Infant joint attention, temperament, and social competence in preschool children

Infant joint attention has been observed to be related to social-emotional outcomes in at-risk children. To address whether this relation is also evident in typically developing children, 52 children were tested at 12, 15, 24, and 30 months to examine associations between infant joint attention and social outcomes. Twelve-month initiating and responding to joint attention were related to 30-month social competence and externalizing behavior, even when accounting for 15-month temperament ratings, 24-month cognition and language, and demographic variables. These results suggest that, in addition to associations with language and cognition, infant joint attention reflects robust aspects of development that are related to individual differences in the emergence of social and behavioral competence in childhood.     

Education as Part of the Migratory Project of Latin American Migrant Women Traveling to the United States in Undocumented Conditions

Education is an indispensable element for the development of society. In Latin America, the point of origin of most of the undocumented immigrants to the United States, equal opportunity in access to education and educational achievement is still pending. The study presented here focuses on the analysis of the expectations of female migrants via Mexico’s northern border, focusing attention on educational attainment as an important aspect of the “American Dream” of the migrant women interviewed and their dependents.     

Flawed heroes and great talents: the challenges associated with framing soccer legends in the NASL

The essay explores the ways that the North American Soccer Leagues (NASL) attempted to frame footballing stars in terms that North American fans would understand and embrace. The impetus for this approach was economic and influenced by the success of Pelé. However, the essay argues that the approach was deeply flawed and missed the obvious challenge of replacing Pelé – that he was irreplaceable. Nevertheless, the NASL and its boosters sought to position several stars as the natural successors to Pelé, including Franz Beckenbauer, George Best and Johan Curyff. The essay thus explores how these NASL stars were framed and how these frames would ultimately become limited.     

State of the library and information science blogosphere after social networks boom: A metric approach

A metric analysis of blogs on library and information science (LIS) between November 2006 and June 2009 indexed on the Libworm search engine characterizes the community's behavior quantitatively. An analysis of 1108 personal and corporate blogs with a total of 275,103 posts is used to calculate survival rate, production (number of posts published), and visibility via such indicators as links received, Technorati authority, and Google's PagePank. Over the study period, there was a 52% decrease in the number of active blogs. Despite the drop in production over this period, the average number of posts per blog remained constant (14 per month). The most representative blogs in the discipline are identified. The emergence of such platforms as Facebook and Twitter seems to have meant that both personal and corporate blogs have lost some of their prominence.     

Therapeutic effect of methane and its mechanism in disease treatment

Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE B - Methane is the simplest hydrocarbon, consisting of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. It is abundant in marsh gas, livestock rumination, and...     

School–University–Community Pathways to Higher Education: Teacher Perceptions,School Culture and Partnership Building

This article provides a snapshot in time of teacher perceptions, school culture, and partnership building. We delineate how teachers perceive our partnership’s purpose and its role in transforming school culture. Second, we describe how teachers express the life expectations they have and the possibilities they hope for their students and the families involved with the partnership. Finally, we outline our thoughts on moving forward with building partnership, continuing to transform school culture, and collaborating with teachers. In conclusion, we discuss the role that partnership building can have on creating pathways to higher education for students in communities of color.     

Using educational placement in third grade to select and validate a preschool screening measure

The early detection of children with mild learning problems remains a problem. New screening tests are being developed that will be more effective in identifying children who fall into this “difficult to identify” group. This study examined the predictive validity of one potential screening test. The scores of 268 children on each task of a nine‐task preschool cognitive battery were evaluated in terms of the accuracy with which they predicted the classification of those same children into regular education (n = 254) or special education (n = 14) 4 years later when the children were in third grade. A classification accuracy level of 79% was achieved for the exceptional children, and a classification level of 70% for the normally achieving children. Racial/ethnic status, testing language, and socioeconomic status all impacted the children's screening performance. Lower screening scores and a greater proportion of the sample with scores below the cut were associated with minority status, not being tested in English, and lower socioeconomic status. Preschool testing in Spanish or both English and Spanish was associated with poorer achievement 4 years later. Many of the children not in special education, but with a screening score below 13, had serious academic problems in third grade that were reflected in their low percentile scores on one or more subtests of the Stanford Achievement Test. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 40: 565–582, 2003.