Autobiographies of B’nai Mitzvah: The Meaning of B’nai Mitzvah and the Role Adolescents Believe Adults Play in the Process

ABSTRACT

B’nai mitzvah is a significant motivation for engagement in Jewish education. Professionals and families devote resources in aiding young people in becoming b’nai mitzvah. This article examines the adolescent narratives of b’nai mitzvah and the ways in which adults feature in their stories. Their accounts surface a belief that adults support them through pep talks, expressions of pride, helping them make choices, and being with them through the process. Teens see themselves responsible for their choices and achievements, but are appreciative of support. This article raises questions about what ways and by whom adolescents should be guided and supported.     

Online News Coverage of Preexposure Prophylaxis

Human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV continues to be a serious issue, especially for men who have sex with men (MSM). A new means of HIV prevention, called preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP), significantly reduces the chance of HIV infection. However, adoption of the drug has been slow. In this study, a content analysis of 234 online news articles about PrEP from popular U.S. news Web sites was conducted, focusing on how articles were framed in terms of benefits to PrEP, barriers to PrEP, the severity of HIV, and the susceptibility of MSM to HIV. Results showed that coverage contained conflicting information about PrEP and failed to cast HIV as a serious problem.     

Modeling scholarly book literature

Recent technology provides the means to gauge the declining ability of the nation's research libraries to maintain fairly comprehensive book collections in the face of the extraordinary growth and price inflation of scholarly publishing since the 1970s. An application of this technology is presented here in the form of a model of total book publication output and the aggregate holdings of 71 research libraries in a selected field, general sociology, for the period 1979–88. The usefulness of such modeling is discussed in terms of generating knowledge that, while low on precision, has broad reliability and relevance.     

Differences in electronic exchanges in synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication: the effect of culture as a mediating variable

Two hundred and eighty undergraduates from universities in two countries were asked to read didactic material, and then think and write about potential solutions to an ill-defined problem. The writing was conducted within a synchronous or asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) environment. Asynchronous CMC took the form of email exchanges between American learners only, Southern European learners only, and American and Southern European learners together. Synchronous CMC was restricted to dyads consisting of American–American, Southern European–Southern European, and American–Southern European students dialoguing. Additionally, a number of Americans and Southern Europeans were each paired with a content-“mirroring” computer-generated partner to account of the effect of thinking with an unresponsive partner in synchronous CMC. Results revealed that dyadic learners in asynchronous CMC used significantly more reasoning skills to think about solutions to the problem, while dyadic learners in synchronous CMC exchanged significantly more personal knowledge and features of emotion. However, the tendency among dyadic learners to include emotional features in their dialogues was mediated by their cultural background.     

The Relations of Children's Dispositional Prosocial Behavior to Emotionality, Regulation, and Social Functioning

The purpose of this study was to examine the relations of a measure of children's dispositional prosocial behavior (i.e., peer nominations) to individual differences in children's negative emotionality, regulation, and social functioning. Children with prosocial reputations tended to be high in constructive social skills (i.e., socially appropriate behavior and constructive coping) and attentional regulation, and low in negative emotionality. The relations of children's negative emotionality to prosocial reputation were moderated by level of dispositional attentional regulation. In addition, the relations of prosocial reputation to constructive social skills and parent-reported negative emotionality (for girls) increased with age. Vagal tone, a marker of physiological regulation, was negatively related to girls' prosocial reputation.     

Understanding Children's Comprehension of Visual Displays of Complex Information

Developing students' ability to interpret the vast amount of quantitative data they encounter on a daily basis has become a major task for today's educators. However, very little attention has been given to students' strategies of analyzing multivariate data. This study investigated how students interpret and analyze multivariate data organized in tables and the nature of external visual displays that they tend to create and use for this purpose. Ten middle school students were asked to think aloud while solving five problems demanding an analysis of data organized in tables. The students were then interviewed. Results indicated that (1) students based their conclusions on only part of the data; (2) students did not use either efficient or sufficient visual representations; (3) students did not apply mathematical operations efficiently; and (4) students referred to or built a context to the problem. The results of the current research may assist educators to design efficient curricula while being aware of and taking into account (1) students' difficulties in employing previously learned mathematical devices to analyze data, (2) students' skills in choosing appropriate and efficient visual representations to present and interpret the data, and (3) strategies employed by students in analyzing multivariate data.