The Distress of Citizen-Children with Detained and Deported Parents

In immigration enforcement, many undocumented immigrants with children are often detained and deported. But it is their US-born citizen-children that have been overlooked in immigration debates and enforcement policies and practices. Citizen-children are at risk for negative psychological outcomes when families are fractured and destabilized by arrest, detention, and deportation. The children risk being torn from their parents and, often, their undocumented siblings. To add to the small but growing empirical base on the effects of living under the threat of deportation and actual deportation of parents, we compared the psychological status of three groups of citizen-children: (1) a group living in Mexico with their deported parents; (2) a group in the US with parents affected by detention or deportation; and (3) a comparison group of citizen-children whose undocumented parents were not affected by detention or deportation. We compared children on self-report and parent-report measures of behavioral adjustment, depression, anxiety, and self-concept. Across the three groups we found elevated levels of distress, and differences between children who had experienced a parent’s detention or deportation and those who had not. We discuss findings in the context of children’s clinical needs, future research, and implications for immigration enforcement policy and practices.     

The expertise reversal effect: cognitive load and motivational explanations

The expertise reversal effect occurs when a learner's expertise moderates design principles such as the redundancy principle (i.e., redundant information should be excluded rather than included) derived from the cognitive load theory. Although this effect is supported by numerous experiments, indicating an overall large effect size, a variety of explanations have been proposed. The present experiment tested a cognitive load and a motivational explanation with 104 students, who reported a lack of experience in the presented instructional contents. They spent about 30 min with the instructional material to learn fundamental concepts about the gradient descent (a mathematical optimization algorithm), and with a retention and transfer test used as dependent measures. Each learner was randomly assigned to one cell of a 2 (either novices or experts introduced to through the instructional design presented previously) × 2 (either with or without additional text explaining the animations) between-subjects factorial design. The expertise reversal effect concerning the redundancy principle was replicated. Novices receiving additional text scored higher on retention and transfer than did novices without additional text, while this result was reversed for experts. Results suggest that this effect can be explained by the learner's cognitive load differences rather than overall motivation differences. Furthermore, a partial overlap was found between the motivational subdimension, "probability of success," and a cognitive load measure. On the practical side, instructional designers should consider the learner's level of expertise and their cognitive load when applying design principles. Further implications for adaptive learning environments are discussed.     

Validated intraclass correlation statistics to test item performance models

A new method, with an application program in Matlab code, is proposed for testing item performance models on empirical databases. This method uses data intraclass correlation statistics as expected correlations to which one compares simple functions of correlations between model predictions and observed item performance. The method rests on a data population model whose validity for the considered data is suitably tested and has been verified for three behavioural measure databases. Contrarily to usual model selection criteria, this method provides an effective way of testing under-fitting and over-fitting, answering the usually neglected question "does this model suitably account for these data?"     

Towards decompartmentalization

Education can only be effective if interdisciplinary and decompartmentalized. The young must have a scientific culture if they are to adapt to the contemporary world and to its evolution. Teaching science must be a way of training the mind to reasoning, to method, to discernment. Science nevertheless remains but a means, an aid for decision; scientific truth must be made relative by resting upon the history of science.