The development of children's understanding of cyclic aspects of time

Developmental psychological approaches to the study of time have fallen into 3 categories: studies of time perception; studies of logical, reconstructive abilities; and studies of the understanding of conventional time systems. The present work examines problems spanning the latter 2 categories--the development of children's understanding of temporal cycles and the relationship between cyclic concepts and cognitive development. 62 children, ranging in age from 4 to 10 years, were administered Piagetian tests of classification and seriation and a variety of specially designed cyclic tasks. Results show major progress in the representation of cyclic order and recurrence during the age period examined. For a variety of particular cycles, order responses were shown before continuity responses. The ability to produce a correct order is related to seriation performance but not classification performance when the variance attributable to age is partialed out. Continuity responses appear to be unrelated to performance on either of the Piagetian tasks tested when age is controlled.     

Being a teacher: altruistic and narcissistic expectations of pre-service teachers

The article focuses on investigating pre-service teachers’ expectations of their future teaching career, in particular concerning teacher–student interrelations. In an attempt to comprehend why people choose teaching as a professional career, a conceptual model titled ‘Teachers’ altruistic-narcissistic classroom expectations’ was designed and tested. The model puts forward for consideration the idea that pre-service teachers view their future relations with students as being based on four basic psychological foundations: genuine altruism, paternalistic altruism, benevolent narcissism, and genuine narcissism. A study to test for the validity of this model, using Facet Theory and smallest space analysis as the methodological approach is reported. One hundred and sixty student–teachers participated in the study. The findings provided evidence in support of the model’s validity. It is argued that altruism and narcissism conjointly may be regarded as factors motivating people to opt for teaching as a career, and that altruistic and narcissistic expectations can predict teachers’ classroom behavior.     

Counselling skills training for adolescent health: A WHO approach to meet a global need

In recent years as public health measures such as improved sanitation, water supply, and immunization have taken effect in developing as well as economically developed countries, there has been an increase in attention to health problems arising from voluntary behaviour such as sexual activity and substance abuse rather than simply from passively acquired infection. This is of special relevance to adolescents who have generally been given lower priority in health services because they are relatively disease-free yet whose patterns of behaviour have great significance for their present and future health. However establishing or changing health behaviour during the dynamic period of adolescence can be difficult especially when the environment is rapidly changing too. This is especially so in developing countries where the traditional directive approach to guidance may need to give way to a somewhat more non-directive style of counselling in order to accommodate greater adolescent autonomy, without loss of fundamental cultural values. Because few people in developing countries are experienced in such techniques WHO has developed a module for training counselling skills for adolescent sexual and reproductive health which preserves culture specificity in a non-directive approach and uses behavioural techniques to train communication microskills.     

Towards creating an inclusive community of researchers: the first three years of the North American Association for Environmental Education research symposium

This article uses a series of interlinked, personal vignettes to discuss the first three years of the North American Association for Environmental Education research symposium, from the perspectives of the key organizers. Seven challenges in the field of environmental education research are identified in a recent historical context, and we illustrate how the symposium sought to address them. The challenges were, that: (i) environmental education research has been marginalized in some areas and not recognized in others; (ii) environmental education research and environmental education practice need to be brought closer together; (iii) environmental education research is still in early development of a professional perspective; (iv) environmental education research has to give a voice to early career scholars and graduate students; (v) environmental education research needs to enable discourse about both process and outcomes; (vi) environmental education researchers need social learning contexts to help develop professional identities and create more meaningful dialogue to address these challenges; and (vii) methodologies, theoretical frameworks and differences in beliefs in environmental education research need to be accommodated. The last challenge is seen as the most significant with which to continue to engage, in developing open, inclusive forums for researchers of environmental education.     

Testing a core emotion-regulation prediction: does early attentional persistence moderate the effect of infant negative emotionality on later development?

To test the hypothesis that early attentional persistence will moderate the effect of infant negative emotionality on social competence, problem behavior, and school readiness at age 3, data collected as part of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care were subject to structural equation modeling analyses (N = 1,038). Consistent with Eisenberg et al.'s data on older children, high levels of negative emotionality were associated with low levels of social competence only when attentional persistence was poor. No such moderating effects of attentional persistence emerged in the case of behavior problems. And in the case of school readiness, findings indicated that high levels of negative emotionality predicted high levels of school readiness when attentional persistence was high, a result opposite to that found with respect to the prediction of social competence.     

Factors affecting adoption of instructional innovations: An example from medical education

This study sets forth an eight-variable causal model describing the spread of instructional innovations among individual faculty members. The model is tested by examining the diffusion of a particular innovation—self-instructional materials—among the faculty of sixteen medical schools, with data provided by faculty survey. The causal model as initially posited is found not to fit the data well; modifications of the model are found to conform more closely. The primary measure accounting for observed variance in faculty innovation behavior is frequency of communication with colleagues about the instructional process.     

Children's emotions and behaviors in response to infants' cries

Infant crying can elicit in others both a range of emotions and contrasting behavioral reactions, such as altruistic caregiving versus aggression. Variations in reactions to young infants' cries were examined in 60 children ranging in age from late preschool to preadolescence. Each child over-heard either a preterm or a full-term tape-recorded cry from an adjacent room. Then a mother, carrying her infant, came looking for her (previously) "crying" infant's bottle. Later each child was interviewed after hearing a tape recording of a preterm and a full-term cry. Children's emotions and behaviors thus were assessed in response to simulated, real distresses and hypothetical representations of distress. Children's self-reports of empathy, their verbalized intentions to help, their actual helping responses, and observers' ratings of negative emotion were common responses to cries at all ages. In addition there were significant increases with age in prosocial, behavioral interventions. Expressions of negative emotion were inversely related to subsequent forms of prosocial behavior that required direct interaction with the infant. The emotions and behaviors of most children were not influenced by whether they heard preterm or full-term cries. They were, however, able to discriminate between such cries and some articulated "theories" about the impact of the cries on the listener.