Parent–adolescent interaction quality and adolescent affect—An experience sampling study on effect heterogeneity

Person–environment interactions might ultimately drive longer term development. This experience sampling study (Data collection: 2019/20 the Netherlands) assessed short-term linkages between parent–adolescent interaction quality and affect during 2281 interactions of 124 adolescents (M_age = 15.80, SD_age = 1.69, 59% girls, 92% Dutch, Education: 25% low, 31% middle, 35% high, 9% other). Adolescents reported on parent–adolescent interaction quality (i.e., warmth and conflict) and momentary positive and negative affect five to six times a day, for 14 days. Preregistered dynamic structural equation models (DSEM) revealed within-family associations between parent–adolescent interaction quality and adolescent affect (concurrently: r = −.22 to .39; lagged effects: ß = −.17 to .15). These effects varied significantly between families. These findings stress the need for more person-specific research on parenting processes.     

Boarding schools: A longitudinal examination of Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous boarders’ and non-boarders’ wellbeing

Improving educational outcomes for Indigenous Australian students is a key strategy to helping Indigenous people reach their full potential. This has resulted in well-intentioned efforts by Australian educators and governments to ensure Indigenous children have positive school experiences. However, Indigenous students still lag behind their non-Indigenous counterparts in educational outcomes. This is particularly so for Indigenous students living in rural and remote parts of Australia where educational opportunities are limited, especially in high school. One solution to this problem has been to enrol these students in boarding schools in urban and metropolitan centres. While research on the success of boarding schools for Indigenous students is scarce, what little that does exist is not encouraging. The focus of this research was to examine the effects of boarding for Indigenous (n = 11) and non-Indigenous students’ (n = 158) wellbeing (N = 1423) in two large private boys’ schools. Participating students aged 12–18 years old completed a survey measuring wellbeing constructs on two occasions, 12 months apart. Non-Indigenous boys were generally higher in wellbeing compared with Indigenous boys. There was also evidence of improved social wellbeing beyond that of non-Indigenous boarders over time. Overall, while evidence of merit was weak, boarding schools may benefit their Indigenous students’ development in social wellbeing.     

Association between prenatal maternal anxiety and/or stress and offspring's cognitive functioning: A meta-analysis

This meta-analysis examined the relationship between prenatal maternal stress and/or anxiety and the outcomes of children aged 3 months to 9 years. Of the 8754 studies published before June 2021 that were synthesized, 17 conducted in Western countries were included in the meta-analysis (N_total = 23,307; M_males 54%; M_ethnicity White 77%, Pacific 15%, African American/Black 10%, Middle Eastern 7%, Eastern 8%). Effect sizes ranged from −0.41 to 0.15. A weak negative association was found between prenatal stress and/or anxiety exposure and children's general intellectual development. Associations varied based on the type of exposure. Findings are limited to developed counties and cannot be generalized to low- and middle-income countries. Directions for maternal prenatal intervention and future studies are discussed.     

Understanding how student-constructed stop-motion animations promote mechanistic reasoning: A theoretical framework and empirical evidence

Previous studies have documented the promising results from student-constructed representations, including stop-motion animation (SMA), in supporting mechanistic reasoning (MR), which is considered an essential thinking skill in science education. Our current study presents theoretically and empirically how student-constructed SMA contributes to promoting MR. As a theoretical perspective, we propose a framework hypothesizing the link between elements of MR and the construction nature of SMA, that is, chunking and sequencing. We then examined the extent to which this framework was consistent with a multiple-case study in the domain of static electricity involving five secondary school students constructing and using their own SMA creation for reasoning. In addition, students' reasoning in pre- and postconstruction of an SMA was examined. Our empirical findings confirmed our framework by showing that all students identified the basic elements of MR, that is, entities and activities of entities, when engaging in chunking and sequencing. Chunking played a role in facilitating students to identify entities responsible for electrostatic phenomena, and sequencing seemed to elicit students to specify activities of these entities. The analysis of students' reasoning in pre- and postconstruction of SMA found that student-generated SMA has a potential effect on students' retention of the use of MR. Implications for instruction with SMA construction to support MR are discussed.     

Automatic thematic classification of election manifestos

We digitized three years of Dutch election manifestos annotated by the Dutch political scientist Isaac Lipschits. We used these data to train a classifier that can automatically label new, unseen election manifestos with themes. Having the manifestos in a uniform XML format with all paragraphs annotated with their themes has advantages for both electronic publishing of the data and diachronic comparative data analysis. The data that we created will be disclosed to the public through a search interface. This means that it will be possible to query the data and filter them on themes and parties. We optimized the Lipschits classifier on the task of classifying election manifestos using models trained on earlier years. We built a classifier that is suited for classifying election manifestos from 2002 onwards using the data from the 1980s and 1990s. We evaluated the results by having a domain expert manually assess a sample of the classified data. We found that our automatic classifier obtains the same precision as a human classifier on unseen data. Its recall could be improved by extending the set of themes with newly emerged themes. Thus when using old political texts to classify new texts, work is needed to link and expand the set of themes to newer topics.     

Hooligans,Casuals, Independents: Decivilisation or Rationalisation of the Activity?

If there is one phenomenon which highlights the lack of role distance of certain sport actors, it is obviously hooliganism. In the mid-1980s, Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning became interested in the role played by modern sports in the ‘civilising process’ and, analysing the violence of sport crowds, introduced a culturalist interpretation of the actions. They were considered to be the work of members of the ‘rough working class’, who were less advanced in the ‘civilising process’ and had still not achieved sufficient self-control. In these groups, characterised by social functioning in the form of a segmentary bond, violence was thought to be a traditional way of resolving conflicts, a significant aspect and essential part of their ethos. This is an over-determined interpretation of the violence of sports crowds which naturalises and socialises this violence. This vision poses a problem, that of the negation of any logic on the part of the actors involved. This viewpoint leads us to consider violence as a social product and a ‘practical accomplishment’, the result of the way in which supporters interpret and live in the world that surrounds them, and, as such, it is the individual and collective motives and purposes that should be investigated.     

Effects of swing-weight on swing speed and racket power

Abstract

Measurements are presented of the speed at which six different rods could be swung by four male students. Three of the rods had the same mass but their swing-weight (i.e. moment of inertia) differed by large factors. The other three rods had the same swing-weight but different masses. Our primary objective was to quantify the effects of mass and swing-weight on swing speed. The result has a direct bearing on whether baseball, tennis, cricket and golf participants should choose a heavy or light implement to impart maximum speed to a ball. When swinging with maximum effort, swing speed (V) was found to decrease as swing-weight (I _o) increased, according to the relation V?=?C/I _o ⁿ , where C is a different constant for each participant and n?=?0.27 when I _o >?0.03 kg?·?m². Remarkably similar results were obtained previously with softball bats (where n?=?0.25) and golf clubs (where n?=?0.26). Swing speed remained approximately constant as swing mass increased (when keeping swing-weight fixed). The implications for racket power are discussed.     

Learning whom not to trust across early and middle adolescence: A longitudinal neuroimaging study to trusting behavior involving an uncooperative other

Longitudinal changes in trusting behavior across adolescence and their neural correlates were examined. Neural regions of interest (ROIs) included the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), left anterior insula (AI), bilateral ventral striatum (VS), and right dorsal striatum (DS). Participants (wave 1 age: M = 12.90) played the investor in a Trust Game with an uncooperative trustee three times (1-year interval). Analyses included 77 primarily Dutch participants (33 females). Participants decreased their investments with wave. Furthermore, activity was heightened in mPFC, dACC, and DS during investment and repayment, and in right VS (investment) and AI (repayment). Finally, DS activity during repayment increased with wave. These findings highlight early–middle adolescence as an important period for developing sensitivity to uncooperative behavior.     

The use of school self‐evaluation results in the Netherlands and Flanders

This article presents the results of two studies on the use of school self‐evaluation in the Netherlands and Flanders. It focuses on which forms of instrumental use of school self‐evaluation results can be found in schools, and how differences in self‐evaluation use between schools can be explained. Results show that the instrumental use of self‐evaluation results in both contexts was limited. Results further show that differences in the use of school self‐evaluation results can be explained by differences in school organizational characteristics, implementation characteristics, and the characteristics of the school self‐evaluation itself. Implications for theory, policy, and practice are discussed.