Rites of Passage: Does adaptation to university mean severing connections?

Many factors go into the decision of selecting a university, ranging from the overall costs and the programme of study to the institute’s reputation; however, accommodation while at university and proximity of the university to one’s permanent abode also play important roles in this decision-making process. Thus, first-year students experience different stages of separation from their prior networks depending on their individual situations. The results of this Ontario (Canada) 2012 study add to prior research by indicating that separation of students’ living arrangements and distance from home impact on transition and incorporation variables, which influenced students’ adaptation to university.     

The US-preexposure effect in honeybees

Signaled avoidance was studied in individual honeybees that visited the laboratory regularly to take sucrose solution from a target set on the sill of an open window. During feeding, substrate vibration or airstream was used to signal a brief shock that could be avoided by breaking off contact with the food for a few seconds. Aversive conditioning of the context was measured in terms of return time (the time between successive visits). In Experiment 1, experience with unsignaled shock was found to lengthen return time—which experience with signaled shock did not—and to impair performance in subsequent avoidance training with signaled shock (the US-preexposure effect). In Experiment 2, experience with unsignaled shock given after signaled avoidance training lengthened return time but had no effect on response to the signal in a subsequent extinction test. These results closely resemble the results obtained in analogous experiments with vertebrates.     

Controlled choice assignments: A new and more effective approach to school desegregation

The authors argue that conventional mandatory and voluntary school desegregation techniques have failed to provide minority students with maximum feasible relief from invidious discrimination because they do not redress the root causes of segregation. They demonstrate that residential-based student assignment plans as well as plans that give students limited access to a few educationally enriched magnet schools are not asymmetrical remedies to wrongful segregation and thus work to perpetuate the racial and social inequities that they purport to correct. The authors offer an alternative approach to school desegregation—controlled choice—that operates independently from residential housing patterns and which explicitly seeks to maximize personal choice within a racially unitary, equitable, and educationally enhanced system of public schooling. Controlled choice was originally pioneered in Cambridge, Mass. during the early 1980s and has recently been adopted in Little Rock, Ark., and Fall River, Mass. The policy is also being actively reviewed by several of the nation's largest school districts including Seattle, Memphis, and Boston.     

Reasoning about data in middle school science

This case study illustrates instruction in an urban 6th‐grade classroom in which students were learning about mass, volume, and density by attempting to layer (stack) three miscible solutions with differing densities atop one another. The study examines classroom discourse and interaction on the basis of four teaching goals: (a) reaching consensus about which stacks were possible, (b) developing persuasive arguments that separated data from noise, (c) establishing social norms for collective inquiry, and (d) appreciating the epistemological status of scientific knowledge. The study traces the fate of three stacks that students claimed were possible after initial investigations with the solutions. These claims underwent a process of collective validation in which consensus without coercion was the goal, which illustrates emergent standards for backing claims with evidence, as well as for replicability, among the students. Students were successful in achieving three of the four goals, with some qualifications. In relation to Goal 3, which required generalization to other situations, somewhat less success is reported. Limitations in the current standards, difficulties of time allotment in current curricula, and establishing classroom cultures of inquiry are discussed. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 179–199, 1999     

On‐screen print: the role of captions as a supplemental literacy tool

Children living in poverty are 1.3 times as likely as non‐poor children to experience reading difficulties and lack key oral experiences that contribute to early literacy development. The purpose of this research was to study the effects of viewing commercially available educational television with closed captions. Seventy second‐ and third‐grade economically disadvantaged children living in urban locations participated in this experimental research design. Children were randomly assigned to view videos with or without closed captions. Captions helped children recognise and read more words, identify the meaning of those words, generate inferences regarding programme content and transfer these skills to a normative code‐related skill task. Risk status moderated word recognition performance: those at risk benefited from captions while those who were not at risk recognised more words when captions were absent.     

Book Reviews

Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects Edited by Neil Jacobs Chandos Publishing, 2006. 250 pp. ISBN 1‐84334‐203‐0, £39.95, pbk ISBN 1‐84334‐204‐9, £57.00, hbk Selling Rights, 5th edn Lynette Owen Routledge, 2006. 384 pp. ISBN 978‐0‐415‐36280‐1, £75.00 hbk ISBN 978‐0‐415‐38652‐4, £29.95 pbk Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain by Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins Duke Law School Center for the Study of the Public Domain, 2006. 76 pp. ISBN 0‐974‐15531‐4, $5.95, pbk. Freely available online at http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd Digital Preservation Marilyn Deegan Simon Tanner Facet Publishing, 2006, Digital Futures Series. 288 pp. ISBN 978‐1‐85604‐485‐1, £39.95, hbk.     

Changing the environment to promote health-enhancing physical activity

Supportive environments have been used to change and influence health behaviours like smoking. While psychological and ecological theories and models demonstrate the possible influences of the environment on health-enhancing physical activity (HEPA), little is known about the effectiveness of the environmental interventions. This paper presents the results of a systematic review of studies that used environmental interventions to increase health-enhancing physical activity. Two groups of studies were found, studies that changed the physical environment by creating new HEPA facilities, policies and supporting mechanisms, and studies that used the elements of the environment as an active or sedentary 'point of choice', via educational materials to promote stair use. Environmental change studies showed a small increase on HEPA behaviour, but the relative impact of environment changes was not evaluated. A number of before and after studies have observed a weak effect of a simple environmental change to stimulate stair climbing while travelling or shopping. Current national policy has embraced the environment as an option for promoting health-enhancing physical activity, especially active travel, in spite of the lack of effectiveness data. It is recommended that existing or planned public health environment and HEPA initiatives should use appropriate evaluation methods to assess their efficacy and effectiveness. Further developmental research into the nature of the relationship of the environment to particular HEPA behaviours is strongly recommended before developing new environmental interventions.     

Physical activity and executive control: implications for increased cognitive health during older adulthood

Electrocortical and behavioral responses of low, moderate, and high physically active older adults were compared with a younger control group on neutral and incompatible conditions of a flankers task. Compared to younger adults, high and moderate active older adults exhibited increased event-related potentials component P3 amplitude for the incompatible condition at the frontal electrode site. For the neutral condition, only low active older adults exhibited decreased amplitude at the central-parietal site, compared to younger adults. P3 latency revealed the longest latencies for low active older adults, followed by moderate active, high active, and younger adults, respectively. Reaction time (RT) data revealed that younger adults exhibited faster RT compared to all three older groups. Results suggest that physical activity may improve executive control function in older adults by affecting the distribution of P3 amplitude, which has been related to memory and attentional processes, and by decreasing P3 latency, which relates to the speed of cognitive processing.