Differential Associations of Distinct Forms of Childhood Adversity With Neurobehavioral Measures of Reward Processing: A Developmental Pathway to Depression

Childhood adversity is associated with altered reward processing, but little is known about whether this varies across distinct types of adversity. In a sample of 94 children (6–19 years), we investigated whether experiences of material deprivation, emotional deprivation, and trauma have differential associations with reward-related behavior and white matter microstructure in tracts involved in reward processing. Material deprivation (food insecurity), but not emotional deprivation or trauma, was associated with poor reward performance. Adversity-related influences on the integrity of white matter microstructure in frontostriatal tracts varied across childhood adversity types, and reductions in frontostriatal white matter integrity mediated the association of food insecurity with depressive symptoms. These findings document distinct behavioral and neurodevelopmental consequences of specific forms of adversity that have implications for psychopathology risk.     

THE KNOWLEDGE OF MEMORY AGING QUESTIONNAIRE

A new questionnaire, the Knowledge of Memory Aging Questionnaire, assesses general knowledge of normal and pathological memory aging for use with students, older adults, and service providers who work with the elderly. The questionnaire consists of 28 true/false items covering a broad range of memory behaviors     

Item-Level Comparative Analysis of Online and Paper Administrations of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills

This article describes a comparative study conducted at the item level for paper and online administrations of a statewide high stakes assessment. The goal was to identify characteristics of items that may have contributed to mode effects. Item-level analyses compared two modes of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) for up to four subjects at two grade levels. The analyses included significance tests of p-value differences, DIF, and response distributions for each item. Additional analyses investigated item position effects and objective-level mode differences. No evidence of item position effects emerged, but significant differences were found for several items and objectives in all subjects at grade 8 and in mathematics and English language arts (ELA) at grade 11. Differences generally favored the paper group. ELA items that were longer in passage length and math items that required graphing and geometric manipulations or involved scrolling in the online administration tended to be the items showing mode differences.     

Urban fifth graders’ connections-making between formal earth science content and their lived experiences

Earth science education, as it is traditionally taught, involves presenting concepts such as weathering, erosion, and deposition using relatively well-known examples—the Grand Canyon, beach erosion, and others. However, these examples—which resonate well with middle- and upper-class students—ill-serve students of poverty attending urban schools who may have never traveled farther from home than the corner store. In this paper, I explore the use of a place-based educational framework in teaching earth science concepts to urban fifth graders and explore the connections they make between formal earth science content and their lived experiences using participant-driven photo elicitation techniques. I argue that students are able to gain a sounder understanding of earth science concepts when they are able to make direct observations between the content and their lived experiences and that when such direct observations are impossible they make analogies of appearance, structure, and response to make sense of the content. I discuss additionally the importance of expanding earth science instruction to include man-made materials, as these materials are excluded traditionally from the curriculum yet are most immediately available to urban students for examination.     

Sensitivity Analysis of the No-Omitted Confounder Assumption in Latent Growth Curve Mediation Models

Latent growth curve mediation models are increasingly used to assess mechanisms of behavior change. For latent growth mediation model, like any another mediation model, even with random treatment assignment, a critical but untestable assumption for valid and unbiased estimates of the indirect effects is that there should be no omitted variable that confounds indirect effects. One way to address this untestable assumption is to conduct sensitivity analysis to assess whether the inference about an indirect effect would change under varying degrees of confounding bias. We developed a sensitivity analysis technique for a latent growth curve mediation model. We compute the biasing effect of confounding on point and confidence interval estimates of the indirect effects in a structural equation modeling framework. We illustrate sensitivity plots to visualize the effects of confounding on each indirect effect and present an empirical example to illustrate the application of the sensitivity analysis.     

Assessing children's perceptions of prosocial and antisocial peer behaviour

The aims of this study were to administer an assessment measure that would identify prosocial children, bullies and their victims, and to examine the underlying structure of children's perceptions of peer social behaviour in these three groups. Three versions (peer nomination, self and teacher rating) of a newly developed child social behaviour questionnaire (CSBQ) were completed by children (aged 9/10 years, n=321) and their teachers in 14 Scottish primary schools. The CSBQ is distinguished from other extant measures by its joint focus on both prosocial and antisocial child behaviours, and by its use of concrete and empirically derived items. In conjunction with sociometric data, which was also elicited from the children, the CSBQ yielded scores on 12 behavioural dimensions. Based upon the peer nomination data, a set of rigorous criteria, capable of reliably identifying children in the three groups, was developed to take account of varying peer nomination practices within and between schools. Factor analysis of the 12 measures yielded four factors (two antisocial factors, a prosocial factor and a victim factor) which accounted for 71% of the variance, and which offer further insight into the organisation of children's perceptions of social behaviour. Gender differences in peer nomination patterns and comparisons between the different informant groups are discussed in relation to previous work.     

Thinking with Posthuman Perspectives in Self-Study Research

In this study, we set out to explore processes of individual and group becomings of a self-study collective over time and distance, and with/through technology. Born out of a self-study project in one of our early doctoral courses, our self-study community has evolved over several years to one that is hybrid in nature. As we have continued our collaboration through online media, a tension arose at the juncture of our fundamentally relational work together, our need for the physical, embodied aspect of learning and self-study and the hybrid, often disembodied, experience provided by substituting online meetings for those conducted in-person. In this article we explore these tensions through pivotal moments and lines of flight in our self-study work over the past year. To frame these moments, we draw on ideas from posthumanism, which offers ways to conceptualize our collective as a multiplicity, account for the relational and material aspects of our work, address the agency of non-human actors (such as technology) in our collaboration, and consider our self-study practice a dynamic, complex, contextualized, situated phenomenon.     

Radio’s Forgotten Visuals

Some of the most ambitious experiments in early radio programming involved the coordination of sounds and visuals. This essay explores the phenomenon of “illustrated radio,” or radio broadcasts enhanced with accompanying visual media such as lantern slides, museum exhibits, and filmstrips. Newspapers, museums, and schools experimented with this format in the 1920s–40s in an effort to expand their audiences and adapt their informational missions to a changing media environment. While relatively short-lived, illustrated radio constituted a significant form of audiovisual broadcasting before television and highlights the range of uses that were envisioned for radio when it was new.