Psychosocial correlates of child abuse potential in multiply disadvantaged adolescent mothers

OBJECTIVE: This study had two aims: First to examine psychosocial correlates of child maltreatment risk, and second to assess the validity of the CAP Inventory (Milner, 1986) with multiply disadvantaged teenage mothers. METHOD: Participants were 75 adolescent mothers who were wards of the Illinois child protection system. Mothers (aged 14-18) and infants participated in home-based psychosocial assessment of personal and parenting functioning. Group comparisons examined differences for mothers with elevated versus normal versus invalid CAP scores due to faking good. RESULTS: Findings indicated that abuse risk groups differed on emotional distress, social support satisfaction, reading achievement, and years of education, but not on parenting beliefs or quality of child stimulation. Differences favored the normal over the elevated risk group in all significant comparisons, whereas mothers with elevated faking good differed from normals only in lower reading achievement. Multiple regression analysis highlighted emotional distress, support dissatisfaction, and low achievement as significant predictors of greater abuse risk. CONCLUSIONS: Despite sharing multiple disadvantages, adolescent wards are a heterogeneous group who show different levels of psychosocial functioning corresponding to levels of child maltreatment risk. The findings provide support for the concurrent validity and clinical applicability of the CAP Inventory with disadvantaged teenage mothers.     

Developing Research Skills for Civil Engineers: A Library Contribution

A cowse‐integrated programme of library instruction has been developed for the School of Civil Engineering at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia; library instruction being one of the means selected to improve the research efforts of fourth year project students. The programme has been developed through consultation between the Civil Engineering Research Project Coordinator and the Civil Engineering Reference Librarian. Its aims are derived from those established for the fourth year research projects. Attention is focussed on the nature of the programme and the impact of instruction on fourth year research project students. Students who had received extended library instruction were compared with students from the previous year. Evidence suggests that the instruction has improved the information seeking behaviour of the students and their literature reviews.     

Who are Rural Students? How Definitions of Rurality Affect Research on College Completion

Research in Higher Education - Given a revived national discourse about rural populations, more educational research on rural students is necessary, including ways that rural students transition to...     

Search for Symbol Sense Behavior: Students in Upper Secondary Education Solving Algebraic Physics Problems

Research in Science Education - Students in upper secondary education encounter difficulties in applying mathematics in physics. To improve our understanding of these difficulties, we examined...     

Expertise Differences in the Comprehension of Visualizations: a Meta-Analysis of Eye-Tracking Research in Professional Domains

This meta-analysis integrates 296 effect sizes reported in eye-tracking research on expertise differences in the comprehension of visualizations. Three theories were evaluated: Ericsson and Kintsch’s (Psychol Rev 102:211–245, 1995) theory of long-term working memory, Haider and Frensch’s (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cognit 25:172–190, 1999) information-reduction hypothesis, and the holistic model of image perception of Kundel et al. (Radiology 242:396–402, 2007). Eye movement and performance data were cumulated from 819 experts, 187 intermediates, and 893 novices. In support of the evaluated theories, experts, when compared with non-experts, had shorter fixation durations, more fixations on task-relevant areas, and fewer fixations on task-redundant areas; experts also had longer saccades and shorter times to first fixate relevant information, owing to superiority in parafoveal processing and selective attention allocation. Eye movements, reaction time, and performance accuracy were moderated by characteristics of visualization (dynamics, realism, dimensionality, modality, and text annotation), task (complexity, time-on-task, and task control), and domain (sports, medicine, transportation, other). These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of visual expertise in professional domains and their significance for the design of learning environments.