Child forensic interviewing in Children's Advocacy Centers: empirical data on a practice model

OBJECTIVE: Children's Advocacy Centers (CACs) aim to improve child forensic interviewing following allegations of child abuse by coordinating multiple investigations, providing child-friendly interviewing locations, and limiting redundant interviewing. This analysis presents one of the first rigorous evaluations of CACs' implementation of these methods. METHODS: This analysis is part of a quasi-experimental study, the Multi-Site Evaluation of Children's Advocacy Centers, which evaluated four CACs relative to within-state non-CAC comparison communities. Case abstractors collected data on investigation methods in 1,069 child sexual abuse cases with forensic interviews by reviewing case records from multiple agencies. RESULTS: CAC cases were more likely than comparison cases to feature police involvement in CPS cases (41% vs. 15%), multidisciplinary team (MDT) interviews (28% vs. 6%), case reviews (56% vs. 7%), joint police/child protective services (CPS) investigations (81% vs. 52%) and video/audiotaping of interviews (52% vs. 17%, all these comparisons p<.001). CACs varied in which coordination methods they used, and some comparison communities also used certain coordination methods more than the CAC with which they were paired. Eighty-five percent of CAC interviews took place in child-friendly CAC facilities, while notable proportions of comparison interviews took place at CPS offices (22%), police facilities (18%), home (16%), or school (19%). Ninety-five percent of children had no more than two forensic interviews, and CAC and comparison differences on number of interviews were mostly non-significant. CONCLUSIONS: Relative to the comparison communities, these CACs appear to have increased coordination on investigations and child forensic interviewing. The CAC setting was the location for the vast majority of CAC child interviews, while comparison communities often used settings that many consider undesirable. CACs showed no advantage on reducing the number of forensic interviews, which was consistently small across the sample.     

Retrieving and classifying instances of source code plagiarism

Automatic detection of source code plagiarism is an important research field for both the commercial software industry and within the research community. Existing methods of plagiarism detection primarily involve exhaustive pairwise document comparison, which does not scale well for large software collections. To achieve scalability, we approach the problem from an information retrieval (IR) perspective. We retrieve a ranked list of candidate documents in response to a pseudo-query representation constructed from each source code document in the collection. The challenge in source code document retrieval is that the standard bag-of-words (BoW) representation model for such documents is likely to result in many false positives being retrieved, because of the use of identical programming language specific constructs and keywords. To address this problem, we make use of an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of the source code documents. While the IR approach is efficient, it is essentially unsupervised in nature. To further improve its effectiveness, we apply a supervised classifier (pre-trained with features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs) on the top ranked retrieved documents. We report experiments on the SOCO-2014 dataset comprising 12K Java source files with almost 1M lines of code. Our experiments confirm that the AST based approach produces significantly better retrieval effectiveness than a standard BoW representation, i.e., the AST based approach is able to identify a higher number of plagiarized source code documents at top ranks in response to a query source code document. The supervised classifier, trained on features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs, is shown to effectively filter and thus further improve the ranked list of retrieved candidate plagiarized documents.     

Tackle and ruck technique proficiency within academy and senior club rugby union

ABSTRACT

This study examined the validity of a tool that assesses tackle and ruck technique in training and established reference data for tackle, ball-carry and ruck technique at different levels of play in rugby union. One hundred and thirty-one amateur rugby union players; 37 senior, 51 first-grade academy and 43 second-grade academy players, participated in a two-on-two contact drill. The drill was filmed and the players’ tackle, ball-carry and ruck technique were assessed using standardized technical criteria. Senior level players scored significantly higher in all three assessments; tackle technique senior vs academy 1^st (p < 0.01, effect size (ES) = 0.7, moderate), senior vs academy 2^nd (p < 0.01, ES = 0.7, moderate); ball-carry technique senior vs academy 1^st (p < 0.01, ES = 0.6, moderate), senior vs academy 2^nd (p < 0.01, ES = 0.8, moderate); ruck technique senior vs academy 1^st (p < 0.01, ES = 0.7, moderate), senior vs academy 2^nd (p < 0.01, ES = 0.4, small). These findings emphasize the importance of developing contact technique to allow players to progress to higher levels, and provide validity to an assessment tool which can facilitate this process.     

Use of Decontextualized Talk Across Story Contexts: How Oral Storytelling and Emergent Reading Can Scaffold Children's Development

This study examined 33 mothers' and preschoolers' oral language skills (decontextualized discourse) across an emergent reading, shared reading, and oral storytelling interaction. The sample comprised primarily African American families from various socioeconomic backgrounds, ranging from Head Start families to middle-income families. Two measures of decontextualized language were assessed—literate language features and type of talk (i.e., a coding scheme categorizing comments/questions on a continuum from contextualized to decontextualized talk). Mothers used more decontextualized language during the oral storytelling interaction versus the other interactions, but children used more during the emergent reading interaction. Mothers with advanced literacy skills were more likely to make decontextualized comments/questions and use mental/linguistic verbs during the interactions. Results are discussed in terms of implications for parent-child home literacy interventions.     

Effects of Maternal Employment on Maternal and Two-Year-Old Child Behavior

94 mothers with 2-year-old children were interviewd about their employment, role satisfaction, and social support and were observed in their homes at dinnertime and in a laboratory compliance task. Hierarchical multiple regressions were used to test main effects of employment, hours employed, and their interactions. Maternal employment adversely affected maternal behavior when satisfaction with social support or with the work role was low, but only in the laboratory. Positive main effects of employment on maternal behavior were observed in the home: employed mothers used less power assertion with their children. Mothers who worked longer hours used more guidance and were more responsive to their children in both settings. In both settings, the effect of poor-quality care on child behavior was greater when mothers were employed, and, in the laboratory, boys of employed mothers were more defiant than boys of nonemployed mothers and girls of employed mothers. Boys with more than one current arrangement were more likely than similarly situated girls to be defiant in the laboratory, but they were also less likely than girls to be cared for by fathers.     

Learning to be critically reflective: exploring fiction writing and adult learning

Many educators in adult, community and higher education contexts are concerned with fostering reflective learning amongst their students. This paper explores the concept of critical reflection and considers how engaging with fiction may be an innovative pedagogical approach to support critical learning opportunities. Drawing upon interviews with fiction writers, ways in which critical reflection may be encouraged in connection to reading and writing fiction are taken up by exploring three different thematic areas that relate to a Habermasian framework of knowledge constitutive approaches to learning. These different areas can be categorised as (a) technical-rational, (b) humanistic and (c) critical or emancipatory. The first of these considers critical reflection as a way to develop technical capacities as a creative writer. The next section takes up a humanistic framework to explore the value of individual and collective learning opportunities to enhance personal growth and critical reflection. The third area of discussion considers a deeper critical or emancipatory framework of learning through critical reflection which may lead to social change. The paper concludes by considering the value of arts-informed adult education approaches, such as those related to fiction writing, to enhance the development of critical reflection amongst adult learners.     

‘Just turn to us’: the persuasive features of contract cheating websites

Academic integrity is important to universities and students must abide by codes of academic conduct around assessment. Students are, however, subject to multiple pressures around assessment, some of which can push them to cheat. Modern contract cheating websites are the fronts for sophisticated, commercial operations that offer individually written assessment items for a fee; to combat their use we need a better understanding of the tools they use to persuade students to become customers. In this study we examined the persuasive features of 11 highly-visible contract cheating websites and mapped these features to a previously used persuasiveness framework. We find that contract-cheating websites use a variety of credibility, interactive and informative features designed to persuade students to use their services. In addition, the sites offer low-cost, customisable products available in very short timeframes. We suggest ways in which educators can encourage academic integrity by talking with their students about how the websites promulgate their ‘just turn to us’ message.     

‘Is it because I’m a woman?’ Gender-based attributional ambiguity in higher education administration

This study examines gender-based attributional ambiguity among higher education administrators in the US, specifically academic deans. Attributional ambiguity involves situations in which members of underrepresented groups cannot determine whether interactions both negative and positive have occurred because of their minority status or for some unrelated yet plausible reason. A conceptual model of attributional ambiguity in higher education administration is presented highlighting the types of situations that produce this ambiguity, two variants of attributional ambiguity (i.e. cognitive and social), and the psychological and organizational consequences of such ambiguity. Reasons that attributional ambiguity is inherent to higher education administration are examined including the fluidity of gender roles, the culture of academia, and leaders’ minimization of discriminatory experiences. Implications for professional practice are also presented such as the need for curricula, trainings, mentoring, and coaching that addresses attributional ambiguity and greater publicity related to women’s underrepresentation in leadership roles in higher education.     

Effects of a Teacher‐Designed and Teacher‐Led Numerical Board Game Intervention: A Randomized Controlled Study with 4‐ to 6‐Year‐Olds

The purpose of the current pilot study was to examine the effects of a teacher‐designed and teacher‐led numerical board game intervention. Fifty‐four 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds were randomly assigned to either the number board game intervention or an active control group. Relative to the control group, children who received the number game intervention demonstrated significant improvements on a numeral identification task. This finding is significant in so far as numeral identification skills play a critical role in more advanced numerical and mathematical reasoning. There was no evidence of training‐related improvements on any of the other tasks. In addition to the intervention effects, the present study provides an example of a successful teacher‐researcher collaboration, providing new insights into the making of bidirectional relations between research and practice.     

Not Proved: Reply to Wynn

Findings on whether young infants look longer at incorrect addition and subtraction have been inconsistent or, as in our study, negative. We hypothesize that imprecise ordinal calculating with very small numbers of objects develops in late infancy and precise calculating in early childhood.