Adolescents at risk for mistreating their children. Part I: Prenatal identification

OBJECTIVE: To determine if the Family Stress Checklist helps prenatal care providers identify adolescents who are at risk for mistreating their children. METHODS: We studied 262 participants in a comprehensive, adolescent-oriented maternity program. During the prenatal period, the Family Stress Checklist was used to quantify abuse potential, with scores >25 defining high risk. Information about the social context of the pregnancy and the pattern of health care utilization was obtained with a self-administered questionnaire, and by reviewing the medical records. Major disruption of primary care giving by the adolescent mother was classified hierarchically as abuse, neglect, and abandonment. RESULTS: Family Stress Checklist scores ranged from 0 to 65 (mean + SD = 20.1 + 1.4); 113 (43%) of the 262 teenagers were classified as high risk. High and low risk adolescent mothers made an equivalent number of health maintenance and Emergency Department visits, but the high risk group initiated significantly more acute care visits (6.0 + 4.1 compared to 3.9 + 3.3; p < .0001). After controlling for pre-existing sociodemographic differences, high risk 1-year-olds were 8.41 (95% CI: 1.77-40.01) times and high risk 2-year-olds 5.19 (95% CI: 1.99-13.60) times more likely to have been mistreated than their low risk counterparts. CONCLUSIONS: Prenatal care providers can use the Family Stress Checklist to systematically identify a subgroup of adolescent mother whose excessive use of the acute medical care services and propensity for mistreating their children suggests the need for additional support services.     

Effects of distractor familiarity on habituation of neophobia

When the first presentation of a neophobic flavor is immediately followed by a distractor flavor, habituation of the neophobic response is typically attenuated. This is manifested by the fact that neophobia is still shown to the target flavor on its second presentation. Three experiments investigated the prediction that this effect will occur only for novel, but not familiar, distractor solutions. Experiments 1 and 2 found that, contrary to this prediction, both novel and familiar distractors can attenuate the habituation of a neophobic response. In Experiment 3, however, when the distractor was made very much more familiar, it lost its ability to interfere with the habituation of neophobia to the target solution. These results are discussed in terms of Wagner’s (1981) theory of habituation.     

Preventive Conservation on Demand: Developing Tools and Learning Resources for the Next Generation of Collections Professionals

ABSTRACT

The modern learning environment is evolving at a rapid pace. Technology can help developers of preventive conservation tools and learning resources for collections professionals to increase their impact and reach. However, it is crucial to keep the needs of users, and gaps in skills and knowledge at the forefront. This article examines preventive conservation tools and resources developed by the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) and ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property) over the past 30 years. In light of the results from a recent survey and research in the learning and development field, a set of orientations for future tool development are highlighted; these tools must be: need driven, user centered, emulating everyday experiences, social and informal, concise, mobile friendly, curated and open access.     

An analysis of evaluation campaigns in ad-hoc medical information retrieval: CLEF eHealth 2013 and 2014

Since its inception in 2013, one of the key contributions of the CLEF eHealth evaluation campaign has been the organization of an ad-hoc information retrieval (IR) benchmarking task. This IR task evaluates systems intended to support laypeople searching for and understanding health information. Each year the task provides registered participants with standard IR test collections consisting of a document collection and topic set. Participants then return retrieval results obtained by their IR systems for each query, which are assessed using a pooling procedure. In this article we focus on CLEF eHealth 2013 and 2014s retrieval task, which saw topics created based on patients’ information needs associated with their medical discharge summaries. We overview the task and datasets created, and the results obtained by participating teams over these two years. We then provide a detailed comparative analysis of the results, and conduct an evaluation of the datasets in the light of these results. This twofold study of the evaluation campaign teaches us about technical aspects of medical IR, such as the effectiveness of query expansion; the quality and characteristics of CLEF eHealth IR datasets, such as their reliability; and how to run an IR evaluation campaign in the medical domain.     

Examining emotional expressions in discourse: methodological considerations

This methodological paper presents an approach for examining emotional expressions through discourse analysis and ethnographic methods. Drawing on trends in the current literature in science education, we briefly explain the importance of emotions in science education and examine the current research methodologies used in interactional emotion studies. We put forth and substantiate a methodological approach that attends to the interactional, contextual, intertextual, and consequential aspects of emotional expressions. By examining emotional expressions in the discourse in which they are constructed, emotional expressions are identified through semantics, contextualization, and linguistic features. These features make salient four dimensions of emotional expressions: aboutness, frequency, type, and ownership. Drawing on data from a large empirical study of pre-service elementary teachers’ emotional expressions about climate change in a science course, we provide illustrative examples to describe what counts as emotional expressions in situ. In doing so we explain how our approach makes salient the nuanced nature of such expressions as well as the broader discourse in which they are constructed and the implications for researching emotional expressions in science education discourse. We suggest reasons why this discourse orientated research methodology can contribute to the interactional study of emotions in science education contexts.     

一项关于英语专业学生套语知识的调查

通过一个问卷调查和套语知识测试调查了中国三峡大学英语专业65名学生的套语知识习得情况,发现被测试者掌握的套语知识有限,套语成为英语专业学生学习英语的很大障碍。针对英语教师和英语学习者就当前中国环境下的英语教学提出了几点建议。     

Innovation in PhD completion: the hardy shall succeed (and be happy!)

What is it that makes a PhD such a difficult process, and prevents candidates from completing on time? In this paper, we propose that self‐sabotaging behaviours, including overcommitting, procrastination and perfectionism, have a role to play. At Flinders University, we have developed a program in which we work with PhD students to help to reduce these behaviours and give them the strategies and attitudes they need to successfully (and happily!) complete their thesis. The program utilises cognitive–behavioural coaching, an evidence‐based strategy that we claim leads to significant and long‐term behavioural change. An evaluation of the program indicates that it is very successful, improving students’ ability to manage their time, set specific times for writing, and show work to their supervisor regularly, and that these behaviours were associated with lower levels of stress and improved ability to complete.     

Counseling Students' Decision Making Regarding Teaching Effectiveness: A Conjoint Analysis

The authors examined the relative importance of 4 attributes of decision making for student evaluation of teaching effectiveness: perceived knowledge base of the professor, professor's delivery style, course organization, and course workload. Participants were 234 counseling graduate students from 6 midwestern universities in the United States. Data were analyzed with classic conjoint analysis using an additive model with full‐profile method. Results indicated that decisions about teaching effectiveness are complex and based on multiple attributes. There was sufficient variability in the decision‐making process to warrant caution in overgeneralizing results. Implications for faculty development and faculty hiring are considered.