Preparing Doctoral-Level Consultants for Systems Change: Implementing and Supervising Multitiered Practices in Early Childhood Education

Implementing changes that support a preventative approach in early childhood education (ECE) requires the collaboration of skilled professionals. The present case study describes a change effort to implement multitiered systems of support (MTSS) in early childhood settings that included collaboration of agency personnel, school psychology program faculty and trainees, and ECE faculty. It describes a competency-based training initiative that provides applied experiences in consultation, supervision, and change facilitation for systems change efforts. The implementation of a systems-level approach for promoting positive behavior at three ECE agencies is described, with resulting teacher and child outcomes. Implications for future consultation research, training, and practice are discussed in relation to a consultation training model that provides competency-based field experiences to support change in ECE.     

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).     

Complex influences of mechanistic knowledge,worldview, and quantitative reasoning on climate change discourse: Evidence for ideologically motivated reasoning among youth

Anthropogenic climate change remains divisive in the United States, where skepticism of the scientific consensus is associated with conservative worldviews, resulting in political polarization. This study considers three hypotheses regarding U.S. polarization over climate change that have emerged from social psychology research and applies them to science education by showing how these hypotheses could relate to adolescents' science learning. We then test each hypothesis within an experimental educational intervention designed to study the influence of worldview, mechanistic knowledge, and quantitative reasoning on students' written arguments about climate change. We used mixed methods to analyze the results of this individually randomized trial with clustering involving 357 participants in grades 9–11 from 5 U.S. sites. Findings show that: (a) exposure to mechanistic knowledge about climate change increased odds of receptivity toward climate change; (b) increasingly conservative worldviews were associated with decreased odds of receptivity; (c) worldview and quantitative reasoning interacted, resulting in an amplified effect of worldview for students with greater quantitative reasoning. Results also suggest that the influence of worldview and mechanistic knowledge on receptivity work independently from one another in our dataset. This study demonstrates the value of teaching mechanistic understandings of climate change, yet also demonstrates the influence of worldview on receptivity to climate change for adolescents, as well as complex interactions between quantitative reasoning (something school science aims to develop) and worldview. It shows that moving the U.S. public toward the scientific consensus is complex and involves confronting ideologically motivated reasoning within science education.     

Two schemes of intellectual development: A comparison of development as defined by william perry and jean piaget

The theories of Jean Piaget and William Perry provide two different theories of intellectual development with several similiarities, but also with critical differences. In this study a comparison was made to determine whether the two theories describe operation of the same mental structures or two fundamentally different aspects of intellectual development. The results, based upon individual interviews of all participants, indicate that the two theories outline different and independent processes for assessing intellectual development.