Need for approval and children's well-being

This research examined the hypothesis that a tendency to base one's self-worth on peer approval is associated with positive and negative aspects of children's well-being. A sample of 153 fourth through eighth graders (9.0 to 14.8 years) reported on need for approval, global self-worth, social-evaluative concerns, anxiety and depression, and exposure to victimization. Teachers reported on social behavior. Results confirmed that need for approval is a two-dimensional construct composed of positive (enhanced self-worth in the face of social approval) and negative (diminished self-worth in the face of social disapproval) approval-based self-appraisals. Need for approval had trade-offs for well-being that depended on the dimension (positive vs. negative), the psychological domain (emotional vs. social adjustment), children's sex and age, and children's social context (high vs. low peer victimization).     

‘We are family’: Māori success in foundation programmes

This paper considers the question: What constitutes an optimal learning environment for Māori learners in foundation programmes? Using Kaupapa Māori methodology, nearly 100 adult Māori (Indigenous) students in Aotearoa/New Zealand were interviewed from a range of tertiary providers of foundation programmes. State-funded foundation programmes that scaffold adults into tertiary education are a partial response to Ministry of Education concerns about unsatisfactory high school statistics for some sections of the community. Connecting with Māori voices enabled the researchers to gain a deeper awareness of the reality of study experiences for these adult learners. It is argued that academic participation and success for adult Māori learners is increased when the learning and teaching environment mirrors the connectedness and belonging of a whānau (family) environment.     

The Development of Perspective Taking: Understanding Differences in Information and Weighting

2 separate aspects of perspective taking are that judgments attributed to another should depend on the information available to the other (Information effect) and on how the other's use of information differs from one's own (Weighting effect). These 2 aspects of perspective taking were studied in a moral judgment task with preschoolers, and second and fifth graders. Subjects were read a series of stories about a little boy transgressing and asked to make judgments from both their own perspective and that of a mother character in the stories. The mother story character had either the same information as the subject or only partial information. Valence of intention and consequence and the amount of mother's knowledge varied factorially. Subjects were clustered using scores derived from the judgements. 3 clusters were found that showed different levels of perspective-taking ability. There was a developmental progression in the 3 levels of perspective taking. Subjects in the Harshness cluster attributed harsher judgments to the mother perspective. Subjects in the Weighting cluster weighted information differently depending on the perspective from which they judged. Subjects in the Information-and-Weighting cluster weighted information differently depending on perspective, and also considered the amount of information available to the mother character in attributing judgments. The findings are compared to current theory on the development of perspective taking. Future research and theory need to consider the influence of both information and weighting differences on performance in perspective-taking tasks.