Supplementation of urban home visitation with a series of group meetings for parents and infants: results of a “real-world” randomized, controlled trial

Objective: Home visitation has been shown to be effective in reducing rates of child maltreatment and in enhancing psychosocial outcomes in children and their parents. Even when available, however, it is underutilized by parents in some urban settings. We tested a supplemental 10-session group intervention for its ability to increase active participation in home visitation, enhance the quality of caregiving behavior of parents, and improve social developmental outcome in children.Method: A randomized controlled design was utilized, involving two separate cohorts of parents of 3- to 18-month old infants, totaling 148 parent-child dyads. The intervention focused on practical experience in promoting parent-infant attachment relationships.Results: At 6 months follow-up, there was a substantial increase in the proportion of intervention group parents participating in home visitation, compared to parents in the control group (Fisher’s exact p = .008). Parents in the intervention group exhibited a trend for improvement in their capacity to appropriately interpret infants’ emotional cues (p = .08), independent of the effects of home visitation itself. Attrition in both the treatment and control groups was inversely associated with income and level of education.Conclusions: Group meetings may constitute an effective means of engaging stressed urban families in home visitation.     

Collaborate and Innovate: The Impact of Academic Librarians on the Commercialization of University Technology

The University of Arizona Library, in collaboration with the campus commercialization unit, created a partnership that contributes to the early development of inventions in the commercialization pipeline. The library-commercialization business-intelligence workgroup was incorporated into the overall campus commercialization business-development workflow in 2014 and is comprised of librarians and commercialization professionals working together to provide insight and decision support for development of commercialization strategies for inventions emerging from university research that aligns with market drivers. These efforts are recognized by university leadership as critical to the strategic plan of the university. This article discusses the impact of the workgroup and how the group of librarians contributed to the development of new companies, new licenses, and financial impact of economic development at a large land-grant university and larger community.     

Predictors of parental stress in mothers of young children with hearing loss

This study examined parental stress in 184 hearing mothers of young children who are deaf or hard of hearing. Stress levels were measured in three domains using the short-form of the Parental Stress Index (PSI; Abidin, 1995). Mothers in this study demonstrated significantly less parental distress on the PSI than a normative, hearing group, although this difference was quite small. Differences between the hearing and hearing loss samples did not reach conventional levels of significance for the Dysfunctional Parent-Child Interactions or the Difficult Child subscales. An examination of potential predictors of maternal stress revealed that mothers who perceived their daily hassles as more intense also obtained higher stress ratings on all three subscales. Additional predictors of parental distress were frequency of hassles, social support, and annual family income. Increased stress on the Dysfunctional Parent-Child Interaction subscale was predicted by children who had disabilities in addition to hearing loss, more delayed language relative to their chronological age, and less severe degrees of hearing loss. No additional, significant predictors were obtained for the Difficult Child subscale. When all measured variables were controlled for, characteristics that did not predict maternal stress on any of the three subscales included the child's gender, ethnicity, age of identification, mode of communication used, maternal education, and months between age of identification and child age at the time of observation.     

How Two- and Four-Year-Old Children Interpret Adjectives and Count Nouns

We examined the role of object kind familiarity (i.e., knowledge of a count noun for an object) on preschoolers' sensitivity to the relation between a novel word's form class (adjective or count noun) and its reference (to a material kind-property or to an object kind). We used a forced-choice match-to-target task, in which children learned a word for one object (e.g., a metal cup), and then chose between 2 other objects. One was from the same object kind but a different material kind (with different related properties, such as color and texture; e.g., a white plastic cup); the other was from a different object kind but the same material kind (with the same related properties; e.g., a metal spoon). In Experiment 1, children learned either a count noun (e.g., "This is a zav") or an adjective (e.g., "This is a zav one"). Within each form class, we crossed the familiarity of the referent object kind (familiar and unfamiliar) with the age of the children (2- and 4-year-olds). The principal finding was that in interpreting an adjective, 4-year-olds were more likely to choose the object sharing material kind with the target if the target was familiar than if it was unfamiliar. No such familiarity effect was evident among 2-year-olds. In Experiment 2, we employed a more unambiguously adjectival frame (e.g., "This is a very zav-ish one"), and replicated the results of Experiment 1. We interpret the results in terms of 2 proposed word learning biases: one that learners initially expect any word applied to an unfamiliar object to refer to a (basic-level) kind of object, and a second that learners prefer words to contrast in meaning. We consider several interpretations of the observed age difference.     

Building collective leadership capacity using collaborative twenty-first century digital tools

The current research explores how using collaborative twenty-first century digital tools developed the collective leadership capacity among participants in an educational leadership course. A qualitative interpretive approach was used. The data show how learning within the digital collaborative spaces was multidirectional and enhanced the possibilities of each student’s learning and practice. Communicating, curating and sharing knowledge, led to the development of new insights and support of mutual practice. The authors argue that the group’s collaborative endeavours produced substantive collective knowledge that elevated practice, and in so doing created collective leadership capacity within educational institutions and organisations in Trinidad and Tobago.