“You're My Parent but You're Not”: Dialectical Tensions in Stepchildren's Perceptions About Communicating with the Nonresidential Parent

The nonresidential parent plays a role in the lives of stepchildren and in stepfamily households. The focus of the present study was on the interaction between the nonresidential parent and his/her child who resides as part of a stepfamily household. Grounded in relational dialectics theory, the researchers performed an interpretive analysis of 50 transcribed interviews with college-aged stepchildren. Stepchildren's perceptions of communication with the nonresidential parent were animated by two contradictions: parenting/nonparenting and openness/closedness. These two contradictions form a totality, interwoven with one another. The parenting/nonparenting contradiction reflected stepchildren's ambivalence over parenting attempts of nonresidential parents. Stepchildren wanted nonresidential parent involvement and parenting, and at the same time they resisted it, often finding communication to be awkward and challenging. In addition, stepchildren wanted open and intimate communication with their nonresidential parents, yet they found openness to be problematic and managed these contradictory demands via segmentation. Implications of these findings are discussed, along with insights to guide professionals working with stepfamilies and adults co-parenting children to better understand and interact in ways that promote healthy stepfamilies.     

Pediatric health assessments of young children in child welfare by placement type

Objectives

To describe health-related problems across placement types (unrelated foster, kin foster, in-home with birth parent); to examine the association of placement and demographic/child welfare variables (child gender, age, race/ethnicity; caregiver language; type of maltreatment, and length of time receiving services from child welfare) with health-related problems.

Methods

This study utilized a retrospective medical chart review of children less than 6 years old (n = 449) seen at an outpatient child welfare pediatric clinic. Logistic regression modeling was used to estimate odds of having a weight, medical, or provisional developmental delay problem by placement and demographic/child welfare characteristics.

Results

Almost 13% of children in the sample were obese (≥95% age-gender specific percentile) and more than a quarter were overweight/obese (≥85%) while only 7% were underweight (≤5%). Most children (78%) had a physical health diagnosis and 25% were provisionally identified with a developmental delay. No differences between weight diagnoses, type of medical diagnoses, and provisional developmental delay by placement type were found, although children with 3 or more medical diagnoses were more likely to be with kin (p < .05). Children 2 years old or older were more likely to be overweight/obese than children under 2 years old (p < .05) and Hispanic children were more likely to be overweight/obese than non-Hispanic children (p < .01). Length of stay in child welfare was positively related with a medical diagnosis or provisional developmental delay (p < .01).

Conclusions

Results argue for careful assessment of weight, medical, and developmental problems in children active to child welfare, whether residing in their home of origin, with kin, or with unrelated foster parents. The increasing problem of obesity among young children in child welfare warrants further investigation and intervention.

Practice implications

The comprehensive health examination and enhanced health maintenance schedule for children in foster care should be extended to children who remain at home with child welfare services as child welfare involvement rather than placement is related to health-related problems.     

Peer relations and the understanding of faux pas: longitudinal evidence for bidirectional associations

Research connecting children's understanding of mental states to their peer relations at school remains scarce. Previous work by the authors demonstrated that children's understanding of mental states in the context of a faux pas--a social blunder involving unintentional insult--is associated with concurrent peer rejection. The present report describes a longitudinal follow-up investigation of 210 children from the original sample, aged 5-6 or 8-9 years at Time 1. The results support a bidirectional model suggesting that peer rejection may impair the acquisition of faux pas understanding, and also that, among older children, difficulties in understanding faux pas predict increased peer rejection. These findings highlight the important and complex associations between social understanding and peer relations during childhood.     

Navigating pitfalls of web-based survey development and administration

With multiple low-cost Web-based delivery methods increasingly available, the number of surveys being distributed to gather data on library users and potential users is dramatically increasing. This paper provides an overview of survey administration including history, guidelines on decision-making in survey development, and best practices for survey research when delivered via the Web. Questions on survey development issues such as probability and non-probability sampling and privacy concerns are clarified.     

Moments of becoming: experiences of embodied connection to place in arts-based service learning in Australia

The experience of place in arts-based service learning (ABSL) is personal. It can be difficult to define and challenging to share and build upon. This paper, reporting from a national ABSL project involving three Australian universities, is concerned with experiences of place in forming professional teacher identity. Using a narrative methodology in presenting the stories of six people, pre-service teachers and Indigenous community members, the paper draws on a number of different theoretical frameworks to explore each participant’s experience and its longer-term impact on their thinking. The participant stories revealed the value of spaces between art-making, teaching, and research. The learning experiences led pre-service teachers to reflect deeply in relation to self and to consider the impact of their experiences on both current and future professional interactions. As anticipated, participants found it difficult to communicate these elemental experiences in the written word. The findings have implications for the value of flexible and critical service-learning approaches, particularly in diverse cultural contexts.     

The Impact of Instructional Design on College Students’ Cognitive Load and Learning Outcomes in a Large Food Science and Human Nutrition Course

The effective design of course materials is critical for student learning, especially for large lecture introductory courses. This quantitative study was designed to explore the effect multimedia and content difficulty has on students’ cognitive load and learning outcomes. College students (n = 268) were randomized into 1 of 3 multimedia groups: text + graphics (Group 1–TG); audio + text + graphics (Group 2–ATG); or video + audio + text + graphics (Group 3–VATG). Participants answered a demographic survey and pretests before viewing 2 food science supplemental lecture materials (i.e., water mobility and amino acid structures) and completing the cognitive load instrument and post‐tests within a noncontrolled setting. Cognitive load scores were tabulated and compared using a 3 × 3 ANOVA and Tukey post hoc analysis across multimedia groups and food science supplemental lecture materials. Based on the post hoc, students in Group 1–TG had higher intrinsic cognitive load scores than Group 2–ATG (ANOVA, P < 0.05). Cognitive load and post‐test scores were tabulated and compared using a spearman correlation across groups. In Group 1–TG, students that reported less intrinsic cognitive load had higher post‐test scores. Also, students that reported more germane cognitive load had higher post‐test scores. In Groups 2–ATG and 3–VATG, students that reported less extraneous cognitive load had higher post‐test scores (ANOVA, P < 0.05).     

The girl with the garden gloves: researching the affordances of sensual materialities in the school garden

ABSTRACT

This article uses vignettes and photographs taken from ethnographic research to reframe the methodological assumptions within school garden research. New theoretical perspectives are applied to previous empirical school garden research that provides deeper understandings of both the teaching and the learning of ecoliteracy in such material contexts. Actor Network Theory and Social Semiotics further highlight the affordance of school garden spaces. We make public the conversations of a small research group about a perceived ethnographic turn towards materiality, aesthetics and agency.     

Children's Facial Emotion Recognition Skills: Longitudinal Associations With Lateralization for Emotion Processing

This is the first longitudinal study to evaluate the relations between hemispheric laterality for emotion processing and the development of facial emotion recognition (FER) skills, both of which show similar developmental trajectories. Five to 12-year-old children (N = 160) completed an emotion discrimination task, emotion matching task, identity matching task, and behavioral lateralization for emotion processing task at baseline and 1 year later. Lateralization at baseline predicted later emotion discrimination, whereas change in strength of lateralization across the year predicted emotion matching ability. Lateralization was not a significant predictor of identity matching. These findings provide evidence that it is changes in laterality for emotion processing that contribute to improvements in FER skills between 5 and 12 years of age.     

Critical Pedagogy in Process: A Collaborative Self‐Study

... the most important consideration in formulating purpose in education is the happiness of the students themselves. — T. Makiguchi     

Making the Rice: Latina Performance Testimonios of Hybridity,Assimilation, and Resistance

This performance testimonio is the result of collaboration between two U.S. Latina graduate students/ university instructors: a Latina of Puerto Rican descent and a white Chicana. It is a dialogue in which the authors “come together to engage our differences, face-to-face, and work to find common ground” (The Latina Feminist Group, 2001 The Latina Feminist Group. 2001. Telling to live: Latina feminist testimonios, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 1). We offer this performance testimonio to interrogate and be accountable for our performances of hybrid/assimilated identities, as we strive to recognize the ways we produce, maintain, and resist dominant and oppressive cultural paradigms. To do this, we draw on the models of resistance found in Latina/Chicana feminist discourse and performance autoethnography. The text was created to be performed before an audience.