An intervention for relational and physical aggression in early childhood: A preliminary study

A preventive intervention for reducing physical and relational aggression, peer victimization, and increasing prosocial behavior was developed for use in early childhood classrooms. Nine classrooms were randomly assigned to be intervention rooms (N = 202 children) and nine classrooms were control rooms (N = 201 children). Classroom was the unit of analysis and both observations and teacher-reports were obtained at pre and post-test. Focus groups were used to develop the initial program. The 6-week program consisted of developmentally appropriate puppet shows, active participatory sessions, passive concept activities and in vivo reinforcement periods. Preliminary findings suggest that the “Early Childhood Friendship Project” tended to reduce physical and relational aggression, as well as physical and relational victimization and tended to increase prosocial behavior more for intervention than control classrooms. Teachers and interventionists provided positive evaluations of the program and there is evidence for appropriate program implementation.     

No Natives Here: A Focus Group Study of Student Perceptions of Web 2.0 and the Academic Library

This study explores Web 2.0 technologies in an academic library through focus groups with undergraduates at Kent State University. Results reveal that students, despite being heavy users, are less sophisticated and expressive in their use of Web 2.0 than presumed. Students set clear boundaries between educational and social spaces on the Web, and the library may be best served by building Web 2.0 into its site and extending its services into course management systems.     

Maximal strength and cortisol responses to psyching-up during the squat exercise

We studied the effect of psyching-up on one-repetition maximum (1-RM) performance and salivary cortisol responses during the squat exercise. Ten men (age 21.6+/-1.4 years; mean+/-s) and ten women (age 22.4+/-2.8 years) with weight training experience of 4.5+/-2.0 years participated in this study. One-repetition maximum squats were performed on a Smith machine during each of two different intervention conditions that were counterbalanced and consisted of a free choice psych-up and a cognitive distraction. Saliva samples were obtained at the beginning of each test session and immediately after the final 1-RM attempt. No significant difference in 1-RM was identified between psyching-up (104+/-50 kg) and cognitive distraction (106+/-52 kg). Performing a 1-RM in the squat exercise significantly increased salivary cortisol concentrations during both conditions (P<0.05). There was no significant difference in salivary cortisol responses between conditions. These results suggest that psyching-up does not increase 1-RM performance during the squat exercise in strength-trained individuals.     

Parents' Socialization of Children's Injury Prevention: Description and Some Initial Parameters

In a year-long participant observation study of remediative action following actual injury, 61 8- and 9-year-old children and their 27-46-year-old mothers wrote records and reported on more than 1,000 minor injuries in branching biweekly interviews. Mothers reported that 80.1% of injuries received no parent-initiated remediation, 14% received only a lecture, and less than 3% of injuries were followed by parental action. Children reported that 96.1% of their injuries were followed by no remediative action and recalled lectures after only 1.2% of injuries. Remediative action was related to type of child activity (e.g., unstructured play was followed by remediation more often than more purposive behavior) and to mother's affect (e.g., anger) and beliefs (e.g., that injury was the child's fault or due to rule violation). The parameters that influenced remediative consequences, and thus that may influence future injury, are discussed.     

An effective and efficient results merging strategy for multilingual information retrieval in federated search environments

Multilingual information retrieval is generally understood to mean the retrieval of relevant information in multiple target languages in response to a user query in a single source language. In a multilingual federated search environment, different information sources contain documents in different languages. A general search strategy in multilingual federated search environments is to translate the user query to each language of the information sources and run a monolingual search in each information source. It is then necessary to obtain a single ranked document list by merging the individual ranked lists from the information sources that are in different languages. This is known as the results merging problem for multilingual information retrieval. Previous research has shown that the simple approach of normalizing source-specific document scores is not effective. On the other side, a more effective merging method was proposed to download and translate all retrieved documents into the source language and generate the final ranked list by running a monolingual search in the search client. The latter method is more effective but is associated with a large amount of online communication and computation costs. This paper proposes an effective and efficient approach for the results merging task of multilingual ranked lists. Particularly, it downloads only a small number of documents from the individual ranked lists of each user query to calculate comparable document scores by utilizing both the query-based translation method and the document-based translation method. Then, query-specific and source-specific transformation models can be trained for individual ranked lists by using the information of these downloaded documents. These transformation models are used to estimate comparable document scores for all retrieved documents and thus the documents can be sorted into a final ranked list. This merging approach is efficient as only a subset of the retrieved documents are downloaded and translated online. Furthermore, an extensive set of experiments on the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) () data has demonstrated the effectiveness of the query-specific and source-specific results merging algorithm against other alternatives. The new research in this paper proposes different variants of the query-specific and source-specific results merging algorithm with different transformation models. This paper also provides thorough experimental results as well as detailed analysis. All of the work substantially extends the preliminary research in (Si and Callan, in: Peters (ed.) Results of the cross-language evaluation forum-CLEF 2005, 2005).

Cataloging Digitized Continuing Resources in a Shared Record Environment

ABSTRACT

Cataloging digitized continuing resources is a challenging task for many libraries because of their complex cataloging rules and characteristics of format. As libraries provide their digitized content and catalog records in shared environments, like HathiTrust, and use them as an access point, libraries also have to work with holdings and item records created by each contributing institution's local practice. This article discusses common challenges imposed on libraries when creating and providing access to digitized continuing resources available in a shared environment, stresses the importance of having shareable holdings and items records, and suggests possible ways to work with those challenges.     

Using Least-to-Most Assistive Prompt Hierarchy to Increase Child Compliance with Teacher Directives in Preschool Classrooms

Prompt strategies have been used to increase the compliance of preschool-aged children to teacher directives. This paper describes two experiments conducted to determine if classroom teachers could learn to use the LtM prompt hierarchy and if child compliance would increase in response to teacher behavior. This study builds on the current literature base by using prompting, specifically LtM with the additional requirement of teacher-child proximity and teacher-child eye level prior to beginning the prompt sequence, which is consistent with recommended practice in early childhood (Copple and Bredekamp, Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs (revised edition), National Association for the Education of Young Children, Washington, DC, 2009). The participants consisted of 6 preschool teachers, with varying levels of education and experience, across 2 different early childhood classrooms. Teacher prompts and children's completion of teacher directives were measured during free choice center time. Results were consistent with previous research in that compliance to teacher directives increased in preschool children with the implementation of the LtM.     

Student engagement with feedback and attainment: the role of academic self-efficacy

Abstract

Academic self-efficacy, the belief that one can achieve desired academic goals plays an important role in learning. This study aimed to determine the extent to which academic self-efficacy mediates relationships between students’ perceptions of feedback and their academic attainment. An opportunity sample of 232 students (123 female) in their first year of higher education reported their academic self-efficacy and evaluated their assessment experience, including the perceived quantity and quality of feedback and the extent to which this feedback elicited an active response. Positive associations were observed between academic attainment and students’ confidence that they could achieve their desired grades and adopt appropriate study behaviours. A negative association was identified between attainment and confidence to talk about their studies. Attainment was not related to the perceived quantity or quality of feedback, but did bear a significant association with the reported use to which feedback was put. Positive associations were generally identified between academic self-efficacy and perceptions of feedback. Path models revealed that inter-relationships were best represented by a model wherein academic self-efficacy mediated links between students’ perceptions of feedback and academic attainment. The findings highlight the need to incorporate characteristics of the individual into an understanding of student engagement with feedback.     

Mazes and Maps: Can Young Children Find Their Way?

Games provide important informal learning activities for young children, and spatial game play (e.g., puzzles and blocks) has been found to relate to the development of spatial skills. This study investigates 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children's use of scaled and unscaled maps when solving mazes, asking whether an important aspect of spatial learning—the ability to use scaled representations—is related to children's play with scaled maps. Results show that almost all children used the maps to solve the mazes at least occasionally, and use them consistently across maze difficulty and different types of maps. Map use and more accurate spatial scaling were associated with better maze performance. We suggest that maze activities including scaled maps might provide an opportunity for developing children's spatial scaling through play, and discuss future research directions.