VIII. THE SITUATION FOR CHILDREN WITHOUT PARENTAL CARE AND STRATEGIES FOR POLICY CHANGE

Research that clearly demonstrates the negative effects of institutionalization, particularly for young children, has been critical for changing policy. However, actually putting science into action requires advocacy, persistence, and perseverance. Policy makers and advocates must be informed about the research and use it effectively. This paper proposes a number of key components for translating research into policy and programs: analyzing the situation, using evidence to build the case for action, developing policies, building program capacity in child welfare and early childhood development, creating a family‐based child welfare system, and developing a system of monitoring and accountability. Much of the knowledge in this paper comes from experiences, desk reviews, and case studies of successful practices. Research provides the basis, but moving research to practice depends on collaboration between researchers who understand the key policy perspectives and policy makers who understand the research.     

Thinking Counterfactually Supports Children’s Evidence Evaluation in Causal Learning

Often, the evidence we observe is consistent with more than one explanation. How do learners discriminate among candidate causes? The current studies examine whether counterfactuals help 5-year olds (N = 120) select between competing hypotheses and compares the effectiveness of these prompts to a related scaffold. In Experiment 1, counterfactuals support evidence evaluation, leading children to privilege and extend the cause that accounted for more data. In Experiment 2, the hypothesis that accounted for the most evidence was pitted against children’s prior beliefs. Children who considered alternative outcomes privileged the hypothesis that accounted for more observations, whereas those who explained relied on prior beliefs. Findings demonstrate that counterfactuals recruit attention to disambiguating evidence and outperform explanation when data contrast with existing beliefs.     

“Don’t Be a Sucker!”-the Mathematics of Gambling

Although the Internet has been touted as a boon to social studies education, little research exists that documents the impact of using it as a contextualizing tool for analyzing primary sources and developing Web sites on high school students' achievement. In this article, the authors address both issues by using a quasi-experimental design to measure impact on student achievement. However, there was no appreciable difference in student achievement, and the provided assignment and amount of content that students were expected to learn in the unit of study may have hindered higher-order thinking. The authors discuss the implications of these findings.     

Maternal Work and Child-Care Strategies in Peri-Urban Guatemala: Nutritional Effects

Associations of 293 mothers' work for earnings and child-care arrangements with the anthropometric status of their children were examined in urban Guatemala. It was hypothesized that during the period of life in which growth often falters (8 through 35 months), maternal employment could be beneficial for children. Informal workers tended to be poorer, less educated, and have more undernourished children than formal workers or nonworkers. When poverty and mother's education were controlled for, no effects of maternal employment on children's anthropometric growth patterns were seen. However, the percent of the family income the mother earned was positively associated with all anthropometric indicators, controlling for confounds. Children taken care of by preteen siblings had significantly lower weight for height than those in other situations, even controlling for SES and maternal employment status. These effects were not found in a 36-48-month-old sample.     

Anticipation to Social and Nonsocial Dynamic Cues in Preschool-Age Children

The ability to learn from expectations is foundational to social and nonsocial learning in children. However, we know little about the brain basis of reward expectation in development. Here, 3- to 4-year-olds (N = 26) were shown a passive associative learning paradigm with dynamic stimuli. Anticipation for reward-related stimuli was measured via the stimulus preceding negativity (SPN). To our knowledge, this is the first study to measure an SPN in children younger than age 6. Our findings reveal distinct anticipatory neural signatures for social versus nonsocial stimuli, consistent with previous research in older children. This study suggests an SPN can be elicited in preschoolers and is larger for social than nonsocial stimuli.     

Personality and Attitude Change in Counselor Trainees: An Evaluation

Subjects were 22 participants (14 males and 8 females) in a 38-week Guidance Institute designed to prepare secondary counselors to work with disadvantaged youth. Twenty students with similar characteristics enrolled in the regular counselor education program served as a control group. The Personal Orientation Inventory (POI) and Semantic Differentials were administered to experimental and control subjects at the beginning and end of the Institute program. Results indicated that both groups made significant changes on the POI, with the amount and direction of change favoring the Institute subjects. The authors concluded that the Institute had a highly significant impact on the personal development of participants and that the Institute was more efficient than the regular program in eliciting such change.     

Engineering biocompatible TeSex nano-alloys as a versatile theranostic nanoplatform

Photothermal nanotheranostics, especially in the near infrared II (NIR-II) region, exhibits a great potential in precision and personalized medicine, owing to high tissue penetration of NIR-II light. NIR-II-photothermal nanoplatforms with high biocompatibility as well as high photothermal effect are urgently needed but rarely reported so far. Te nanomaterials possess high absorbance to NIR-II light but also exhibit high cytotoxicity, impeding their biomedical applications. In this work, the controllable incorporation of biocompatible Se into the lattice of Te nanostructures is proposed to intrinsically tune their inherent cytotoxicity and enhance their biocompatibility, developing TeSe_x nano-alloys as a new kind of theranostic nanoplatform. We have uncovered that the cytotoxicity of Te nanomaterials primarily derives from irreversible oxidation stress and intracellular imbalance of organization and energy, and can be eliminated by incorporating a moderate proportion of Se (x = 0.43). We have also discovered that the as-prepared TeSe_x nano-alloys have extraordinarily high NIR-II-photothermal conversion efficiency (77.2%), ⁶⁴Cu coordination and computed tomography contrast capabilities, enabling high-efficacy multimodal photothermal/photoacoustic/positron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging-guided NIR-II-photothermal therapy of cancer. The proposed nano-alloying strategy provides a new route to improve the biocompatibility of biomedical nanoplatforms and endow them with versatile theranostic functions.