Team Hyena Puppet: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Making and Teaching Science Through Art

In 2016, professors representing Biology, Dance, Music, and Theatre and dance program students created Dunes, a performance piece that depicts the ecological succession of Michigan's sand dunes. The process used to make this work is a direct representation of the steps that Team Hyena Puppet, a collective of teaching artists and scientists, takes in their science-based art collaborations, which are used to reflect on and depict scientific research and simultaneously teach student participants and audience members science through the performing arts.     

Not Proved: Reply to Wynn

Findings on whether young infants look longer at incorrect addition and subtraction have been inconsistent or, as in our study, negative. We hypothesize that imprecise ordinal calculating with very small numbers of objects develops in late infancy and precise calculating in early childhood.     

Associations among Adult Attachment Representations, Maternal Sensitivity, and Infant-Mother Attachment in a Sample of Adolescent Mothers

Associations among adolescent attachment organization, maternal sensitivity, and infant attachment organization were examined prospectively in 74 teenaged mother-infant dyads. Pregnant teenagers' attachment organizations predicted both sensitivity and infant-mother attachments. Mothers classified autonomous (F) in the prenatal period showed higher levels of sensitivity at both 3 and 9 months than mothers classified dismissing (Ds), preoccupied (E), or unresolved (U). Correspondence between maternal attachment (F vs. Ds/E/U) and infant attachment (secure [B] vs. avoidant [A]/resistant [C]/ disorganized [D]) was observed in 58 of 74 (78%) dyads. Exact 4-group (Ds/E/F/U and A/B/C/D) agreement was observed in 50 of 74 (68%) families. In contrast, associations between maternal sensitivity and infant attachment were not significant, leading to questions about the processes that link attachment representations, maternal behavior, and infant attachment in adolescent mothers.     

Effects of a Brief Mindfulness Based Group Intervention On College Students

Increases in the number of college students seeking mental health services require counseling centers to explore innovative strategies to provide effective and efficient treatments. Group interventions offer an alternative to traditional individual counseling, allowing centers to serve more students with fewer clinical staff (Burlingame et al., 2016). Of current group modalities, mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have been growing in popularity as an effective approach for addressing college students’ increasingly complex needs. This study describes the evaluation of a three-session mindfulness-based intervention on students’ mindfulness, symptoms, and stress. Compared to a comparison group of 109 students not seeking counseling center services, 78 students who received the intervention reported increased mindfulness, and decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress at the end of the group. Furthermore, improvements in mindfulness mediated intervention effects on symptoms of depression and anxiety. These gains were generally maintained 3 weeks later. These findings support the benefits of brief group interventions for college students. Suggestions for modifications to the intervention and for future research are discussed.     

Do Children with Autism Use the Speaker's Direction of Gaze Strategy to Crack the Code of Language?

Normal toddlers infer the referent of a novel word by consulting the Speaker's direction of Gaze. That is, they use the Speaker's Direction of Gaze (SDG) strategy. This is a far more powerful strategy than the alternative, the Listener's Direction of Gaze (LDG) strategy. In Study 1 we tested if children with autism, who have well-documented impairments in joint attention, used the SDG or the LDG strategy to learn a novel word for a novel object. Results showed that although 70.6% of children with mental handicap passed the test by making the correct mapping between a novel word and a novel object, via the SDG strategy, only 29.4% of children with autism did so. Instead, their reliance on the LDG strategy led to mapping errors. In Study 2 a group of normal children, whose chronological age (24 months old) was eqated with the verbal mental age of the 2 clinical groups in Study I, was tested using a similar procedure. Results showed that 79% of this normal group passed the test by making the correct mapping between a novel word and a novel object using the SDG strategy. Taken together, the results from both studies suggest that children with autism are relatively insensitive to a speaker's gaze direction as an index of the speaker's intention to refer . This result is consistent with previous findings showing that children with autism are relatively "blind" to the mentalistic significance of the eyes. Discussion centers on how the absence of an SDG strategy might disrupt specific aspects of language development in autism.     

Creating a space where teachers can locate their voices and develop their pedagogical awareness

The claim is made here that we need to prepare teachers who can locate their voices in teaching situations, recognize their relationship with other voices in those situations, and reflect on their pedagogical intentions. In a teacher education course, stories written about practicum experiences offered students an opportunity to reflect on the location of their voice in classroom situations and to discuss with peers different classroom situations and possibilities for teaching and learning. This study examines more closely the reflections of two of the students with seemingly distinct orientations to learning to teach. Their practicum stories and reflective essays were analyzed for positioning of voice as described by Belenky et al. (1986). The two students located their voices in distinct ways, and also expressed growing awareness of classroom dynamics and the value of peer dialogue in broadening and deepening their understandings of teaching and learning.     

Weak Ties in Networked Communities

Communities with high levels of social capital are likely to have a higher quality of life than communities with low social capital. This is due to the greater ability of such communities to organize and mobilize effectively for collective action because they have high levels of social trust, dense social networks, and well-established norms of mutuality (the major features of social capital). Communities with “bridging” social capital (weak ties across groups) as well as “bonding” social capital (strong ties within groups) are the most effective in organizing for collective action. People who belong to multiple groups act as bridging ties. When people with bridging ties use communication media, such as the Internet, they enhance their capability to educate community members and to organize, as needed, for collective action. This article summarizes evidence from stratified household survey data in Blacksburg, VA, showing that people with weak (bridging) ties across groups have higher levels of community involvement, civic interest, and collective efficacy than people without bridging ties among groups. Moreover, heavy Internet users with bridging ties have higher social engagement, use the Internet for social purposes, and have been attending more local meetings and events since going online than heavy Internet users with no bridging ties. These findings may suggest that the Internet—in the hands of bridging individuals-is a tool for enhancing social relations and information exchange, and for increasing face-to-face interaction, all of which help to build both bonding and bridging social capital in communities.     

Close to you? Bias and precision in patent-based measures of technological proximity

Patent data have been widely used in research to characterize firms’ locations in technological or knowledge space, as well as the proximities among firms. Researchers have measured firms’ technological or knowledge proximities with a variety of measures based on patent data, including Euclidean distances (using the technological classifications listed on patents), and overlap in cited patents. Often research has employed only the first listed patent classification in measures of proximities. We explore the effects of using the first listed patent class as well as other methods to measure proximities. We point out that measures of proximity based on small numbers of patents are imprecisely measured random variables. Measures computed on samples with few patents or a single patent class generate both biased and imprecise measures of proximity. We discuss the implications of this for typical research questions employing measures of proximity, and explore the effects of larger sample sizes and coarser patent class breakdowns in mitigating these problems. Where possible, we suggest that researchers increase their sample sizes by aggregating years or using all of the listed patent classes on a patent, rather than just the first.