Infrastructure (NII) and the National Performance Review (NPR) make information technology an agent for change and emphasize standards as a means for achieving connectivity of computer and telecommunications technologies and for easy access to information. The Federal government will be challenged to address the technical, organizational, and policy issues that affect the development of the standards needed for future information systems.     

Communication,cognitive processing,and public knowledge about climate change

This study advances the cognitive mediation model (CMM) by examining the factors behind acquiring knowledge about climate change. Based on a nationally representative survey of Singaporeans (N?=?1,083), this study supported the original CMM. The extended CMM showed that surveillance gratification was positively associated with traditional and online media attention, while social utility was positively associated with online media attention. While attentions to traditional and online media were positively associated with elaboration, online media attention was positively associated with selective scanning. Elaboration was positively associated with knowledge. Implications for theory and practice were discussed.     

First and second-level agenda-setting in the 2014 Indian general election: a time-series analysis of party-media relation

The role of the press as a political watchdog is crucial to the functioning of democracy. Especially in the run-up to elections, voters depend on the media's presentation of parties and candidates to make informed, responsible choices at the ballot box. But who, then, influences the news media? Empirical evidence in the United States and Europe suggests that political party campaigns and election coverage in the news media are interconnected and influence each other. This study tests whether such agenda-setting effects between party campaigns and the media also take place in the general elections in the world's largest democracy, India. India's western-type political system has a distinct media system characterized by high competition, diversification, non-consolidation and formal and informal ties between the media, commercial interests and political actors. Content analysis and Granger's causality test of newspaper coverage (N?=?716) and party campaign messages (N?=?458) found that agenda-setting effects do occur in India, but are largely bi-directional. We also found an overwhelming focus of both newspapers’ election coverage and of all major party campaigns on one single candidate, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s Narendra Modi. This, we argue, is a result of the broader trends that have shaped Indian politics in recent years. The significant correlations and non-significant causal effects between party campaign and media coverage also indicate a trade-off situation between political power negotiation and political balance in the press.     

Early Childhood Education as Development: Critique of the Metaphor

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the recent call for developmentally appropriate practices from the perspective of the sociology of the curriculum. A brief examination of this orientation toward curriculum studies is presented in the first section of this paper. Next, a discussion of curriculum theory as metaphor is presented and used to evaluate early childhood education as development on the basis of ethics, as well as disclosure value. Finally, two alternative metaphors are suggested as possible lenses for viewing the content of the early childhood curriculum: early childhood education as caring and early childhood education as schooling for democracy. Early childhood educators are urged to consider the potential of these two metaphors as ways of orientating discourse about what should be taught in early childhood and primary school classrooms.