Cognitive Stimulation at Home and in Child Care and Children’s Preacademic Skills in Two-Parent Families

This paper used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (N = 1,258) to examine the influence of hilevels of cognitive stimulation from mothers, fathers, and childcare providers at 24 months and children’s pre-academic skills at 48 and 60 months in two parent families. Results from path analysis showed direct positive effects of fathers’ early cognitive stimulation on early reading and math skills at 48 and 60 months. There were also two moderated effects: The effects of high levels of maternal stimulation at 24 months on early math and reading skills at 48 months were largest for children also receiving high levels of cognitive stimulation from their childcare providers. Implications for including fathers in studies of the home cognitive stimulation and strengthening the parent-childcare connection are discussed.     

Pedagogy and Foreignness

Based on my reflections on “being a foreigner,” I explore the boundaries of citizenship education in this essay. I use my foreign identity to articulate how social justice education can perpetuate closed-mindedness in classrooms by moving too quickly to student activism. I situate my experiences and reflections on being a foreigner within previous conversations about notions of certainty and indoctrination in the field of education philosophy, and I make an argument to create a safe intellectual space for my students. Creating such space is not neglecting moral responsibility or perpetuating privilege but actually navigating through the binary between “us” and “them.”     

Scandal and social inequality: how young Koreans feel relative deprivation to sport celebrities

Abstract

It is often observed that when sport celebrities are involved in scandals they continue to reap a variety of benefits once the scandal fades. While it may appear they suffer little consequence for their misdeed, consequences do of course ensue. One of these is relative deprivation, particularly for young groups. This study examines how young South Koreans differently shape relative deprivation according to the type of scandal. A sample of 262 Korean university students were subjected to a priming scenario technique that showed examples of Korean sport celebrities’ real scandals. This study finds that Korean university students’ cognition, affect, and behaviour of relative deprivation were positively correlated to one another. Only the behavioural dimension was significantly different according to the type of scandal. The results could be implemented toward customising sport organisation’s communication message and a sport celebrity’s image repairing strategy when the scandal is related to social equity.     

Composing new understandings of sustainability in the Anthropocene

The relationship between sustainability and the Anthropocene takes on new meaning in a time of unprecedented human impact on Earth systems. This relationship is at times contested and not well researched but critical in considering how we will respond to environmental challenges of today and the future. Elaborating on the need for new perspectives and nuanced understandings of sustainability, the contributors to this volume draw on posthumanist and “new” feminist materialist methodologies and theoretical lenses to engage readers in ways, which often contrast with prevailing thinking and research. From the cosmopolitics of place in urban Berlin to the watery space of urban wetlands they share research and rich narratives, which illustrate how sustainability is theorized and enacted across a range of diverse educational contexts. Moving beyond the rhetoric of sustainability, the authors invite us to explore innovative ways to engage with new concepts and emerging tensions that are now influencing the fields of education and sustainability.     

Amount of invested mental effort (AIME) in online searching

This research investigates how people’s perceptions of information retrieval (IR) systems, their perceptions of search tasks, and their perceptions of self-efficacy influence the amount of invested mental effort (AIME) they put into using two different IR systems: a Web search engine and a library system. It also explores the impact of mental effort on an end user’s search experience. To assess AIME in online searching, two experiments were conducted using these methods: Experiment 1 relied on self-reports and Experiment 2 employed the dual-task technique. In both experiments, data were collected through search transaction logs, a pre-search background questionnaire, a post-search questionnaire and an interview. Important findings are these: (1) subjects invested greater mental effort searching a library system than searching the Web; (2) subjects put little effort into Web searching because of their high sense of self-efficacy in their searching ability and their perception of the easiness of the Web; (3) subjects did not recognize that putting mental effort into searching was something needed to improve the search results; and (4) data collected from multiple sources proved to be effective for assessing mental effort in online searching.     

A Longitudinal and Multidimensional Examination of the Associations Between Temperament and Self-Restraint During Toddlerhood

Developing self-restraint, or the inhibition of behavior in response to a prohibition, is an important process during toddlerhood. The objective of this study was to gain a better understanding of individual differences in the development of self-restraint during toddlerhood by examining stable elements and growth of temperament (i.e., attentional control, behavioral inhibition, negative emotionality), general intelligence, and self-restraint. Participants were 412 same-sex twin pairs (approximately 90% European American) from predominately middle-class households in Colorado. Data were collected at 14, 20, 24, and 36 months. Results indicated that higher behavioral inhibition, attentional control, and intelligence were independently associated with better self-restraint, whereas higher negative emotionality was an independent predictor of lower self-restraint. The associations between temperament and self-restraint generally appeared to be stable from 14 to 36 months.     

Systematic and systemic approaches to reducing attrition rates in online higher education

Abstract

Prior to 1997, the Department of Instructional & Performance Technology (IPT) online program at Boise State University faced a high student dropout rate. The IPT turned to Keller's ARCS model, Kaufman's Organizational Elements Model, and Kirkpatrick's evaluation model throughout the processes of improving the motivational appeal of the online course for the first‐time adult learners and solving the attrition problem. In this article, the author describes a long‐term evaluation case study and explains how she systematically designed and implemented various instructional interventions to reduce attrition. She also presents the results of systemic evaluations.     

Towards an understanding of the use of an institutional repository with integrated social networking tools: A case study of PocketKnowledge

Transaction log analysis (TLA), content analysis, and grounded theory procedures were used to explore the use of an institutional digital repository and social networking website by the academic community of a graduate school of education in the northeastern United States. Three successive years of usage records were gathered and analyzed to determine: (a) the numbers and categories of persons signing up to use the repository during each school semester, (b) the type of content being archived and its rate of growth, and (c) the possible influence of the repository on collaborative, online and open access scholarship within the institution. Findings show a steady increase in the usage of the repository for archiving and sharing digital resources, and an item-tagging scheme that suggests user preference of the resource as a platform for enhancing professional rather than personal interests. User interactivity by way of textual scholarly discussions on the repository platform is however almost nonexistent.     

Delay-dependent stability criteria for systems with asymmetric bounds on delay derivative

This paper discretizes the states, a method introduced in [18] for constant delayed systems, not only in constructing the Lyapunov-Krasovskii (L-K) functional but also in designing the integral inequality technique [17] and [19] for time-varying delayed systems, which increase the order of uncorrelated augmentation [5], [21] and [22]. Based on the discretized state, [10] and [27]'s piecewise analysis method is applied to confirm the system stability in whole delay bound. Asymmetric variation of the delay derivative is assumed so that direct extension to all constraints of the delay derivative can be achieved. Examples show the resulting criteria improve the allowable delay bounds over all existing ones in the literature.     

Ownership and firm innovation in a transition economy: Evidence from China

We examine innovation performance of firms in a transition economy from an ownership perspective. We focus specifically on the relationship between ownership structures and firm innovation performance. Drawing on data from 548 Chinese firms we find volume of patent registration to be most strongly influenced by foreign ownership in the firm along with firm affiliation within a business group. The influence of state and institutional ownership on innovation performance is positive but lagged. Contrary to expectations, insider ownership leads to lower innovation performance and concentrated ownership has no significant impact. Our study has two principal contributions. Firstly, we utilize a comprehensive treatment of ownership characteristics, overcoming weakness in previous studies that have used a more narrow focus on ownership type. Secondly, we contribute to understanding of how firms in transition economies build ‘indigenous’ capabilities for innovation by drawing attention to the interplay of foreign and domestic control of agents’ innovation.