Students’ Perceptions of Unsafe Schools: An Ecological Systems Analysis

In the aftermath of several school shooting incidents in recent years, students’ perceptions of unsafe schools has been a major concern for parents, teachers, school officials, school practitioners, and policy-makers. Using Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems framework, we examined the micro-, meso-, and exosystem level factors associated with perceptions of unsafe school environments in a nationally representative sample of 10- to 15-year-old youth in the United States. We found that for the socio-demographic characteristics, students who were older, male, and poor had increased risks of perceiving higher levels of unsafe school environments. Within the microsystem of the family, our results indicate that parent-youth discussions of school activities/events decreased the risk of students perceiving unsafe schools. All of the school environment variables—ease of making friends, teachers’ involvement, observed weapon carrying, and school rule enforcement—were related in the expected direction to students’ perceiving their schools as unsafe. At the mesosystem level, findings from our study demonstrate that variables measuring parental school involvement were unrelated to perceptions of school safety. Finally, at the exosystem level, we found that students’ perceptions of residing in a safer neighborhood and residence in a non-central city metropolitan area, compared with a central city, decreased the odds of perceiving school environments as unsafe. School policy and practice implications are discussed.     

Yu in the Xunzi: Can Desire by Itself Motivate Action?

This essay argues that yu ?? (desire), in Xunzi??s view, cannot by itself motivate action. Such a clarification will also bear on our understanding of the relation between xin ?? (the heart/mind) and yu in the Xunzi. It is divided into three main sections. The first section seeks to explicate the common assumption that yu can be an independent source of motivation. In the second section, I will conduct textual analysis that challenges such an assumption and argue that only xin can by itself motivate action. In the third section, I explain that the issue of whether yu can conflict with xin is not applicable in Xunzi??s thought and extrapolate the implications that xin is always activated and that it has a natural inclination to pursue the objects of yu. For these reasons, the source of moral failure lies in xin being active in certain problematic ways.     

Functional Extended Redundancy Analysis

We propose a functional version of extended redundancy analysis that examines directional relationships among several sets of multivariate variables. As in extended redundancy analysis, the proposed method posits that a weighed composite of each set of exogenous variables influences a set of endogenous variables. It further considers endogenous and/or exogenous variables functional, varying over time, space, or other continua. Computationally, the method reduces to minimizing a penalized least-squares criterion through the adoption of a basis function expansion approach to approximating functions. We develop an alternating regularized least-squares algorithm to minimize this criterion. We apply the proposed method to real datasets to illustrate the empirical feasibility of the proposed method.     

Ritual in the Xunzi: A Change of the Heart/Mind

This article seeks to advance discussion of Xunzi??s view of ritual by examining the problem ritual treats and the way in which it targets the problem. I argue that the root of the problem is the natural inclination of the heart/mind to be concerned only with self-interest. The reason ritual works is that, on the one hand, it requires one to disregard concern for self-interest and observe ethical standards and, on the other, it allows one to express feelings in an ethically appropriate way. The ideal character shaped by ritual is one of respect in dealing with affairs and people; the ideal effect of ritual on the person is a sense of ease and security. Based on these conclusions, I will flesh out an implicit assumption Xunzi might have adopted about a pattern in human psychological constitution so as to further our understanding of Xunzi??s moral psychology.     

Mindful and Mutual Care for Individuals with Developmental Disabilities: A Systematic Literature Review

Parental and professional caregivers of individuals with developmental disabilities (DD) often experience stress and hardship associated with their role, placing them in real danger of burnout and affecting their quality of care. Mindfulness practice is currently being applied to address these issues. We conducted a systematic literature review to explore the effects of mindfulness practice and analyse the intervention and methodological features used for eliciting these effects. An initial search produced 386 publications. Of these, seven met the selection criteria of intervention studies that applied mindfulness to parental and professional caregivers of individuals with DD. We found, from analysis of seven studies, direct effects of mindfulness practice for practitioners (i.e., parental and professional caregivers) and crossover effects for individuals with whom these practitioners interacted (i.e., their children and care recipients). The studies under review collectively suggest that the practice of mindfulness in everyday life over significant periods of time can both improve the experience of care providers and support them in providing a better standard of care for care recipients. Limitations of current mindfulness intervention studies and some implications for future studies are discussed to strengthen the application of mindfulness for individuals influenced by DD.     

The beliefs that underlie autonomy-supportive and controlling teaching: A multinational investigation

We investigated the role of three beliefs in predicting teachers’ motivating style toward students—namely, how effective, how normative, and how easy-to-implement autonomy-supportive and controlling teaching were each believed to be. We further examined national collectivism–individualism as a predictor of individual teachers’ motivating style and beliefs about motivating style, as we expected that a collectivistic perspective would tend teachers toward the controlling style and toward positive beliefs about that style. Participants were 815 full-time PreK-12 public school teachers from eight different nations that varied in collectivism–individualism. All three teacher beliefs explained independent and substantial variance in teachers’ self-described motivating styles. Believed effectiveness was a particularly strong predictor of self-described motivating style. Collectivism–individualism predicted which teachers were most likely to self-describe a controlling motivating style, and a mediation analysis showed that teachers in collectivistic nations self-described a controlling style because they believed it to be culturally normative classroom practice. These findings enhance the literature on the antecedents of teachers’ motivating styles by showing that teacher beliefs strongly predict motivating style, and that culture informs one of these beliefs—namely, normalcy.     

Collaborative mother–toddler communication and theory of mind development at age 4

Focusing on social pragmatics, this longitudinal study investigated the contribution of mother–toddler collaborative communication to theory of mind (ToM) development at age 4. At age 2½, 78 toddlers (42 boys) and their mothers were observed during pretend play. At age 4, children were tested using 4 false belief understanding tasks. Both mothers and toddlers engaged in more collaborative (inform, guide/request, and support/confirm) than non-collaborative communication acts. Other-focused collaborative acts of support/confirm by mothers and toddlers predicted children's false belief understanding, even after controlling for 5 covariates. In addition, as active agents in their own ToM development, the contribution of toddlers' collaborative acts to false belief understanding was independent of their mother's. Finally, the way toddlers and their mothers co-constructed their communication mattered. Only when toddlers engaged in high levels of collaborative acts, the mothers' high levels of collaborative acts demonstrated a positive effect on children's ToM development. The applied implications of these findings are discussed.     

Parental Health and Children’s Functioning in Immigrant Families: Family Roles and Perceived Treatment at School

Although parents’ health condition is generally thought to be related to their involvement in their children’s functioning, the possible dynamics behind the scenes in school contexts with immigrant children has received little attention. This study examined the association between parents’ health condition and their children’s academic and behavioral functioning, as well as the mediation effects of parents’ school engagement and children’s perceived treatment at school among 607 immigrant families with 10- to 12-year-old children. Using structural equation modeling, the results indicated that parents’ poor health condition was associated with children’s increased behavioral problems. Parents’ school engagement fully mediated the association between parental health condition and children’s academic achievement and partially mediated the association between parental health condition and children’s behavior problems. Notably, higher levels of parents’ school engagement were associated with increased behavior problems, demonstrating a unique feature in these immigrant children’s developmental functioning. Higher levels of perceived harsh treatment by peers at school due to children’s immigrant identity were associated with these children’s greater risks of behavior problems. The results suggested what may lie behind the scenes in these children’s behavioral problems is that many of these children who act out and are brought to the school office for disciplinary issues may suffer from perceived discrimination and bad treatment by their peers. The findings provide important implications for researchers, healthcare practitioners, and educators seeking to understand this subpopulation and to design and implement family support and prevention programs for young adolescents from immigrant backgrounds.