Children''s Use of Anatomically Detailed Dolls to Recount an Event

The use of anatomically detailed dolls in child sexual abuse investigations has raised several controversial issues related to important theoretical questions in developmental psychology. The present study was designed to examine some of these issues in a methodologically sound experiment. 80 3- and 5-year-old children experienced a social interaction with a male confederate and were later tested under 1 of 4 recall conditions: reenactment with anatomically detailed dolls, reenactment with regular dolls, free recall with visual cues, or free recall without visual cues. The children were also asked a variety of specific and misleading questions, some of them dealing with acts associated with abuse ("He took your clothes off, didn't he?"). Both anatomically detailed and regular dolls along with other props aided 5-year-olds more than 3-year-olds in recounting the event. To use increased rather than decreased age differences. Anatomically detailed dolls did not foster false reports of abuse. Overall, 3-year-olds were more suggestible than 5-year-olds. The findings have implications for children's testimony in child abuse cases and for psychological theories concerning the effects of stimulus support on children's memory.     

Receptive Language of Gifted and Learning Disabled‐Gifted Children

Three tests of receptive language were administered to thirty children enrolled in regular, gifted, and learning disabled‐gifted programs. Analyses of variance indicated that the Token Test for Children differentiated the learning disabled‐gifted children and the Verbal Absurdities Subtest of the Detroit Tests of Learning Aptitude differentiated the gifted children from the other two groups.     

Preschool children's reasoning about ability

Young children's reasoning about ability was investigated among 155 preschoolers (M = 4 years, 10 months) across 3 studies. Results suggest that preschoolers are sensitive to mental state information when making judgments about another child's ability: They judged a child who finds a task easy to be smarter than one who finds the same task hard. Systematic patterns of errors on recall tasks suggest that preschoolers perceive positive correlations between (a) exerting effort and experiencing academic success, and (b) being nice and having high academic ability. Results from a comparison group of forty 9- to 10-year-olds (M = 9 years, 10 months) suggest that the preschool findings generally reflect emerging patterns of reasoning about ability that persist into later childhood, but that the perceived correlations between high effort and academic outcomes and between social and academic traits diminish with age.     

Children's Relationships with Peers: Differential Associations with Aspects of the Teacher-Child Relationship

Associations between children's social competence with peers and differential aspects of their teacher-child relationships were examined in a longitudinal sample of 48 4-year-old children enrolled in child care as infants. Toddler security with teacher was negatively associated with hostile aggression and positively with complex peer play and gregarious behaviors. Prosocial behaviors and withdrawing behaviors were associated with preschool security with teacher. Dependence on teachers as a preschooler was associated with social withdrawal and hostile aggression. Positive toddler teacher socialization was associated with higher perceived peer acceptance. Preschool teacher negative socialization was negatively associated with complex peer play, teacher ratings of hesitancy, friendly enactment, and accidental attribution and positively related to teacher ratings of difficulty.     

Learning at the nanoscale: The impact of students' use of remote microscopy on concepts of viruses,scale, and microscopy

The rapid pace of development is bringing advanced technologies to the World Wide Web (WWW), and, as a result, schools have access to new tools for science investigations. In this exploratory study, we investigated how an educational experience organized around students' use of a WWW‐controllable atomic force microscope (AFM) influenced students' understandings of viruses. The context for the study was a weeklong unit on viruses for two high school biology classes which incorporated student use of the WWW controllable AFM. We also investigated how the haptic (involving kinesthetics and touch) experiences afforded by this tool might influence students' knowledge of viruses, microscopy, and nanometer scale. Fifty students from two high school biology classes participated in a series of instructional activities and pre‐ and postassessments (knowledge test, opinion questionnaire, and interviews). Results showed that students' understandings of microscale, virus morphology, and dimensionality changed as a result of the experiences. Students' conceptions moved from a two‐dimensional textbook‐like image of a virus to a three‐dimensional image of an adenovirus. The results of this preliminary study suggest that the use of the technology as a tool for learning about morphology of materials too small to see may be beneficial. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 40: 303–322, 2003     

Development and Evaluation of an Inquiry-Based Elementary Science Teacher Education Program Reflecting Current Reform Movements

The National Science Education Standards (National Research Council 1996, National science education standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press) and various other national and state documents call for teachers who possess science content knowledge, employ an inquiry approach in teaching, and engage in reflective practices. This paper describes a rationale for choosing particular recommendations to implement and how we incorporated those as we revised our elementary science education program. An analysis of the impact of the reformed inquiry-based content courses revealed that students who take more than one reformed content course improve their science content knowledge and efficacy towards teaching science significantly more than students who take fewer courses.     

Risk factors for the perpetration of child sexual abuse: a review and meta-analysis

OBJECTIVES: Since the late 1980s, there has been a strong theoretical focus on psychological and social influences of perpetration of child sexual abuse. This paper presents the results of a review and meta-analysis of studies examining risk factors for perpetration of child sexual abuse published since 1990. METHOD: Eighty-nine studies published between 1990 and April of 2003 were reviewed. Risk factors were classified into one of the following six broad categories: family factors, externalizing behaviors, internalizing behaviors, social deficits, sexual problems, and attitudes/beliefs. Sex offenders against children (SOC) were compared to three comparison groups identified within the 89 studies: sex offenders who perpetrated against adults (SOA), non-sex offenders, and non-offenders with no history of criminal or sexual behavior problems. RESULTS: Results for the six major categories showed that SOC were not different from SOA (all d between -.02 and .14) other than showing lower externalizing behaviors (d=-.25). Sex offenders against children were somewhat different from non-sex offenders, especially with regard to sexual problems and attitudes (d=.83 and .51). Sex offenders against children showed substantial differences from non-offenders with medium sized effects in all six major categories (d's range from .39 to .58). CONCLUSION: Child sex offenders are different from non-sex offenders and non-offenders but not from sex offenders against adults. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: This study suggests that the presence of general risk factors may lead to a variety of negative behavioral outcomes, including the perpetration of child sexual offending. Family factors were strongly related to the perpetration of child sex offending (vs. non-sexual offending or non-offending) and may be valuable intervention points for interrupting the development of child sex offending, as well as other negative behaviors. Other potential points for intervention may focus on the development of appropriate social and emotional skills that contribute to sexual offending.     

Role of concept definition, teaching examples, and practice on concept learning from prose

Two experiments were performed to evaluate the effects of definition adjunct questions on concept learning. Each experiment included 132 undergraduates at a large midwestern university. In both experiments, subjects studied a passage containing matched or unmatched application questions only, matched or unmatched application questions preceded by a definition question, definition questions only, or no questions at all. The critical attributes of the to-be-learned concepts were more salient in the sets of examples and nonexamples presented in the matched application questions than in the unmatched application questions. Subjects took a criterion test which consisted of novel matched and unmatched application questions. In both experiments, only unmatched application adjunct questions preceded by a definition question produced significantly higher performance on the criterion questions than definition questions only. The discussion focused on the importance of definition questions for effective use of different types of application questions.