How well do ratings of academic performance by mothers and their sons correspond to grades,achievement test scores,and teachers' ratings?

Accurate perceptions of their child's academic performance are pivotal for parents' encouragement of their child's academic efforts. In research studies, parents' reports of their child's academic achievement, as well as the child's own reports, are often used as a proxy for teachers' ratings or grades. However, are parents' reports or their child's reports accurate and unbiased? We investigated whether ratings of academic performance made by mothers and their sons corresponded more closely to final grades and achievement test scores than did similar ratings made by teachers for three large samples of boys. Mothers' ratings correlated with final grades as well or better than teachers' ratings but more poorly with achievement test scores than did teachers' ratings. The seventh-grade boys' ratings correlated more poorly with both final grades and achievement test scores than did teachers' or mothers' ratings. Across all three samples combined, mothers were more likely to over-estimate rather than under-estimate the final grade. The same was true of the seventh grade sample of boys. Once the effect of final grade had been controlled, little evidence of a consistent pattern of associations between maternal demographic, parenting, and child behavior variables and either over- or underestimation was found.     

Ritual Murder in a Russian Border Town

On April 22, 1823, in the small White Russian border town of Velizh, a three-year-old boy finished his lunch and went outside to play. Fedor never returned home, and several days later a neighbor found his body at the very edge of town, punctured in numerous places. Now largely forgotten, Fedor’s death resulted in the longest and one of the most comprehensive investigations of ritual murder in the modern world. Using the analytical techniques of microhistory, this essay reconstructs small-town life in the Russian Empire, exploring along the way neighborly encounters, law and daily life, and the complex motivations that led to the ritual murder charge. While scholars usually attribute the charge to antisemitism and economic rivalries, this essay offers an alternative explanation. By recreating the day-to-day world of Velizh, I argue that tales of blood sacrifice proved remarkably contagious in the towns and villages of eastern Europe because of their role in the popular belief systems of the time and their ability to express the fears and preoccupations of a population that left no other records.     

The Integrative Role of Sacrifice in the Theology of Henri de Lubac

At key junctures in his theologies of spiritual exegesis, the Eucharist and the church, Henri de Lubac appeals to the notion of Christ's sacrifice as providing the pivotal content for the topic at hand. Despite this, de Lubac scholarship has devoted scant attention to the role of sacrifice in his thought. Using the fourfold sense of Scripture and the scholastic categories of res and sacramentum to establish a formal structure for de Lubac's thought, I demonstrate that sacrifice provides an integrative motif for these disparate areas of de Lubac's thought, better accounting for the ‘organic unity’ of his theology.