“Why Give Up Something That Works So Well?”: Retirement Expectations Among Academic Physicians

For individuals with strong work identities, the decision to retire can be particularly challenging. For academic physicians, retirement is an important personal decision that also has far-reaching implications for the healthcare system. This is because academic physicians are responsible for producing the research from which key medical decisions are made, for training future healthcare providers, and for providing specialized care for patients. For this study, we conducted focus groups with academic physicians from a large research university in Canada and then performed inductive thematic analyses to examine perceptions and concerns about later life career transitions. This study highlights tensions between professional experiences for the next generation of physicians and individual struggles with personal identity. Findings suggest improvements to institutional programs that support flexible, agentive, and respectful retirement transitions will not only be beneficial but necessary as medical and university systems continue to grapple with issues of balanced recruitment and succession.     

Marginalizing women: images of pregnancy in williams obstetrics

This research analyzes the historical development of the medical construction of the pregnant body in 17 of 20 editions of Williams Obstetrics, an obstetrical textbook published continually from 1904 to 1997. Examination of the visual imagery of these works produced three key findings. First, depictions of the healthy or “normal” pregnant body are virtually absent throughout the series. Second, visual depictions of women's full bodies adhere to a race-based hierarchy of presentation. Finally, the fundamental discourse about pregnant and female bodies communicated to physicians (primarily) by these images is one of pathology and fragmentation. We conclude that the resulting social and medical construction of the pregnant and female body presented in the Williams series is one of disembodiment, abjection, and ultimately marginality. These findings support recent feminist research that criticizes both the increasing erasure of the person of the women from the medical interpretation of pregnancy and the concomitant decrease in women's perceived sense of empowerment as pregnant beings.     

The Goldilocks Effect in Infant Auditory Attention

Infants must learn about many cognitive domains (e.g., language, music) from auditory statistics, yet capacity limits on their cognitive resources restrict the quantity that they can encode. Previous research has established that infants can attend to only a subset of available acoustic input. Yet few previous studies have directly examined infant auditory attention, and none have directly tested theorized mechanisms of attentional selection based on stimulus complexity. This work utilizes model‐based behavioral methods that were recently developed to examine visual attention in infants (e.g., Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin, 2012). The present results demonstrate that 7‐ to 8‐month‐old infants selectively attend to nonsocial auditory stimuli that are intermediately predictable/complex with respect to their current implicit beliefs and expectations. These findings provide evidence of a broad principle of infant attention across modalities and suggest that sound‐to‐sound transitional statistics heavily influence the allocation of auditory attention in human infants.     

Diagnosing Portuguese Students' Misconceptions about the Mineral Concept

Educational researchers and teachers are well aware that misconceptions—erroneous ideas that differ from the scientifically accepted ones—are very common amongst students. Daily experiences, creative and perceptive thinking and science textbooks give rise to students' misconceptions which lead them to draw erroneous conclusions that become strongly attached to their views and somehow affect subsequent learning. The main scope of this study was to understand what students consider a mineral to be and why. Therefore, the goals were (1) to identify eleventh-grade students' misconceptions about the mineral concept; (2) to understand which variables (gender, parents' education level and attitude towards science) influenced students' conceptions; and (3) to create teaching tools for the prevention of misconceptions. In order to achieve these goals, a diagnostic instrument (DI), constituted of a two-tier diagnostic test and a Science Attitude Questionnaire, was developed to be used with a sample of 89 twelfth-grade students from five schools located in central Portugal. As far as we know, this is the first DI developed for the analysis of misconceptions about the mineral concept. Data analysis allows us to conclude that students had serious difficulties in understanding the mineral concept, having easily formed misconceptions. The variables gender and parents' education level influence certain students' conceptions. This study provides a valuable basis for reflection on teaching and learning strategies, especially on this particular theme.     

It's Different on the Inside: Creating an Organization to Study Organizations

Objective: To use the classroom experience as a learning environment for organizational communication in which students experience emerging hierarchical structure, culture, reward systems, and consequences

Course: Introduction to organizational communication     

Perceptions of Social Justice Among the South Asian and Mainstream Chinese Youth from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds in Hong Kong

This study examined the attitudes of young people from different cultural backgrounds in Hong Kong toward social justice, in particular those regarding gender, racial/ethnic equalities, and immigrant rights. Among the sample of 15,428 adolescents, aged 12 to 19, 7.1% were South Asians, 15.5% were immigrants from mainland China, 4.1% were cross-boundary students, 73% were Hong Kong mainstream Chinese, and 0.3% did not indicate. Their civic attitudes were assessed by the adapted International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS) (2009) questionnaire instrument. Latent means analysis (LMA) was conducted and the findings concluded that, compared with Hong Kong mainstream students (HKMS), South Asian (SA) students reported a statistically significant lower score on gender equality and significantly higher score on racial/ethnic equality and immigrants' rights. In contrast, both Cross-Boundary students (CBS) and Chinese Immigrant students (CIS) rated significantly higher on items relating to racial/ethnic equality and immigrants' rights, as compared with their HKMS counterparts. Regression analyses were also utilized to investigate how demographic variables predicted the latent variables. Specifically, regression analyses of different student groups on social justice issues were discussed to compare how demographic variables contributed to the subjective perceptions of these rights and responsibilities. Policy implications were drawn with reference to the data and recommendations for improvement were discussed.