Accuracy in identifying students’ miscues during oral reading: a taxonomy of scorers’ mismarkings

Reading and Writing - Informal reading inventories (IRI) and curriculum-based measures of reading (CBM-R) have continued importance in instructional planning, but raters have exhibited difficulty...     

Altruism, aggression, and social interactions in young children with a manic-depressive parent

This is an exploratory study of the emotional and social functioning of young children with a manic-depressive parent. Seminaturalistic observations and experimental manipulations of the affective environment were used to assess 2-year-old children's regulation of emotion, as well as their aggression, altruism, and affiliative interactions. Children with a bipolar parent sometimes showed heightened distress and preoccupation with the conflicts and suffering of others, especially disturbances in adults. These children had difficulty in maintaining friendly social interactions, in sharing, and in helping their playmates. They also had difficulty modulating hostile impulses; they showed more maladaptive patterns of aggression toward peers and adults. These interpersonal and emotional problems of offspring of manic-depressives were often similar to those problems of manic-depressives that have been implicated in the clinical literature as possibly associated with the transmission of the disorder. This apparent congruence of findings obtained from different disciplines employing very different research strategies and studying people of different ages, attests to the utility of an explicit interdisciplinary approach in the area of developmental psychopathology.     

Children's responses to everyday marital conflict tactics in the home

Mothers' and fathers' reports of marital conflicts in the home were obtained (n = 1,638 and 1,281 conflicts, respectively), including conflicts in front of the children (n = 580 and 377, respectively). Participants were 116 families with children 8 to 16 years old (M = 10.82 years, SD = 2.17; 58 boys, 58 girls). Children's emotional responses indicated distinctions between distressing conflict tactics (i.e., threat, personal insult, verbal hostility, defensiveness, nonverbal hostility, marital withdrawal, physical distress) and those that increased their emotional security (i.e., calm discussion, support, affection). Analyses based on cross-reporter informants of parental conflict and child responses strengthened confidence in the findings. Conflict tactics were related to marital functioning, and children's emotional reactions during marital conflicts were associated with their adjustment.     

The changing role of the Japanese professor

In analyses of the professorial role, an opposition is often established between the professional or external components and the university or internal components. From this perspective, professors at leading universities in the West are said to emphasize the professional components of their role. In contrast, in the past Japanese professors tended to emphasize the local university-centered components. In recent years, many professors have shifted their energies away from these university-centered components. Some have become professional in the Western sense, but others have become showmen and still others politicians. No single phrase suffices to summarize the trend away from university centeredness.The authors wish to thank Kazuyuki Kitamura and the other members of the Research Institute for Higher Education of Hiroshima University for so generously supplying their unpublished data on university governance for their inspection. Also they acknowledge the stimulation they have experienced in reading Shigeru Nakayama's important comparative analysis of university traditions.