Neighborhood income and physical and social disorder in Canada: associations with young children's competencies

This study examined the association of census level, observational, and parent-reported neighborhood characteristics on the verbal and behavioral competencies of a national sample of Canadian preschoolers (N = 3,350). Children's verbal ability scores were positively associated with residing in neighborhoods with affluent residents and negatively associated with residing in neighborhoods with poor residents and in neighborhoods with low cohesion, even after controlling for family socioeconomic factors. Behavior problem scores were higher when children lived in neighborhoods that had fewer affluent residents, high unemployment rates, and neighborhoods with low cohesion, after controlling for family socioeconomic factors. These findings are discussed in light of neighborhood studies of children in the United States in the mid-1990s.     

Captive But Mobile: Privacy Concerns and Remedies for the Mobile Environment

We use the legal framework of captive audience to examine the Federal Trade Commission 2012 privacy guidelines as applied to mobile marketing. We define captive audiences as audiences without functional opt-out mechanisms to avoid situations of coercive communication. By analyzing the current mobile marketing ecosystem, we show that the Federal Trade Commission's privacy guidelines inspired by the Canadian “privacy by design” paradigm fall short of protecting consumers against invasive mobile marketing in at least three respects: (a) The guidelines overlook how, in the context of data monopolies, the combination of location and personal history data threatens autonomy of choice; (b) the guidelines focus exclusively on user control over data sharing, while ignoring control over communicative interaction; and (c) the reliance on market mechanisms to produce improved privacy policies may actually increase opt-out costs for consumers. We conclude by discussing two concrete proposals for improvement: a “home mode” for mobile privacy and target-specific privacy contract negotiation.     

Children’s and adolescents’ thoughts on pollution: cognitive abilities required to understand environmental systems

Pollution phenomena are complex systems in which different parts are integrated by means of causal and temporal relationships. To understand pollution, children must develop some cognitive abilities related to system thinking and temporal and causal inferential reasoning. These cognitive abilities constrain and guide how children understand pollution processes. Hence, ascertaining whether changes among children’s ideas of pollution are related to system thinking and inferential reasoning abilities could be useful in improving environmental education. Eighty participants between 9 and 16 years old were interviewed to evaluate how children explain different aspects of pollution-related systems. From the explanations found in these interviews, three progressive epistemic structures were reconstructed. The three epistemic structures differ in the type of causal and temporal relationship established by the participants and in the mechanisms that the participants used to relate the pollutant to its effects.     

Neighborhood disadvantage: pathways of effects for young children

The present study used Canadian National Longitudinal data to examine a model of the mechanisms through which the effects of neighborhood socioeconomic conditions impact young children's verbal and behavioral outcomes (N= 3,528; M age = 5.05 years, SD= 0.86). Integrating elements of social disorganization theory and family stress models, and results from structural equation models suggest that both neighborhood and family mechanisms played an important role in the transmission of neighborhood socioeconomic effects. Neighborhood disadvantage manifested its effect via lower neighborhood cohesion, which was associated with maternal depression and family dysfunction. These processes were, in turn, related to less consistent, less stimulating, and more punitive parenting behaviors, and ultimately, poorer child outcomes.     

Context-based learning and metacognitive prompts for enhancing scientific text comprehension

ABSTRACT

Context-based learning (CBL), promoting students' scientific text comprehension, and fostering metacognitive skills, plays an important role in science education. Our study involves CBL through comprehension and analysis of adapted scientific articles. We developed a module which integrates metacognitive prompts for guiding students to monitor their understanding and improve their scientific text comprehension. We investigated the effect of these metacognitive prompts on scientific text comprehension as part of CBL in chemistry. About 670 high school chemistry students were randomly divided into three groups exposed to high- and low-intensity CBL. One of the high-intensity groups was also exposed to metacognitive prompts. Research tools included pre- and post-questionnaires aimed at measuring students' conceptual chemistry understanding and metacognitive knowledge in the context of reading strategies, before and after exposure to the CBL. Chemistry understanding was reflected by students' ability to identify the main subject of the adapted article and by explaining concepts both textually and visually. We found that high-intensity CBL combined with metacognitive prompts improved students' chemistry understanding of the adapted scientific articles and the ability to regulate their learning. Our study establishes that reading context-based adapted scientific articles advances students' conceptual chemistry understanding. These gains are strongly amplified by domain-specific metacognitive prompts.     

Students’ conceptions of work and the understanding of the economic value of labor: a developmental study of unemployment and job precarity in times of an economic crisis

In the aftermath of the financial and economic recession of 2008, 130 Spanish students of five age groups (8 to 17 years) and two socioeconomic backgrounds were individually interviewed about unemployment and lower wages. The participants were presented with two hypothetical situations, and their responses were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed. The results indicated that children bring their conceptions of work when attempting to explain those phenomena. Specifically, it was found that the explanations were closely associated with the comprehension of the notion of surplus value (i.e., the idea that workers create more value than the cost of their salaries), and that the development of this notion proceeds in three levels. Younger children were simply unaware of the capacity of workers to create value (Level 1), which gave rise to some alternative conceptions (e.g., the idea that money for salaries comes from external sources). The children within the age range of 12–13 began to understand that workers create some value (Level 2). At this level, however, the notion of surplus value was not fully understood, and the idea that money for salaries comes from external sources persisted in a variety of ways. From the ages of 13–14, the children begin to understand that a wage is the price of labor and that the employer earns a profit because workers create more value than the cost of their wages (Level 3). The article presents a discussion of the possible reasons behind the slow progress observed and highlights some suggestions for educational practice.

     

Promoting preservice teachers’ dual self-regulation roles as learners and as teachers: effects of generic vs. specific prompts

Researchers have recently suggested that teachers must undertake important dual self- regulation roles if they want to become effective at improving their students’ self-regulation. First, teachers need to become proficient at self-regulated learning (SRL) themselves, and then teachers need to learn explicitly how to proactively teach SRL – termed self-regulating teaching (SRT). Considering that both roles are difficult to attain by novice teachers, supports (prompts) are essential. We examined an intervention comparing the usefulness of two prompting conditions – generic versus specific – for developing both SRL (as learners) and SRT (as teachers) among 90 preservice science teachers engaging in explicit self-regulation instruction and reflective group discussion about learning/teaching experiences (observed learning clips, in-action teaching). We compared the two group conditions by using two SRL assessments and two SRT assessments. Mixed methods indicated that, as expected, the specific-prompts condition outperformed the generic-prompts condition on self-awareness of own SRL, skills for accurately noticing authentic videotaped students’ SRL, and explicit usage of SRT during actual teaching experiences. As expected, no differences emerged between generic and specific prompts in applying SRT to a novel lesson-design task (far-transfer measure). These findings, supported by two case studies’ sequential pattern analysis, offered an important contribution to theoretical and practical understanding of novice teachers’ self-regulation prompting approaches, practice modes, and multidimensional assessments of teachers’ professional development.     

From democratic school to civic and political participation / De la escuela democrática a la participación política y ciudadana

The aim of this article is to study the possible influence that exercising a representative role at school may have on secondary school students’ willingness to participate politically in society. In order to do this, an analysis was carried out of the answers given by 300 students between 13 and 18 years old, from a school with marked democratic practices, when asked about their experience of democracy at school and their intention to participate politically. The results show that students’ willingness to participate in society by means of conventional actions, such as voting, does not depend directly on whether they have exercised a representative role at school. However, non-conventional actions, such as attending demonstrations or supporting boycotts, does have a meaningful relation with the exercise of representative roles in the school. As a conclusion, we highlight that participating in the representation of the school influences the democratic formation of students and their willingness to participate politically in society, although this influence is more closely related to non-conventional actions, such as strikes, boycotts and demonstrations.     

Mathematical modeling of tech-related real-world problems for secondary school-level mathematics

Educational Studies in Mathematics - The use of authentic real-world problems that reflect the applied nature of mathematics is not prevalent in formal secondary school settings. In this study, we...     

Publicized Intimacies on Reality Television: An Analysis of Voyeuristic Content and Its Contribution to the Appeal of Reality Programming

Given that reality television is not a cohesive genre, a better understanding of the frequently noted voyeuristic appeal of reality programs would require an analysis of content features that may contribute to their voyeuristic appeal. A survey administered to television viewers and a content analysis of reality programs support hypotheses regarding the voyeuristic appeal of reality programs in general, and suggest that scenes which adopt a “fly on the wall perspective,” take place in private settings, contain nudity, and/or include gossip, contribute to the voyeuristic appeal of reality programs.