Librarian-initiated publications discovery: How do digital depository librarians discover and select web-based government publications for state digital depositories?

This paper reports on a study of librarian initiated publications discovery (LIPD) in U.S. state digital depository programs using the OCLC Digital Archive to preserve web-based government publications for permanent public access. This paper describes a model of LIPD processes based on empirical investigations of four OCLC DA-based digital depositories. The model is composed of stages including site visit, site scan, selection, re-conceptualization, and two bibliographic verification steps; action strategies at each stage and the observed practices at each site are reported. This paper also describes how librarian perceptions of web publications as discrete objects and bibliographic objects influence the selection and retention of government web content. Finally, the paper discusses several problems associated with the observed LIPD methodologies and technologies.     

Scaring the Monster Away: What Children Know About Managing Fears of Real and Imaginary Creatures

Children around 4, 5, and 7 years old (N = 48) listened to scenarios depicting a child alone or accompanied by another person (mother, father, friend) who encounters an entity that looks like a real or an imaginary fear‐inducing creature. Participants predicted and explained each protagonist’s fear intensity and suggested coping strategies. Results showed age‐related increases in judgments that different people will experience different intensities of fear in the same situation. With age, children also demonstrated increasing knowledge that people’s minds can both induce and reduce fear, especially in situations involving imaginary creatures. Suggestions of reality affirmation strategies (e.g., reminding oneself of what is real vs. not real) significantly increased with age, whereas positive pretense strategies (e.g., imagining it is a friendly ghost) significantly decreased.     

Young Children’s Representations of Spatial and Functional Relations Between Objects

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children’s (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity. Further experiments probed the sources of younger children’s difficulty by comparing children’s performance placing a target object in a hole, on a 2‐dimensional form, or atop another solid object. Together, the findings suggest that some factors limiting adults’ object representations, including the difficulty of comparing the shapes of positive and negative spaces and of representing shapes in 3 dimensions, contribute to young children’s errors in manipulating objects.     

Early development of quantity to number-word linkage as a precursor of mathematical school achievement and mathematical difficulties: Findings from a four-year longitudinal study

This article reports results of a four-year longitudinal study that investigated the impact of specific and non-specific precursors on mathematical school achievement. Preschool quantity-number competencies (QNC) predicted mathematical achievement in primary school. Furthermore, basic arithmetic fact retrieval in Grade 1 had an impact on early mathematics school achievement. The influence of socioeconomic status and number naming speed, assessed in kindergarten, became especially important at the end of Grade 4. Particularly, a subgroup of mathematically low-achieving children in Grade 4 had already performed more poorly than normal children in tasks assessing preschool QNC, number naming speed, and basic arithmetic fact retrieval, as well as nonverbal intelligence and socioeconomic status.     

Does Text Complexity Matter in the Elementary Grades? A Research Synthesis of Text Difficulty and Elementary Students’ Reading Fluency and Comprehension

Prompted by the advent of new standards for increased text complexity in elementary classrooms in the USA, the current integrative review investigates the relationships between the level of text difficulty and elementary students’ reading fluency and reading comprehension. After application of content and methodological criteria, a total of 26 research studies were reviewed. Characteristics of the reviewed studies are reported including the different conceptualizations of text, reader, and task interactions. Regarding the relationships between text difficulty and reading fluency and comprehension, for students’ reading fluency, on average, increased text difficulty level was related to decreased reading fluency, with a small number of exceptions. For comprehension, on average, text difficulty level was negatively related to reading comprehension, although a few studies found no relationship. Text difficulty was widely conceptualized across studies and included characteristics particular to texts as well as relationships between readers and texts. Implications for theory, policy, curriculum, and instruction are discussed.     

Dysregulated Fear,Social Inhibition,and Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia: A Replication and Extension

Behavioral inhibition indicates increased risk for development of social anxiety. Recent work has identified a pattern of dysregulated fear (DF), characterized by high fear in low‐threat situations, that provides a more precise marker of developmental risk through early childhood. This study tested a new longitudinal sample of children (n = 124) from ages 24 to 48 months. Replicating prior findings, at 24 months, we identified a pattern of fearful behavior across contexts marked by higher fear to putatively low‐threat situations. DF was associated with higher parental report of social inhibition at 24, 36, and 48 months. Extending prior findings, we observed differences in cardiac physiology during fear‐eliciting situations, suggesting that the neurobiological underpinnings of DF relate to difficulty with regulation.     

Self‐archiving practice and the influence of publisher policies in the social sciences

Authors in different disciplines exhibit very different behaviours on the so‐called ‘green’ road to open access, i.e. self‐archiving. This study looks at the self‐archiving behaviour of authors publishing in leading journals in six social science disciplines. It tests the hypothesis that authors are self‐archiving according to the norms of their respective disciplines rather than following self‐archiving policies of publishers, and that, as a result, they are self‐archiving significant numbers of publisher PDF versions. It finds significant levels of self‐archiving, as well as significant self‐archiving of the publisher PDF version, in all the disciplines investigated. Publishers' self‐archiving policies have no influence on author self‐archiving practice.     

Relational Interventions for Maltreated Children

Child maltreatment may be best characterized as a pathogenic relational experience which primarily occurs in the mother–child relationship. As such, enhancing the mother–child relationship is the key process that should be targeted in intervention approaches for child maltreatment. Two salient and modifiable components of the mother–child relationship are highlighted: maternal sensitivity and attachment organization. It is argued, from a developmental psychopathology perspective, why focusing on these issues hold the most promise for interrupting negative developmental cascades and promoting resilience among maltreated children. Utilization of a tiered approach to delivering increasingly intensive relational interventions is recommended as are future directions for translational research and dissemination.