Measuring Cultural Dimensions of Classroom Interactions

We trace the development and analyze the generalizability of the Classroom Assessment of Sociocultural Interactions (CASI), an observation system designed to measure cultural dimensions of classroom interactions. We establish CASI measurement properties by analyzing panoramic videos of 4th and 5th grade classrooms from the Measures of Effective Teaching project, and argue for its significance in terms of achievement opportunity for minoritized students and needed evidence regarding equitable teaching. We frame ten dimensions of sociocultural interactions within three domains: Life Applications (i.e., connections with what students know and do outside of school); Self in Group (i.e., interdependence to motivate learning and foster social identities); and Agency (i.e., how freedom and choice are managed).

We demonstrate how measurement error is associated with raters, lessons, and lesson segments, and discuss implications for CASI refinement, as well as appropriate instrument uses to enrich learning opportunities for minoritized students across a variety of classroom settings.     

The Effects of Darkness and Lightness Cues in the Visual Depiction of Political Actors Involved in Scandals: An Experimental Study

Reports about political scandals have increased lately. Yet the general impact of news visuals and the specific role of lightness and darkness cues in images of scandalized politicians remain unclear. With the help of an experiment, the present pilot study examined the influence of candidate images and the effects of particular image backgrounds (light versus dark). While the foreground of the image depicting a politician involved in a scandal remained unchanged, the background was systematically altered. The results revealed that a light background had a positive effect on recipients’ attitudes toward the politician. In contrast, participants exposed to a dark image background demanded a more severe punishment for the politician.     

Toppling hierarchies? Media and information literacies,ethnicity, and performative media practices

This article suggests how we should study media and information literacies (MIL) and do so at a time, when young people nurture these literacies through multiple media practices and across spaces of learning. Our basic argument is this: in order to gain a robust knowledge base for the development of MIL we need to study literacy practices beyond print literacy and numeracy, and we need to study these practices beyond formal spaces of learning. The argument is unfolded with particular focus on ethnic minority youth since this group routinely figures as under-achieving in studies of school literacy, such as Programme for International Student Assessment. Based on a brief overview of literacy studies in view of digitization and a critical examination of recent studies of youthful media practices and ethnicity, the argument is illustrated through an empirical analysis that draws on results from a nationally representative survey of media uses among Danes aged 13–23 years. The analysis demonstrates that ethnic minority youth offer the most serious challenge to existing literacy hierarchies found in formal education. We discuss the implications of these results for educational policy-making and for future research on MIL, advocating inclusive approaches in terms of media for learning and spaces of learning.     

Behavioral and neurophysiological effects of morphological awareness training on spelling and reading

Behavioral and neurophysiological effects of a computer-aided morphological training protocol were examined in German-speaking children from Grades 3 to 9. Study 1 compared morphological awareness, reading, and spelling skills of 34 trained children with an untrained control group of 34 children matched for age, sex, and intelligence. All participants in the training group showed increases in morphological awareness, but only students from secondary school improved significantly in reading and spelling competences. In Study 2, a subsample of 8 trained children with poor spelling and reading abilities and 10 untrained children with higher language competencies underwent an electroencephalography testing involving three different language tasks. The training resulted in decreased theta-activity and increased activity in lower (7–10 Hz) and upper alpha (10–13 Hz). These findings reflect more effortful and attention-demanding processing after the training and suggest that children with poor spelling and reading abilities use the acquired morphological knowledge in terms of a compensatory strategy.     

Personality Traits Are Associated With Cortical Development Across Adolescence: A Longitudinal Structural MRI Study

How personality traits relate to structural brain changes in development is an important but understudied question. In this study, cortical thickness (CT) and surface area (SA), estimated using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), were investigated in 99 participants aged 8–19 years. Follow‐up MRI data were collected after on average 2.6 years for 74 individuals. The Big Five personality traits were related to longitudinal regional CT or SA development, but limited cross‐sectional relations were observed. Conscientiousness, emotional stability, and imagination were associated with more age‐expected cortical thinning over time. The results suggest that the substantial individual variability observed in personality traits may partly be explained by cortical maturation across adolescence, implying a developmental origin for personality–brain relations observed in adults.     

User community vs. producer innovation development efficiency: A first empirical study

In this paper we report upon a first empirical exploration of the relative efficiency of innovation development by product users vs. product producers. In a study of over 50 years of product innovation in the whitewater kayaking field, we find users in aggregate were approximately 3× more efficient at developing important kayaking product innovations than were producers in aggregate. We speculate that this result is driven by what we term “efficiencies of scope” in problem-solving. These can favor an aggregation of many user innovators, each spending a little, over fewer producer innovators benefitting from higher economies of scale in product development. We also note that the present study explores only one initial point on what is likely to be a complex efficiency landscape.