Psychometric Properties of a Parental Questionnaire for Assessing Correlates of Toddlers’ Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior

This study examined the psychometric properties of a questionnaire developed with the guidance of the socialization model of child behaviour to understand modifiable correlates of toddlers’ physical activity and sedentary behaviour. Findings are based on 118 parents (33.7 ± 4.9 years; 86% female) of toddlers (19.3 ± 2.7 months; 48% female) from Edmonton, Canada in The Parents’ Role in Establishing healthy Physical activity and Sedentary behaviour habits study (PREPS). The PREPS questionnaire encompassed 21 variables across the constructs of the socialization model of child behaviour. Of the nine variables assessed for internal consistency reliability, eight had good (α ≥ 0.70) reliability. Of the 15 continuous variables assessed for 1-week test–retest reliability, 10 had moderate (intra-class correlation = 0.50–0.74) and 5 had good (intra-class correlation ≥ 0.75) reliability. Of the six categorical variables assessed for 1-week test–retest reliability, two had fair (К = 0.21–0.40), one had moderate (К = 0.41–0.60), one had substantial (К = 0.61–0.80), and two had almost perfect (К = 0.81–1.00) reliability. Of the 12 sedentary behaviour variables assessed for convergent validity, 7 were significantly correlated with children’s screen time, of which three were small (r ≤ 0.29), two were medium (r = 0.30–0.49), and two were large (r ≥ 0.50) effect sizes.     

Adelard of Bath and Roger Bacon: early English natural philosophers and scientists

The image of Roger Bacon as a 'modern' experimental scientist was propagated as historical truth in 19th century scientific historiography. Twentieth century criticisms attacked this tradition, arguing that Bacon was primarily a medieval philosopher with 'medieval' scientific interests. However, recent scholarship has provided a more careful and critical account of Bacon's science, and identifies his greatest achievement in terms of his successful attempt to assimilate the worlds of Greek and Islamic optics. It can be justly claimed that Roger Bacon was the first Western thinker in the middle ages to have mastered most of the Greek sources and the central Islamic source in optics. He made this scientific domain understandable for a Western Latin-reading audience. Yet, Bacon himself acknowledged Adelard of Bath, whose translations and commentary of Euclid's Elements set the foundations for a science of optics, as the true pioneer.     

Attentional bias for exercise-related images

This research examined attentional bias toward exercise-related images using a visual probe task. It was hypothesized that more-active participants would display attentional bias toward the exercise-related images. The results showed that men displayed attentional bias for the exercise images. There was a significant interaction of activity level by gender, and simple slopes analysis showed that active women displayed attentional bias toward the exercise-related images and inactive women displayed attentional bias toward the control images. A similar analysis with explicit attention to the pictures as the outcome variable was not significant. These findings confirm that attention for exercise-related images can be captured automatically regardless of whether people report they are attending to them.     

IP Address Data and its Place in the Library Community Today and in the Future

Internet Protocol (IP) technology has played an important role in the management of access to scholarly work within institutions since the advent of electronic publishing in the late 1990s. Despite recent efforts to explore alternative modes of authentication, the ubiquitous use of IP address authentication within the systems of libraries, publishers, and third party vendors around the world suggests it will continue to play a significant role for the foreseeable future. However, recent studies show that a large amount of the IP address data held within publisher systems is incorrect, improperly assigned, or requires clarification. Poor source data carries significant risks—not the least of which translates into unreliable usage reporting for libraries and publishers. The IP Registry is designed to help mitigate these challenges by creating a Registry of cleaned data that libraries and publishers can interact with in a centralized fashion thereby helping to ensure accuracy and reducing the level of resources necessary to manage and communicate changes to existing data. The database of more than 60,000 academic, corporate, and government libraries was created through the amalgamation of raw source data from more than 170 scholarly publishers. In addition to cleaned IP address data, the Registry includes standardized English naming, aliases, local language naming (and characters), hierarchies, and organizational IDs for each record. The importance of accurately understanding current usage and how libraries utilize published content is clear. Regardless of what the future holds, the need for a clean and stable source of IP address data is real for libraries, publishers, and vendors alike.     

Affect and learning: An exploratory look into the role of affect in learning with AutoTutor

The role that affective states play in learning was investigated from the perspective of a constructivist learning framework. We observed six different affect states (frustration, boredom, flow, confusion, eureka and neutral) that potentially occur during the process of learning introductory computer literacy with AutoTutor, an intelligent tutoring system with tutorial dialogue in natural language. Observational analyses revealed significant relationships between learning and the affective states of boredom, flow and confusion. The positive correlation between confusion and learning is consistent with a model that assumes that cognitive disequilibrium is one precursor to deep learning. The findings that learning correlates negatively with boredom and positively with flow are consistent with predictions from Csikszentmihalyi's analysis of flow experiences.     

Differentiating the neural response to intervention in children with developmental dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia is associated with functional abnormalities within reading areas of the brain. For some children diagnosed with dyslexia, phonologically based remediation programs appear to rehabilitate brain function in key reading areas (Shaywitz et al., Biological Psychiatry 55: 101–110, 2004; Simos et al., Neuroscience 58: 1203–1213, 2002). However, a non-trivial number of children diagnosed with dyslexia fail to respond to these interventions (Torgesen, Learning Disabilities Research & Practice 15: 55–64, 2000). A cross-sectional fMRI study investigating post-treatment effects was conducted in an effort to better understand differences in brain function between treatment responders and non-responders. Educational testing and brain activation measured after treatment suggested that the reading intervention used in the present study rehabilitated several basic level reading processes in all participants diagnosed with dyslexia. However, activation in the left inferior parietal lobe differentiated treatment responders and non-responders in comparison to non-impaired readers. Children with persistent deficits in single word decoding (treatment non-responders) demonstrated significantly less activation in the left inferior parietal lobe when compared to non-impaired readers.     

Play and Divergent Problem Solving: Evidence Supporting a Reciprocal Relationship

A series of three studies was conducted to examine the relationship between specific forms of social and pretend play and divergent (figural and semantic) and convergent problem solving in preschool aged children. Naturalistic and experimental designs were used to provide a clearer account of the nature of the relationship between play and problem solving and to challenge the assumption that there is a single direction bf influence (play influencing problem solving) rather than the influence being complex and reciprocal. Overall, the results support a complex reciprocal causality model in which the development of divergent problem solving skills facilitates the development of play skills and vice versa.