Breaking Down Barriers: Museum as Broker of Home/School Collaboration

ABSTRACT

Parents have a major influence on children's learning, yet parent involvement remains weak in many communities. This article addresses the role of a museum in bringing home and school together, describing results from 2 complementary studies of a museum-designed and -implemented parent involvement program. The first study was an exploratory, mixed-methods investigation designed to understand the program's impact on parents' engagement in their children's learning. The second study used a grounded theory approach to develop theoretical hypotheses about the programmatic mechanisms that facilitated parents' engagement. In terms of impact, the program gave parents a platform through which to create new and more meaningful spaces for connecting to their children's learning, including conceptual spaces, social spaces, and physical spaces. In terms of mechanisms, the program first helped parents to build relevant capital and then to author new and relevant ways of engaging with their children's schooling. Taken together, study results broaden current thinking about the spaces in which parent engagement occurs and emphasize the important community-based role that museums can play to bring parents and schools together in support of children's development.     

Sticks,Stones, or Words? Counting the Prevalence of Different Types of Intimate Partner Violence Reported by New Zealand Women

This study documents the lifetime and 12-month prevalence and overlap of psychological/emotional, physical, and sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) reported by a representative sample of New Zealand women. Use of controlling behaviors by women's current or most recent intimate partner was also explored. The results indicated that 55% of ever-partnered women had experienced any IPV in their lifetime: 33% had experienced more than one type of IPV (usually psychological/emotional violence and physical and/or sexual violence), and 22% had experienced one type of IPV. Use of controlling behaviors by the woman's current or most recent partner was associated with partner's use of physical or sexual violence. Implications are discussed at the population level, for service providers, and for future studies.     

Mental well-being in the religious and the non-religious: evidence for a curvilinear relationship

Previous studies demonstrating a positive relationship between religiosity and mental health have sampled from a highly religious general population with little differentiation between weak religiosity and non-religiosity. Church members are typically compared with non-religious unaffiliated individuals, thus confounding belief with group effects (e.g. social support). The present study examined mental well-being, utilising the full range of certainty of belief or non-belief in God. In the first study, we compared church and secular group members on measures of life satisfaction and emotional stability. The second study used a large survey of the non-religious. A curvilinear relationship was found such that those with higher belief certainty (both confidently religious and atheists) have greater well-being relative to those with low certainty (unsure and agnostics). Multiple regressions controlling for social and demographic variables reduced, but did not eliminate this curvilinear relationship. Mechanisms of well-being may involve a confident worldview rather than religious beliefs themselves.     

Aging,Encoding Fluency,and Metacognitive Monitoring

ABSTRACT

Encoding fluency (how rapidly one generates a mediator for a new association) may be a cue used to judge one's own learning. To evaluate age differences in utilization of this cue, older and younger adults were instructed to use interactive imagery to study paired associates, pressing a button to indicate when an image had been formed for a given pair. A judgment of learning (JOL) was also made immediately after each pair had been studied. Hence, at least two cues pertaining to encoding fluency—whether an image had been formed (a diagnostic cue) and the latency of formation (a nondiagnostic one)—were available when making JOLs. Age equivalence was found in JOL accuracy, and JOLs for both age groups were positively related to imagery formation and were negatively related to the latency of image formation. Moreover, subjectively judged latency correlated higher with JOLs than actual (objective) latency, supporting the hypothesis that perceived fluency is a cue used in constructing JOLs.     

HALAKHA ADAPTS TO MODERN TECHNOLOGY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

This article will attempt to shed some light on the phenomenon of the adoption of modern technologies by Orthodox Jews. It examines the debate over the halakhic status of electricity in the early twentieth century, concentrating on two rabbis of that period, Yehuda Yudel Rosenberg (1859–1935) of Montreal, and Shlomo Zalman Auerbach (1910–1995) of Jerusalem, who wrote notable works on the subject. The works discussed are Rabbi Rosenberg’s Me’or hahashmal (1924) and Rabbi Auerbach’s Me’orei esh (1935). These works are examined in the context of the development of halakha and its application to new technologies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and also in light of the halakhic strategies of both rabbis. Finally, unpublished letters of Rabbi Auerbach to Rabbi Rosenberg are examined that allow us some insight into the inception of Rabbi Auerbach’s work.     

Beneficence: Does Agglomeration Matter?

When it comes to the duty of beneficence, a formidable class of moderate positions holds that morally significant considerations emerge when one's actions are seen as part of a larger series. Agglomeration, according to these moderates, limits the demands of beneficence, thereby avoiding the extremely demanding view forcefully defended by Peter Singer. This idea has much appeal. What morality can demand of people is, it seems, appropriately modulated by how much they have already done or will do. Here we examine a number of recent proposals that appeal to agglomeration. None of them, we argue, succeeds.