Maternal warmth and prosocial behaviors among low-SES adolescents: Considering interactions between empathy and moral conviction

ABSTRACT

The study examined the links among maternal warmth and adolescents’ empathic concern, moral conviction and prosocial behaviors. Participants were 311 adolescents from a low-income community (M age = 16.10 years; range = 14–19 years; 58.7% girls; 82.7% white; 13.6% Latinx). The results demonstrated that maternal warmth was positively associated with adolescents’ empathic concern and moral conviction. Empathic concern was positively associated with three common forms of prosocial behaviors, and moral conviction was positively associated with four types of prosocial behaviors. Empathic concern and moral conviction also interacted to predict selfishly and selflessly motivated prosocial behaviors. Discussion will focus on the role of maternal warmth in fostering sociomoral tendencies.     

Structure reconsidered: Towards new foundations of explanatory transitions theory

The most prominent framework for studying socio-technical transitions to date is the multi-level perspective (MLP). While appreciated for its flexibility and usefulness for studying socio-technical transitions it has not been without its critics. In this paper we focus on the ontological foundations of the MLP and its (in)ability to explain transitions and how they come about. The purpose is to initiate development of an explanatory theory for socio-technical transitions, by carrying out an immanent critique of the ontological foundations of the MLP together with a methodological critique. We show that the ontological foundations of the MLP to a large extent inhibits explanatory capacity. The argument is fourfold: since structure and agency are understood as inseparable, (i) the causal influence of material properties are undervalued, and (ii) different degrees of structural constraint and freedom of actors are ignored. As a consequence (iii) transitions are reduced to shifts in the maturity and spread of socio-cognitive rules, without analysis of systemic change. Moreover, (iv) mechanisms are reduced to recurring patterns of events which cannot explain why some transitions fail while others succeed. To remedy these limitations we outline alternative critical realist foundations for transitions theory.     

Screen time and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity changes and displacement in adolescence: A prospective cohort study

Background: This paper determines longitudinal changes in the time Spanish adolescents devote to moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and screen media activity (SMA). Moreover, it examines the displacement hypothesis between time spent on SMA and MVPA.

Methods: A cohort of 755 adolescents participated in a prospective cohort study over a three-year period. Repeated measures ANOVA to highlight interaction effects among all variables and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) techniques were employed.

Results: Age and gender-related variations in longitudinal changes in time spent on MVPA and SMA evolved in the inverse direction (decreased on MVPA/increased on SMA) according to the ANOVA. The potential displacement between time spent on SMA and MVPA from Wave I to Wave II was analysed via SEM. The first model, estimated in the overall sample, showed no evidence for the displacement hypothesis. Subsequently, a multigroup sequence of panel models was performed and a partial displacement was observed only in boys. Hence, boys who spent more time on SMA were more likely to devote less time to MVPA three years later.

Conclusion: This study confirms the opposite trend on the time spent on MVPA and SMA over a three-year period, being clearly higher in SMA. Further SEM analyses reveal a deferred displacement hypothesis between SMA and MVPA only in boys. This partial gendered displacement may be linked to the different uses adolescents make of screen media. The incursion of new technological devices (smartphones or tablets) and their wide range of possibilities for social networking or gaming could explain this displacement     

Pedagogical approaches for e-assessment with authentication and authorship verification in Higher Education

Checking the identity of students and authorship of their online submissions is a major concern in Higher Education due to the increasing amount of plagiarism and cheating using the Internet. The literature on the effects of e-authentication systems for teaching staff is very limited because it is a novel procedure for them. A considerable gap is to understand teaching staff' views regarding the use of e-authentication instruments and how they impact trust in e-assessment. This mixed-method study examines the concerns and practices of 108 teaching staff who used the TeSLA—Adaptive Trust-based e-Assessment System in six countries: the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Finland and Turkey. The findings revealed some technological, organisational and pedagogical issues related to accessibility, security, privacy and e-assessment design and feedback. Recommendations are to provide a FAQ and an audit report with results, to raise awareness about data security and privacy, to develop policies and guidelines about fraud detection and prevention, e-assessment best practices and course team support.     

成功之声

网络和电子产品的蓬勃发展改变了人们生活的诸多方面,本文从音乐产品的角度阐述了这一发展对音乐的影响。所谓"仁者见仁,智者见智",大家也可谈谈自己的想法稿件可发至:angelwlj@126.com。     

Using learning analytics in the Amazonas: understanding students’ behaviour in introductory programming

Tools for automatic grading programming assignments, also known as Online Judges, have been widely used to support computer science (CS) courses. Nevertheless, few studies have used these tools to acquire and analyse interaction data to better understand the students’ performance and behaviours, often due to data availability or inadequate granularity. To address this problem, we propose an Online Judge called CodeBench, which allows for fine-grained data collection of student interactions, at the level of, eg, keystrokes, number of submissions, and grades. We deployed CodeBench for 3 years (2016–18) and collected data from 2058 students from 16 introductory computer science (CS1) courses, on which we have carried out fine-grained learning analytics, towards early detection of effective/ineffective behaviours regarding learning CS concepts. Results extract clear behavioural classes of CS1 students, significantly differentiated both semantically and statistically, enabling us to better explain how student behaviours during programming have influenced learning outcomes. Finally, we also identify behaviours that can guide novice students to improve their learning performance, which can be used for interventions. We believe this work is a step forward towards enhancing Online Judges and helping teachers and students improve their CS1 teaching/learning practices.     

Cultural transitioning of Jewish immigrants: Education, employment and integration

This paper discusses the cultural transitioning process that immigrants undergo in order to attain educational, occupational, and social integration within Canadian society. Results of this phenomenological study examining 31 Jewish immigrants from Argentina, Israel, France and the Former Soviet Union, reveal that lack of educational equivalency and lack of recognition of foreign work experience, language barriers, discrimination, insider/outsider sentiments and the structure of the community were common impediments to cultural transitioning. However, findings suggest that despite a common religious identity, immigrants’ ethnic identities and expectations lead to divergent cultural transitioning experiences.     

A Mile Wide or an Inch Deep? Improving Elementary Preservice Teachers’ Science Content Knowledge Within the Context of a Science Methods Course

Since the beginning of the reform movement in science education, there has been concern that elementary teachers lack the science content knowledge (SCK) needed to engage students in authentic scientific inquiry. This study included 19 preservice elementary teachers and examined the development of their SCK within the context of a uniquely designed elementary science methods course. A project-developed science knowledge test was administered at the beginning and the end of the science methods course, before and after science content was covered concurrent with modeled pedagogy. The preservice elementary teachers had adequate knowledge of low difficulty science content on the pretest, but demonstrated improvement on moderate and difficult science content, especially on topics emphasized in the methods course. Data analyses conducted on change in SCK using analysis of variance were statistically significant and demonstrated a large effect size. Details are discussed, along with large-scale implications and recommendations for elementary science teacher education.     

Test Reliability at the Individual Level

Reliability has a long history as one of the key psychometric properties of a test. However, a given test might not measure people equally reliably. Test scores from some individuals might have considerably greater error than others. This study proposed two approaches using intraindividual variation to estimate test reliability for each person. A simulation study suggested that the parallel tests approach and the structural equation modeling approach recovered the simulated reliability coefficients. Then in an empirical study, where 45 females were measured daily on the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) for 45 consecutive days, separate estimates of reliability were generated for each person. Results showed that reliability estimates of the PANAS varied substantially from person to person. The methods provided in this article apply to tests measuring changeable attributes and require repeated measures across time on each individual. This article also provides a set of parallel forms of PANAS.