Understanding glocal learning spaces. An empirical study of languaging and transmigrant positions in the virtual classroom

The use of digital tools like computers and tablets in institutional learning arenas give rise to forms of flexibility where time and space boundaries become diffuse. Online learning sites are understood as being crucial today, especially in large parts of the Global North, where anyone anywhere potentially can become a student and have access to educational opportunities.

This study focuses on the analysis of recorded sessions, part of an ‘Italian for (adult) beginners' online course. Our interests relate to accounting for how students negotiate different language varieties, including modalities, and how communication in virtual learning settings enables both flexible participation trajectories and identity positions in and across the boundaries of time and space.

The sociocultural and dialogical analyses here are framed in terms of fluidity of ‘glocal' positions and (trans)languaging that emerge in and across time and space in Technology Mediated Communication. Our findings suggest that online environments support meaning-making where it is possible to identify alternative ways of (co)constructing and mediating learning. Such hybridity as well as the performative character of learning and identity display have important implications for online glocal communities.     

Encouraging Maternal Guidance of Preschoolers’ Spatial Thinking During Block Play

Spatial thinking, an important component of cognition, supports academic achievement and daily activities (e.g., learning science and math; using maps). Better spatial skills are correlated with more spatial play and more parental attention to spatial concepts. Tested here was whether informing mothers about spatial thinking and ways to encourage it would increase the spatial guidance they provide to their preschool children (N = 41; M = 5.23 years) during dyadic block play. Mothers given such instructions indeed produced more spatial language and spatial guidance than mothers asked to play as usual. In instructed dyads, children also used more spatial language; both mothers and children engaged in less pretend play. Findings offer support for designing interventions to encourage parents to foster their children's spatial skills.     

University students’ conceptions of learning across multiple domains

Research on students’ conceptions of learning is a growing and complex area of interest in the field of psychology of education. Even though much of the investigation addressed to explore conceptions of learning at the university level, still less research has considered how naïve (i.e. ‘learning as reduction of deficit knowledge through individual effort’) and sophisticated (i.e. ‘learning as opportunity and self-efficacy’) conceptions of learning are related to personal and contextual factors. This research investigated how gender, academic area, and level of study influence university students’ conceptions of learning. Three hundred forty-six university students participated in the study. They were either from humanities (240) or technical-scientific (106) areas of study and they were attending either a Bachelor (140) or Master’s degree (206) course. Conceptions of learning were explored using a self-report instrument (Learning Conceptions Questionnaire; LCQ). A MANOVA revealed that females show conceptions of learning more related to social and motivational aspects of learning with a greater personal involvement, compared with males. No typical pattern of conceptions of learning was found for humanities students or for technical-scientific students. Increasing with the level of study, students showed both naïve and sophisticated conceptions of learning increased, since both ‘learning as reduction of deficit knowledge through individual effort’ and ‘learning as opportunities and self-efficacy’ were more likely. Implications of these results and future lines of research will be discussed.     

The links between students’ relationships with teachers,likeability among peers,and bullying victimization: the intervening role of teacher responsiveness

Highly responsive teachers tend to foster behaviors that are low in conflict and high in prosociality, among their students, leading to a positive classroom climate and to a decrease in bullying victimization. However, little is known about the interaction between teacher responsiveness and both student–teacher, and student–student relationship characteristics, in influencing students’ bullying victimization at school. Here, we examined student–teacher relationship quality and students’ likeability among peers as predictors of in-school victimization. Additionally, we investigated the moderating role of teacher responsiveness over this link. Study sample consisted of 386 early-adolescent students (55.2% female, mean age [SD] = 12.17 [0.73]) and 19 main teachers (females, n = 14). Findings indicated that students’ exposure to victimization was positively associated with student–teacher conflict and negatively associated with likeability among classroom peers. Teacher responsiveness did not show a significant direct association with bullying victimization. However, when teachers showed high responsiveness, the strength of the association between student–teacher conflict and students’ likelihood of bullying victimization was slightly increased. The present study highlights the importance of considering the role of teacher responsiveness when modeling the link between student and teacher relationship quality and in school bullying victimization.

     

Links between repeating and growing pattern knowledge and math outcomes in children and adults

This study examined repeating and growing pattern knowledge and their associations with procedural and conceptual arithmetic knowledge in a sample of U.S. children (N = 185; M_age = 79.5 months; 55% female; 88% White) and adults (N = 93; M_age = 19.5 years; 62% female; 66% White) from 2019 to 2020. Three key findings emerged: (1) repeating pattern tasks were easier than growing pattern tasks, (2) repeating pattern knowledge robustly predicted procedural calculation skills over and above growing pattern knowledge and covariates, and (3) growing pattern knowledge modestly predicted procedural and conceptual math outcomes over and above repeating pattern knowledge and covariates. We expand existing theoretical models to incorporate these specific links and discuss implications for supporting math knowledge.     

The Myth of Catholic Italy in Post-Fascist Newsreels

This article analyzes how Catholicism had a central role in the identity-creation process after the War. The study employs the online archive of the national agency ‘Istituto Luce’ to analyze 261 newsreels about religion released between 1946 and 1965. The article uses (i) Benedict Anderson’s work on imagined communities and (ii) Roland Barthes’ concept of mythology as theoretical frameworks. This study indicates that the majority of newsreels presented Catholicism as intertwined with Italian politics, and as a central element of both tradition and modernity. These findings suggest that the newly formed Italian democracy used the media to emphasize certain aspects of Catholicism, while overlooking others, such as its implications with the Fascist regime. In this way, the media contributed to create a post-war myth where Catholicism represented a moral resource for the country’s leaders and citizens. This historical process contributes to explain the contemporary pervasiveness of Catholicism in Italian media.     

Development of a scale of Sense of Community in university online courses

Creating a sense of community in online classes contributes to student retention and to their overall satisfaction with the course itself. This study aimed to develop a scale of sense of community of students attending online university courses. A series of ordinal exploratory factor analyses were conducted on data obtained from 839 students enrolled in Italian universities. Using an item analysis method, we were able to select the 36 most valid items from an original set of 60 items we had previously defined. These items are distributed across three related factors measuring membership, influence, and fulfillment of needs. This factorial structure replicates the McMillan and Chavis’s model of sense of community, upon the basis of which this scale was developed. The three factors presented good ordinal alpha and adequate convergent/divergent validity coefficients. The scale represents an efficient tool for the design, monitoring, and evaluation of online courses.     

Young Children's Self‐Concepts Include Representations of Abstract Traits and the Global Self

There is debate about the abstractness of young children's self‐concepts—specifically, whether they include representations of (a) general traits and abilities and (b) the global self. Four studies (N = 176 children aged 4–7) suggested these representations are indeed part of early self‐concepts. Studies 1 and 2 reexamined prior evidence that young children cannot represent traits and abilities. The results suggested that children's seemingly immature judgments in previous studies were due to peculiarities of the task context not the inadequacy of children's self‐concepts. Similarly, Studies 3 and 4 revealed that, contrary to claims of immaturity in reasoning about the global self, young children update their global self‐evaluations in flexible, context‐sensitive ways. This evidence suggests continuity in the structure of self‐concepts across childhood.     

It’s a match (?): Tinder usage and attitudes toward interracial dating

ABSTRACT

The increased popularity of dating apps such as Tinder coupled with the rise in interracial marriages form the foundation of this study which explores the role played by visual and cultural cues in people’s dating decisions. Using a within-group 2*3 experimental design (N = 331) among a convenience sample of adults in the Netherlands, this study provides insight into how the ethnicity associated with profile pictures and names impact the evaluation of a potential date on Tinder. Overall, respondents ranked Caucasian-looking Tinder users as more attractive and more likely to be their date of choice. Interestingly, this finding did not hold when narrowed down to respondents identifying as Western-European only: They did not prefer Caucasian-looking or sounding profiles. Perceived attractiveness was shown to partially mediate the choice of a Caucasian-looking profile, regardless of name.     

Defining and Operationalizing Appropriation for Science Learning

The goal of this article is to contribute to understanding the interplay between students' disciplinary engagement and their identity construction. The term appropriation, borrowed from scholars in linguistics and education, was chosen to capture this broader sense of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and identity. Appropriation implies deep conceptual understanding, but it also involves a reflexive process of transforming scientific discourse in a way that is authentic and personal. The core aim of this article is to turn the term appropriation into a theoretical construct by means of an analytic process of defining, operationalizing, and testing the definition against student interview and classroom data. Five discourse markers for operationalizing appropriation were discovered through this process. Appropriation, in our study, implies students’ discourse is (A) an expression of a personal “signature“ idea, (B) grounded in the discipline, (C) thick, in that it involves a metacognitive and epistemological dimension, (D) non-incidental, in the sense of being consistently used throughout classroom activities, and (E) a carrier of social relationships, in that it positions the student within classroom. The study is grounded in an extended intervention on thermodynamics in an Italian secondary school class (grade 12).