Professionals' adherence to mandatory child abuse reporting laws: effects of responsibility attribution, confidence ratings, and situational factors

This study investigated the relationship between responsibility attribution and tendency to report child sexual abuse among practicing psychologists. Two hundred ninety-five licensed psychologists from two states completed vignettes in which the sex of the child and the father's admission or denial of alleged sexual abuse were systematically manipulated. Subjects assigned relative percentages of responsibility to the father, mother, child, and society for the abuse and indicated their tendency to report and their level of confidence that abuse was occurring. Results indicated a significant effect for responsibility to the mother which varied as a function of the father's response to the allegation of abuse. Mothers were blamed significantly more for the abuse when the father denied being abusive. Responsibility attribution did not predict reporting, while confidence in the occurrence of abuse did. Also, sex differences were found among participants where male subjects assigned significantly more responsibility to the abusive father than female participants, and the females blamed the mother more than the males. Results are discussed in the context of previous research on responsibility attribution in child abuse.     

Affect and learning: An exploratory look into the role of affect in learning with AutoTutor

The role that affective states play in learning was investigated from the perspective of a constructivist learning framework. We observed six different affect states (frustration, boredom, flow, confusion, eureka and neutral) that potentially occur during the process of learning introductory computer literacy with AutoTutor, an intelligent tutoring system with tutorial dialogue in natural language. Observational analyses revealed significant relationships between learning and the affective states of boredom, flow and confusion. The positive correlation between confusion and learning is consistent with a model that assumes that cognitive disequilibrium is one precursor to deep learning. The findings that learning correlates negatively with boredom and positively with flow are consistent with predictions from Csikszentmihalyi's analysis of flow experiences.     

Story constellations: A narrative approach to contextualizing teachers’ knowledge of school reform

This article traces the roots of narrative research in the social sciences and education, then centers on ‘story constellations,’ a version of narrative inquiry that uncovers teachers’ knowledge of school reform in context. A fluid form of investigation that unfolds in a three-dimensional inquiry space, story constellations consists of a flexible matrix of paired narratives that are broadened, burrowed, and restoried over time. The adaptability of this narrative inquiry approach is then made visible through introducing four story constellations separately, then laying sketches of the individual story constellations side-by-side. When analyzed in a conjoined fashion, these sketches illustrate how the particularities of place and human agency in the living of school reform played out differently in differing school contexts, despite the fact that the four school sites had one story of reform in common. In the end result, the illustrations demonstrate how the use of the malleable approach drew distinctive story constellations to the surface, spotlighting teachers’ knowledge of school reform as it developed in context over time. In this way, ‘story constellations’ as a method and as a form of inquiry is illuminated.     

Learning and knowing songs: a study of children as music teachers

In this study we analyze how learners constitute what it means to learn and know a song. This is investigated in the context of four 9- to 10-year-old children in dyads teaching each other to sing a song of their own choosing. How the children take on this task is studied in terms of how they dialogically co-construct pedagogical and musical values throughout the collaborative tasks. The empirical data consist of video observations of the children engaged in dyads. Informed by a sociocultural perspective, with an emphasis on mediational means, scaffolding and appropriation, the study seeks to examine how young people’s instructional methods are facilitated and constrained by communicative resources of different kinds. The empirical data is analyzed as interactively unfolding activity. The study shows that the children make a distinction between learning and knowing a song, in terms of tool use. In teaching, learning is communicated as supported by mediational means in the form of external visualization tools, while knowing the song, from the participants’ point of view means to be able to sing the song without any such mediational means. From a sociocultural theoretical perspective, this difference is conceptualized as the gradual learning process of moving from a materialized practice, based on external artifacts, to an embodied practice, that is, a change in mediational means rather than developing musical knowing without tools.     

Development of the International Ocean Literacy Survey: measuring knowledge across the world.

The Ocean Literacy movement began in the U.S. in the early 2000s, and has recently become an international effort. The focus on marine environmental issues and marine education is increasing, and yet it has been difficult to show progress of the ocean literacy movement, in part, because no widely adopted measurement tool exists. The International Ocean Literacy Survey (IOLS) aims to serve as a community-based measurement tool that allows the comparison of levels of ocean knowledge across time and location. The IOLS has already been subjected to two rounds of field testing. The results from the second testing, presented in this paper, provide evidence that the IOLS is psychometrically valid and reliable, and has a single factor structure across 17 languages and 24 countries. The analyses have also guided the construction of a third improved version that will be further tested in 2018.     

The Effect of Cognitive Style and Cognitive Skills on School Subject Performance

Two hundred and five 14-16 year olds from two Anglophone Canadian schools (99 females and 106 males) were given the Canadian Test of Cognitive Skills (an intelligence-type test) and the Cognitive Styles Analysis and their grade 9 scores in the subjects of French, English, mathematics, geography and science were obtained. The study first looked at the relationship between cognitive skills and cognitive style. The correlation between cognitive skills and cognitive style approached zero suggesting their independence. Having confirmed the independence of cognitive skills and cognitive style, their interactive effect, including gender, on subject performance was investigated by means of analysis of variance. There was a significant interaction between sex and subject; females were superior to males in all five subjects, but particularly so in French and English. There was also a significant interaction between skill, style and subject in their effect on performance. This was discussed in terms of the role of style in learning and the effect of skill/intelligence on strategy development.