Exploring a new silent test of phonological awareness

This is the preliminary study of a test of phonologicalawareness which does not require that subjects speak or hear toparticipate. The test was designed to minimize memory loads, and tomeasure speeded written naming and segmentation-by-sound. Spelling datacan also be collected. Subjects have 45 seconds to name items in each oftwo sets of line drawings. The average frequency of the names variesacross these sets. In the third set, subjects must name the items, andalso segment the written names into their constituent sounds. This taskwas administered to disabled and normally-reading adults, with twocommon tests of phonological awareness. The new test discriminatedbetween the readers as reliably as the benchmark tasks, correlating witheach better than they correlated with each other. The new test was thenadministered to deaf adults, who performed similarly to the disabled(hearing) readers. The data represent the first direct demonstration ofphonological abilities in deaf subjects, using a task designedspecifically for that purpose.     

Gender,Science and Technology in Brazil

This essay considers gender in relation toBrazilian science and technology. It reviewsleading studies in the field, and offers briefbiographies of pioneering women in science.While there is still much room for improvement,the essay suggests that the situation of womenin science experienced significant progressduring the closing decades of the twentiethcentury.     

Maternal Unresponsiveness and Child Disruptive Problems: The Interplay of Uninhibited Temperament and Dopamine Transporter Genes

This study examined how and why dopamine transporter (DAT1) susceptibility alleles moderate the relation between maternal unresponsiveness and young children's behavior problems in a disadvantaged, predominantly minority sample of 201 two‐year‐old children and their mothers. Using a multimethod, multisource design, the findings indicated that a genetic composite of DAT1 susceptibility alleles (rs27072, rs40184) potentiated associations between maternal unresponsive caregiving and increases in children's behavior problems 2 years later. Moderator‐mediated‐moderation analyses further revealed that the DAT1 diathesis was more proximally mediated by the potentiating effects of children's uninhibited temperament in the pathway between maternal unresponsiveness and disruptive behavior problems. Results are interpreted in the context of supporting and advancing the biosocial developmental model (Beauchaine & Gatzke‐Kopp, 2012).     

Preschoolers rely on rich speech representations to process variable speech

To learn language, children must map variable input to categories such as phones and words. How do children process variation and distinguish between variable pronunciations (“shoup” for soup) versus new words? The unique sensory experience of children with cochlear implants, who learn speech through their device's degraded signal, lends new insight into this question. In a mispronunciation sensitivity eyetracking task, children with implants (N = 33), and typical hearing (N = 24; 36–66 months; 36F, 19M; all non-Hispanic white), with larger vocabularies processed known words faster. But children with implants were less sensitive to mispronunciations than typical hearing controls. Thus, children of all hearing experiences use lexical knowledge to process familiar words but require detailed speech representations to process variable speech in real time.     

Writing Experiences of Community College Students with Self-Reported Writing Anxieties and Linguistic Insecurity: A Perspective for College Counselors

This explanatory case study researched the writing experiences of 11 community college students who differed subculturally and who were all part of the African diasporic community. The theoretical perspectives used for this study were Arthur Chickering's (1969 Chickering , A. ( 1969 ). Education and identity , (2nd ed.) . San Francisco , CA : John Wiley & Sons . [Google Scholar]) classical concept of academic competence and community dialect theory (Baxter & Holland, 2007 Baxter , M. , & Holland , R. (2007). Addressing the needs of students who use a nonstandard dialect. Adult Basic Education and Literacy Journal , 1(3), 145–153. [Google Scholar]). Academic competence is a stage in college that explores how students learn acquired skills for educational attainment. Community dialect theory argues that African American dialect writers have a low-to-some awareness of how their dialect differs from standard English in the area of subject-verb agreement. Two research questions guided this inquiry: (a) How does Black English influence writing anxiety in academic settings? (b) Why should college counselors have a strategy to assist students who express fears of enrolling in remedial English? A mixed method strategy was used to gather the data. This strategy consisted of a qualitative interview, and two educational tests. The study found that most of the students had a low awareness of how their dialect differed from standard English. Furthermore, Black English directly induced writing anxiety in academic settings for this group of community college students. Their writing anxieties and insecurities were detected by the words and situational experiences these students related during the interviews. In addition, college counselors should have an intervention strategy in place for this population of students to reduce the gap between academic competence and students of African descent who are dialect writers with writing anxieties and linguistic insecurities in academic settings.     

Goal orientation towards teaching (GOTT) scale

Goal orientation theory has been widely investigated and found to affect many motivation and behavior variables in relation to student learning and work performance. However, unlike the motivational construct of self-efficacy, researchers have yet to investigate whether this theory can be applied to the field of teaching and contribute to the explanation for trends in instructional behavior and motives. The purpose of the present study was to develop an instrument to begin the exploration of teachers’ goal orientation towards teaching. From a three-phase research design consisting of scale development, score validation, and convergent/discriminant validation, results provided support for the development of, and validity of scores on, a Goal Orientation towards Teaching (GOTT) Scale. Although further validation is needed, future researchers and practitioners can use the GOTT scale to investigate how teachers’ goal orientation towards teaching can impact student learning, teaching effectiveness, pedagogical learning, and even professional morale.     

Temperamental Emotionality Attributes as Antecedents of Children's Social Information Processing

This study examined temperament dimensions of emotion as precursors of children's social information processing (SIP) of stressful peer events. Two hundred and forty-three preschool children (M = 4.60 years) and their primary caregivers participated in two measurement occasions spaced 2 years apart. Observations of temperamental anger, fearful distress, positive affect, and effortful control were assessed in multiple laboratory tasks across two visits at Wave 1. SIP assessments from vignettes of peer challenges were repeated across two waves and included: eye tracking measures of attention to peer emotion displays, hostile attribution bias, hostile solutions, and subjective distress. Findings from structural equation models with inclusion of autoregressive controls indicated that effortful control, fear, and anger predicted subsequent changes in specific SIP dimensions.