Student Engagement and School Burnout in Finnish Lower-Secondary Schools: Latent Profile Analysis

Self-ratings of behavioural engagement, cognitive engagement and school burnout were used in person-centred analyses to identify latent profiles among 2,485 Finnish lower-secondary school students. Three profiles were identified: high-engagement/low-burnout (40.6% of the sample), average-engagement/average-burnout (53.9%), and low-engagement/high-burnout (5.5%). Another sample of lower-secondary school students was used to validate the 3 profiles. The factors most strongly associated with the high-engagement/low-burnout profile of lower-secondary school students’ were high levels of support from teachers and family, good academic performance, and lack of truancy. The study indicated that teacher and family support and students’ academic achievement are pivotal in understanding student engagement and school burnout.     

Mystery of the Toxic Flea Dip: An Interactive Approach to Teaching Aerobic Cellular Respiration

We designed an interrupted case study to teach aerobic cellular respiration to major and nonmajor biology students. The case is based loosely on a real-life incident of rotenone poisoning. It places students in the role of a coroner who must determine the cause of death of the victim. The case is presented to the students in four parts. Each part is followed by discussion questions that the students answer in small groups prior to a classwide discussion. Successive parts of the case provide additional clues to the mystery and help the students focus on the physiological processes involved in aerobic respiration. Students learn the information required to solve the mystery by reading the course textbook prior to class, listening to short lectures interspersed throughout the case, and discussing the case in small groups. The case ends with small group discussions in which the students are given the names and specific molecular targets of other poisons of aerobic respiration and asked to determine which process (i.e., glycolysis, citric acid cycle, or the electron transport chain) the toxin disrupts.     

Data‐Driven Improvement in Prekindergarten Classrooms: Report From a Partnership in an Urban District

In 2014–2015 and 2015–2016, a metropolitan school system in the southern United States embarked on a unique mission to improve the quality of its public prekindergarten programs through a partnership with a group of developmental researchers in an iterative, data‐based venture. Data on 407 children in Year 1 and 433 in Year 2 (who were enrolled in 26 classrooms and extensively observed) are presented from the first 2 years of the ongoing partnership. All children were 4 years of age. Variability in classroom practices, measured empirically, and variability in child outcomes provided the means to examine the relations between children's gains in academic and social‐emotional areas and major areas of classroom practices. Lessons learned, the eight identified significant practices, implications, and next steps in the partnership are addressed.     

On-line Compared with Face-to-face Introductory Food Science Courses: An Assessment

ABSTRACT: This study tracked and compared the performance of traditional classroom and on-line students in 2 introductory level food science classes. Student evaluations were also compared for the 2 groups. All of the Face-to-face (FTF) students were full-time college students. Seventynine percent of on-line students lived over 50 miles from campus. About 21% of the on-line enrollments were of skilled workers from the food industry. Performance on standardized exams was significantly higher for on-line students. Student evaluations were very positive for both forms of instruction. Differences in maturity, academic load, motivation, class standing, and experience/knowledge of the food industry may have all played a role in the observed results. Although our study cannot differentiate between these effects, it is apparent that on-line food science instruction can be an effective alternative for individuals who are unable to attend traditional courses.     

Caregiver Responsiveness During Preschool Supports Cooperation in Kindergarten: Moderation by Children’s Early Compliance

Research Findings: The current study examined how children’s parent-reported compliance at age 3 (36 months) moderated the effects of 2 dimensions of directly observed early care and education (ECE) process quality (positivity/responsivity and cognitive stimulation) during the prekindergarten year (54 months) on teacher reports of children’s classroom cooperation in the fall of kindergarten. Compliance at 36 months and cooperation in kindergarten are operationalized as overt, behavioral aspects of self-regulation as appraised by parents and teachers. The sample consisted of 996 children from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development who attended formal or informal ECE settings during the prekindergarten year. Results indicated that children with low compliance at age 3 tend to demonstrate stronger cooperation skills by kindergarten when they experience more positivity/responsivity from their ECE caregivers. Main effects of positivity/responsivity and cognitive stimulation on classroom cooperation were not detected for the overall sample. Practice or Policy: The discussion addresses the importance of preparing and empowering ECE providers to help young children who enter the preschool period struggling with behavioral aspects of self-regulation, such as compliance, to improve these skills through positive and responsive caregiving.     

Assessing children's emotional security in the interparental relationship: the Security in the Interparental Subsystem Scales

Guided by the emotional security hypothesis, this study reports on the development of a new self-report measure that assesses children's strategies for preserving emotional security in the context of interparental conflict. Participants were 924 sixth, seventh, and eighth graders and a subset of their mothers, fathers, and teachers. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the Security in the Interparental Subsystem (SIS) Scale supported a seven-factor solution, corresponding well to the three component processes (i.e., emotional reactivity, regulation of exposure to parent affect, and internal representations) outlined in the emotional security hypothesis. The SIS subscales demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Support for the validity of the SIS Scale is evidenced by its significant links with parent reports of children's overt reactivity to conflict, children's responses to interparental conflict simulations 6 months later, and children's psychological maladjustment and experiential histories with interparental conflict across multiple informants (i.e., child, mother, father, and teacher). Results are discussed in the context of developing recommendations for use of the SIS and advancing the emotional security hypothesis.     

Effect of perceptual processing strategies on problem solving of reflective and impulsive children

Several studies employing the "20 questions" test reported that reflective children asked proportionally more constraint-seeking (CS) questions than did impulsive children. The finding was interpreted as supporting the generally accepted view that reflective children are more mature and more efficient problem solvers than impulsive children. Inexplicably, the reflectives' higher proportion of CS questions was not associated with fewer questions to solution, that is, with greater efficiency. The present study examined an alternative hypothesis that differences in performance of impulsive and reflective children on the "20 questions" test are due to individual differences in preferred perceptual processing strategy rather than in cognitive maturity of problem-solving strategy. Efficiency of performance of reflective and impulsive children was shown to be related to type of stimuli and experimental conditions employed, supporting a perceptual rather than cognitive-maturational interpretation.