Phoneme awareness in language-delayed children: comparative studies and intervention

Our initial study compared 15 normally- developing and 13 language- delayed four- and- five- year- olds on a range of phoneme awareness tasks differing in the degree of explicit linguistic analysis required. The language- delayed group performed more poorly than the normally- developing children, and there were significant group differences on several tasks. A significant interaction effect reflected the particular difficulty the language- delayed group had with the more explicit tasks. Follow- up testing suggests that group differences are maintained over time and that the language- delayed children perform more poorly than the normally- developing children on tests of decoding and spelling at the end of first grade. An intervention study, training phoneme awareness skills in language-delayed kindergarten children, was undertaken with a new group of subjects. Fourteen language- delayed children participated in 16 training sessions over eight weeks. Fourteen normal and 14 language- delayed children served as controls. Only the language- delayed training group made significant gains from pre- to posttraining measures. Following training, the language-delayed training group performed similarly to normal controls and significantly better than language- delayed controls whom they had matched before intervention. One year later, the language-delayed children who received training maintained their gains on phoneme analysis tasks and performed significantly better than the language-delayed controls on reading measures. Educational implications are discussed.     

Brain Processes in Mothers and Nulliparous Women in Response to Cry in Different Situational Contexts: A Default Mode Network Study

SYNOPSIS

Objective: In everyday life, parents must respond to and interact with children while in different situational contexts. How situational contexts influence parents’ responses has not been systematically studied. Here we investigated mothers’ versus nonmothers’ neural responses to infant vocalizations in different situations with different task demands. Design: Using fMRI in 21 women (10 mothers), we explored the effects of being distracted by self-oriented (self-referential decisions about personality adjectives) versus goal-oriented (syllabic counting of personality adjectives) tasks while listening to infant cry in comparison with other emotional sounds (infant laughing, adult crying) on the activity of two medial nodes of the Default Mode Network (DMN): the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Results: In the self-oriented task while listening to infant cry, both mothers and nulliparas showed (weak) activation of the DMN; this response likely reflects a shift of attention from the task to the cry. In the goal-oriented task, mothers, not nulliparas, showed (weak) activation of the DMN; this result is compatible with interference of emotional sounds while attending to a goal-oriented task, an activity that deactivates the DMN. Conclusions: Mothers are prone to process infant cry and emotional sounds and are less distracted from doing so by situational contexts, demonstrating their greater sensitivity to emotional sounds such as cry. By contrast, situational context influenced brain responses to infant sounds in nulliparas.     

Cooperative Learning with Gifted and High-achieving Students: A review and meta-analyses of 12 studies

Should gifted and high-achieving students cooperate in homogeneous groups or do they learn better individually? Or should they learn together with less gifted peers in heterogeneous groups? Current empirical research is reviewed in this article and meta-analyses of available results in 12 published studies are performed. Results show that few methodologically sound studies can be found at present. In addition, researchers only considered a restricted spectrum of participants, focused on learning of relatively simple materials, measured only a restricted range of possible outcomes, and neglected processes and activities of the learners, which might determine outcomes of cooperative learning. Results therefore remain controversial even for fundamental issues like learning in homogeneous versus heterogeneous, mixed-ability groups. In spite of these limitations, analyses nevertheless show that cooperative learning offers strong potentials for further improving the quality of instruction with gifted and high-achieving students. Further empirical research is required to obtain more differentiated information on the various aspects of cooperative learning.     

Self-Cognition and Parental Brain

SYNOPSIS

A key feature of parenting is that it is observable starting from behaviors that are performed daily by adult caregivers during repeated interactions with the child. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research on parental brain should integrate settings that resemble ecologies of situations in which parents typically care for children. However, as our commentators point out, ecological settings in fMRI research are challenging and require a multiperspective approach that systematically considers psychological and behavioral complexities of “mommy brain” to better understand how contingent mental states of mothers articulate with specific multi-tasking situations.     

Do Belonging and Social Exclusion at School Affect Structural Brain Development During Adolescence?

Students’ sense of belonging presents an essential resource for academic and health outcomes, whereas social exclusion at school negatively impacts students’ well-being and academic performance. Aiming to understand how feelings of school-related belonging and exclusion shape the structural brain development, this study applied longitudinal questionnaire-based data and MRI data from 71 adolescent students (37 females, M_age at t1 = 15.0; t2 = 16.1 years). All were white participants from Germany. Voxel-based morphometry revealed only an association of social exclusion (and not of belonging) and gray matter volume in the left anterior insula: From t1 to t2, there was less gray matter decrease, the more social exclusion students perceived. School-related social exclusion and disturbed neurodevelopment are thus significantly associated.     

Trapped between justified anger and being the strong Black woman: Black college women coping with racial battle fatigue at historically and predominantly White institutions

Using the unique form of a composite counterstory culled from the experiences of 13 Black women at historically and predominantly White colleges and universities in a Western U.S. state, this paper explores the psychological tensions and silencing Black college women face as they navigate social constructions of their selfhood under a White gaze. This study centers these Black women’s voices through a tradition of storytelling and examines the ways they try to carve their own place by often engaging liberating, yet repressive, historically constructed STRONGBLACKWOMAN imagery to counteract equally silencing Angry Black Woman imagery. The historically and predominantly White institutional spaces within which these women study, live, and play exacerbate this tension, propelling them to model and rely upon stereotypically ‘positive’ representations of Black womanhood to deal with the pain of microaggressions. Altogether, these factors create instances of enhanced racial battle fatigue.     

Health sciences librarians' research on medical students' use of information for their studies at the medical school, University of Queensland, Australia

This study reports the findings of research undertaken by health sciences librarians at the University of Queensland Library into how medical students use information for their studies, particularly resources and services provided by the Library. The methods utilized were an online survey and focus groups. Results indicated that students favor print resources over electronic, value accessing resources on a one-stop basis, and prefer training to be delivered flexibly. The implication of these results for future resource selection, service provision, and instructional design and delivery is discussed.