Attributions and Attitudes of Mothers and Fathers in Italy

OBJECTIVE: The present study examined mean level similarities and differences as well as correlations between mothers' and fathers' attributions regarding successes and failures in caregiving situations and progressive versus authoritarian attitudes. DESIGN: Interviews were conducted with both mothers and fathers in 177 Italian families from Rome and Naples. RESULTS: Fathers' attributions reflected higher perceived control over failure than did mothers' attributions, whereas mothers reported attitudes that were more progressive than did fathers. Only the difference in progressive attitudes remained significant after controlling for parents' age, education, and possible social desirability bias. Site differences emerged for four of the seven attributions and attitudes examined; three remained significant after controlling for parents' age, education, and possible social desirability bias. Medium effect sizes were found for concordance between parents in the same family for authoritarian attitudes and modernity of attitudes after controlling for parents' age, education, and possible social desirability bias. CONCLUSIONS: This work elucidates ways that parent gender and cultural context relate to attributions regarding parents' success and failure in caregiving situations and to progressive versus authoritarian parenting attitudes.     

Teachers’ democratic assignment: a critical discourse analysis of teacher education policies in Ireland and Sweden

ABSTRACT

The needs of a globalized economy are rapidly changing what is legitimated as school knowledge and values, and calling up new understandings of teachers’ role in stimulating democratic spaces. We have termed this Teachers’ Democratic Assignment. We examine changing notions of teachers’ democratic assignment in Ireland and Sweden using a Critical Discourse Analysis. We tested our hypothesis that teachers’ democratic assignment has changed in unprecedented ways using an analysis of policy documents in teacher education. Our findings reported a substantive converging paradigm shift from a predominantly progressive (reconstructivist) curriculum discourse where democracy was seen as inextricably linked to everyday practice in the early years of this century, to a more essentialist (perennialist) discourse in recent times. The findings will have interest for a wider audience and have implications for the role of democracy in teacher education as well as the question of education as a social responsibility for a vibrant democracy.     

State-Dependent Memory in Infants

Why do infants remember some things and not others? Human infants frequently cycle through different states such as calm attentiveness, wakeful activity, and crying. Given that cognitive processes do not occur in isolation, such fluctuations in internal state might influence memory processing. In the present experiment, declarative memory in 9-month-old infants (N = 96) was heavily state dependent. Infants exhibited excellent retention of a deferred imitation task after a 15-min delay if their state at encoding was identical to their state at retrieval (e.g., calm). Infants failed to exhibit retention if their state at encoding was different from their state at retrieval (e.g., calm vs. animated). Infant memory processing depends on internal cues.     

The mirror’s curse: Weight perceptions mediate the link between physical activity and life satisfaction among 727,865 teens in 44 countries

Purpose:The present study aimed to examine the link between physical activity(PA)and life satisfaction in a large international study of adolescents.We also aimed to test whether overweight and underweight perceptions act as mediators and whether age and sex acted as moderators.Methods:For this purpose,we analyzed data from the Health Behavior in School-aged Children study,which comprises 727,865 observations from 44 nations at 4 measurement occasions.Results:Multilevel analyses revealed a positive link between PA and life satisfaction.In addition,underweight and overweight perceptions mediated the effect of PA on life satisfaction.We further found that age and sex acted as moderators.In older adolescents,stronger effects were found in the links between PA and life satisfaction,PA and overweight perception,and both weight perceptions and life satisfaction.In addition,in female adolescents,the link between overweight perception and life satisfaction was stronger.Conversely,the links between PA and both weight perceptions were stronger for boys.Conclusion:The results suggest that weight perception explains part of the relationship between PA and life satisfaction in adolescents and that these effects vary as a function of age and sex.     

How do secondary students approach different types of division with remainder situations? Some evidence from Spain

Division-With-Remainder (DWR) problems are particularly complex, as suggested in many studies. The purpose of this work was to establish whether students’ difficulties in DWR problems came from an inadequate initial representation or from an inadequate final interpretation of the numerical answers, and whether remainders could be grouped into two blocks depending on the kind of answer, either directly matching the terms of the division or not. Forty-five Spanish secondary students, aged 12–13, were requested to solve two Types of Division Situations (i.e., Equal Groups and Comparison), each one involving four Types of Remainder (i.e., Remainder-Not-Divisible, Remainder-Divisible, Remainder-as-the-Result, and Readjusted-Quotient-by-Partial-Increments). Our data showed that: (a) the selection of the correct solution procedure depended on the Type of Division Situations, being easier in Equal Groups than in Comparison problems; (b) correct interpretations were higher than the percentages reported in other researches; and (c) success in problems whose answers were the quotient or the remainder was higher than in Readjusted-Quotient-by-Partial-Increments problems. The results obtained suggest that students’ difficulties originate in the initial representation of the DWR problems and that it would be more adequate to refer to the difficulty of Readjusted-Quotient-by-Partial-Increments problems in particular, rather than to the difficulty of DWR problems in general.     

How do collaborations with universities affect firms’ innovative performance? The role of “Pasteur scientists” in the advanced materials field

This article aimed to identify the effect of university-industry (U-I) collaborations on the innovative performance of firms operating in the advanced materials field, and by doing so, it proposed an original classification of the research organization partners. The main contribution resides in the estimation of the role played by collaborations with differently experienced scientists. In contrast with previous studies, whose empirical setting was the life science industry, in the advanced materials industry the most effective collaborations are not with “Star scientists”, but with “Pasteur scientists”. The latter concept was empirically tested first by the authors of this article, to deepen the present understanding of industrial heterogeneity in innovation processes and to offer new insights for the formulation of corporate innovation strategies. The results of the estimation of a negative binomial regression model applied to a sample of 455 firms active in the photocatalysis in Japan confirm the idea that engaging in research collaborations, measured as co-invention, with “Pasteur scientists” increases firms’ R&D productivity, measured as number of registered patents. In contrast, we found that firms’ collaborations with “Star scientists” exert little impact on their innovative output.     

How do Miles and Snow's strategic types differ in their knowledge assets? Evidence from Italian SMEs

This paper takes a knowledge-based view of firms and discusses the importance of linking organizational knowledge assets into corporate strategy. In order to conceptualize knowledge assets, the paper adopts the intellectual capital (IC) framework, which distinguishes three IC components: human, structural and relational capital. As regards business strategy, the paper adopts Miles and Snow's model, which identifies three strategic types of successful organizations: Defenders, Analysers and Prospectors. The paper explores the ways in which the three strategic types differ in weighting the single components of their IC. This study represents an attempt to extend the Miles and Snow typology including the aspect of knowledge assets. The link between knowledge asset management and strategy is investigated by means of three case studies conducted in Italian small and medium enterprises from the food sector. The paper argues that firms of different Miles and Snow strategic types have different mix of IC components.     

Young Children's Spatial Representations Developed through Exploration of a Desktop Virtual Reality Scene

Virtual Reality (VR) technology seems to offer the opportunity of designing 3D worlds and navigation activities which provide settings that are close to children's everyday experiences, capitalising on their enthusiasm for videogame-like technologies.This paper describes how different types of exploration of a VR scene by 6[emsp4 ]y-old children affected their performance in a series of spatial tasks. Individual children explored a desktop virtual world where we varied both the visual perspective on the VR scene (route vs. survey view) and the level of exploration control (active vs. passive movement). We measured children's knowledge of the spatial layout of the environment through their memory of objects' location in the virtual scene and through the analysis of their wayfinding abilities within the scene.The results indicate that children were able to develop and display different levels of allocentric knowledge about the virtual world depending on the way they had familiarized with it and on the characteristics of the task demands. This finding contributes to inform the design of VR technologies aimed at supporting or evaluating spatial abilities in children of this age.     

Why are smart people curious? Fluid intelligence,openness to experience,and interest

The experience of interest is central to intrinsic motivation for learning, so it is important to understand the nature of interest and its sources. Individual differences in fluid intelligence (Gf) predict finding things more interesting, but it is possible that this effect is merely due to the overlap of Gf with openness to experience, a strong predictor of interest across many domains. The present research measured Gf, the Big Five traits, and the interestingness of contemporary poems and visual art. Latent variable models found that Gf predicted interest in both poems and pictures, even when openness and gender were included as predictors. Moreover, Gf and openness did not interact, indicating main effects rather than joint effects. The relationship between Gf and interest thus appears robust.