The Fragility of Consensus: Public Reason,Diversity and Stability

John Rawls's transition from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism was driven by his rejection of Theory's account of stability. The key to his later account of stability is the idea of public reason. We see Rawls's account of stability as an attempt to solve a mutual assurance problem. We maintain that Rawls's solution fails because his primary assurance mechanism, in the form of public reason, is fragile. His conception of public reason relies on a condition of consensus that we argue is unrealistic in modern, pluralistic democracies. After rejecting Rawls's conception of public reason, we offer an ‘indirect alternative’ that we believe is much more robust. We cite experimental evidence to back up this claim.     

Development and Initial Validation of a Scale Measuring the Beliefs of Educators Regarding Response to Intervention

This article presents information on the development and initial validation of the 16-item Response to Intervention (RTI) Beliefs Scale. The scale is designed to measure the extent to which educators working in schools hold beliefs consistent with the tenets of RTI. The authors administered the instrument to 2,430 educators in 62 elementary schools in the fall of 2007 and 2,443 educators in 68 elementary schools in the spring of 2008. Exploratory, single-level confirmatory, and multilevel confirmatory factor analysis procedures were used to examine construct validity. Results supported a correlated 3-factor model (Academic Abilities and Performance of Students with Disabilities, Data-Based Decision Making, and Functions of Core and Supplemental Instruction) at both the school and educator levels of analysis. Furthermore, the factor scores derived from the model demonstrated significant, positive relations to RTI implementation. Reliability estimates for two of the three factor scores exceeded.70. Implications for research on educator beliefs and implementation of RTI as well as implications for school psychologists supporting RTI implementation are discussed.     

Why Higher Working Memory Capacity May Help You Learn: Sampling,Search, and Degrees of Approximation

Algorithms for approximate Bayesian inference, such as those based on sampling (i.e., Monte Carlo methods), provide a natural source of models of how people may deal with uncertainty with limited cognitive resources. Here, we consider the idea that individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) may be usefully modeled in terms of the number of samples, or “particles,” available to perform inference. To test this idea, we focus on two recent experiments that report positive associations between WMC and two distinct aspects of categorization performance: the ability to learn novel categories, and the ability to switch between different categorization strategies (“knowledge restructuring”). In favor of the idea of modeling WMC as a number of particles, we show that a single model can reproduce both experimental results by varying the number of particles—increasing the number of particles leads to both faster category learning and improved strategy‐switching. Furthermore, when we fit the model to individual participants, we found a positive association between WMC and best‐fit number of particles for strategy switching. However, no association between WMC and best‐fit number of particles was found for category learning. These results are discussed in the context of the general challenge of disentangling the contributions of different potential sources of behavioral variability.     

An Exploration of Family Problem-Solving and Affective Involvement as Moderators Between Disease Severity and Depressive Symptoms in Adolescents with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Little is known about how family functioning relates to psychosocial functioning of youth with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The study aim was to examine family problem solving and affective involvement as moderators between adolescent disease severity and depressive symptoms. Participants were 122 adolescents with IBD and their parents. Measures included self-reported and parent-reported adolescent depressive symptoms, parent-reported family functioning, and physician-completed measures of disease severity. Disease severity was a significant predictor of adolescent-reported depressive symptoms, but not parent-reported adolescent depressive symptoms. Family affective involvement significantly predicted parent-reported adolescent depressive symptoms, while family problem-solving significantly predicted adolescent self-report of depressive symptoms. Neither affective involvement nor problem-solving served as moderators. Family affective involvement may play an important role in adolescent emotional functioning but may not moderate the effect of disease severity on depressive symptoms. Research should continue to examine effects of family functioning on youth emotional functioning and include a sample with a wider range of disease severity to determine if interventions aimed to enhance family functioning are warranted.     

Assessment of interpersonal aggression and violence: introduction to the special issue

Violence and interpersonal aggression are considered major public health problems throughout the world. Yet there is considerable variability in how these terms are operationalized, measured, and studied in the social sciences, which can lead to ambiguity and confusion in the field. In this introduction to the special issue, the authors highlight some of the difficulties inherent in studying interpersonal aggression and violence and briefly review the heterogeneous nature of the research conducted in this area. The authors conclude with a summary of the key findings of the articles that appear in this special issue.