Gender differences in attributions about microcomputer learning in elementary school

To investigate whether girls' attributions about computer use were more likely to follow a pattern of learned helplessness, boys' and girls' attributions about a computerized drill-and-practice task and a tutorial program were assessed. Factor analysis of responses on an attribution questionnaire revealed three factors that differed across gender and across task. Multiple regression, using exposure time, group size, attributions, and interactions to predict posttest scores, showed different patterns for boys and girls and between tasks. For the drill-and-practice task, girls benefited from increased exposure time, and attributions to ease of task and ability predicted performance for both boys and girls. For the tutorial task, increased exposure time did not benefit either sex. Girls, however, benefitted from working in larger groups, while boys benefitted from working in smaller groups. Attributions to luck, as well as perceptions of ability and ease of task, predicted posttest scores. However, for girls, attributions to luck predicted higher scores, while for boys, attributions to luck were negatively correlated with performance. Implications for including appropriate feedback to encourage a mastery approach in computer learning, as well as optimal group size and group composition for positive attributional style and academic success, are discussed.This research was supported by Concordia University and the Fonds Pour la Formation des Chercheurs et l'Aide a la Recherche (Grant EQ-2951), Government of Quebec, Canada.The authors wish to thank Ms. Patricia Peters for assistance with the statistical analysis, and Dr. Philip Abrami, for his contribution to the project.     

The role of stranger harassment experiences in college women's perceived possibility of gender crimes happening to them

The present study examined the relation between stranger harassment experiences and college women's perceived possibility of gender and nongender crimes happening to them. Undergraduate women attending a British university completed self‐report measures of stranger harassment and self‐objectification (i.e., self‐surveillance and body shame), and then evaluated four vignettes of various crimes on the severity of the crime and the likelihood of the crime happening to them. Results indicated that stranger harassment is a common experience for these British university women. Serial mediation analyses revealed a direct effect of stranger harassment on perceived likelihood of rape and perceived likelihood of intimate partner violence, and an indirect effect of stranger harassment on rape through self‐surveillance, whereas stranger harassment and indices of self‐objectification were unrelated to perceived likelihood of human trafficking and burglary. Discussion is centered on the role of objectifying experiences in perceptions of gender crimes where sexual and physical harm to women's bodies is emphasized, and the potential impact for those women on the receiving end of unwanted sexual objectification.     

A PREOCCUPATION WITH OBJECT-REPRESENTATION: THE BECKETT-BION CASE REVISITED

Taking issue with the notion of a profound reciprocal influence of Samuel Beckett and his analyst, Wilfred Bion, based on supposition all too often passed as fact, the author refutes the idea that Bion's ‘Attacks on linking’ was based on his later‐to‐be famous patient. Choosing, rather, to apply Bion's concepts of transformation and assaults on verbal thought to Beckett's remarkably visual and highly dissociative writing, she finds in the analyst's work a means of exploring a startling preoccupation with object representation and an anxiety of remembrance constant throughout the writer's texts. Is this fixation attributable only to aesthetic strategy or does it say something about the writer's own inner representational world? Relating the writer's obsession to Bion's concepts and, moreover, its dissociative expression to the decathexis and blank mourning explored by Green, she uncovers within it a reflection of the kind of evocative memory disturbance identified with primary dyadic dysfunction. This application of Bion and Green to Beckett veers distinctly less towards psychohistory, however, than to how sublimation has rendered this object‐relational failure an aesthetic success.