Can a values-affirmation intervention bolster academic achievement and raise critical consciousness? Results from a small-scale field experiment

This small-scale field experiment tests whether an adapted values-affirmation intervention enhances youths’ academic achievement and mitigates social identity threat while simultaneously...     

The impact of organizational change on the perceptions of UK managers

Abstract

This study describes what kind of impact the relocation of an organization has on the daily life and experiences of its employees and their families. The organization—the defence forces—was closing some garrisons and relocating personnel. The research question is: 'What kind of everyday life and experiences have those who got new jobs in other garrisons in the same area and who stayed in their home towns (stayers) compared to those who had to move to other areas (movers) and also to those who chose to commute between their home town and the new job (commuters).' The hypothesis is that the stayers have less demanding changes in everyday life and less stressful experiences than the movers and commuters. Data were collected through a survey questionnaire before and 18 months after the relocation. The first sample consists of 183 members of the personnel and the follow-up sample 132 members. The results showed that the relocation had not been an easy transition for any group. The life situation of the commuters was the hardest. A considerable portion of the stayers also evaluated their life situation to have been unfavourable and stressful.     

Music,identity, and musical ethnocentrism of young people in six Asian,Latin American,and Western cultures

Ethnomusicologists and sociologists have extensively discussed the symbolic role of music in the creation, maintenance, and expression of cultural and national identity, while the underlying social psychological processes remain unexplored. We elaborate psychological mechanisms of identity construction and identity expression through culture‐specific music preferences. We propose and test a model linking music preferences to national identity via musical ethnocentrism in six student samples from Brazil, Germany, Hong Kong, Mexico, New Zealand, and the Philippines. In each context, culture‐specific music styles were related to national identity of its listeners and musical ethnocentrism mediated these effects. This paper bridges culture‐specific and universal perspectives on music and identity by examining the underlying psychological processes in Asian, Latin, and Western cultures.     

Movement and Meaning

Movement analysis receives a new and useful examination in this paper. The fact (hat all of us always “read” each other's movement behavior as a matter of course is taken for granted. Our verbal language is rife with allusions to bodily behavior, suggesting that there really is such a thing as a language of the body. But one and the same movement can represent many differing aspects of behavior and is heavily dependent on its context. What we experience nonverbally vis-à-vis another person is the executive function of body language like, for instance, “wringing one's hands” or having “shaky knees.” Usually, people will convey nonverbally how they feel about the situation they find themselves in while the other—the recipient of the message—will convey understanding equally nonverbally. Thus, it is always (he representation of something that we experience—an embodiment of intent, not language itself. It therefore becomes necessary to distinguish between the implementation and movement itself. These abstractions become helpful in the understanding of many phenomena during treatment situations as demonstrated here.     

Career Aspirations of Adolescent Girls: Effects of Achievement Level,Grade, and Single-Sex School Environment

The career aspirations of high-achieving adolescent girls were explored by comparing them to the aspirations of adolescent boys as well as by looking at the influence of grade in school, achievement level, and an all-girls school environment. The participants' ideal and real career aspirations, scored in terms of prestige, were investigated via 2 sets of analyses , with coed (n = 704) and single-sex female (n = 494) adolescent samples. Results showed that high-achieving girls exceeded the aspirations of average-achieving girls and boys, and were the same as those of high-achieving boys. Gender and grade differences in ideal and real career choices over all achievement levels are also reported and discussed. Girls at single-sex schools had higher real career aspirations than did girls and boys at coed schools.     

Patching the Pathway and Widening the Pipeline: Models for Developing a Diverse Early Childhood Workforce in Chicago

With the growing appreciation of the importance of early learning experiences for children's healthy development, attention to the cultivation and maintenance of a qualified workforce has steadily increased. Such a workforce must have not just the knowledge and skills related to child development and early learning, but also be linguistically and culturally prepared to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse child and family population. To ensure a highly qualified workforce, programs and policymakers must attend to both the “pipeline” through which new early childhood educators (ECEs) enter the workforce and the “pathways” by which ECEs work toward and obtain the necessary education and credentials for different roles within the field. In line with the aims of this special issue, this paper leverages the first‐person account style to describe barriers to and creative solutions for the development of practitioners in low‐resourced communities in Chicago, with the goal of informing practice and policy. We describe three prior and ongoing partnership programs between community‐based organizations and institutions of higher education, each tailored to support a unique population in the ECE pipeline on the pathway for increased educational attainment and credentialing. Each program is grounded in a specific community of Chicago, a diverse city with a sizable population of children raised in non‐English speaking homes. Each program addresses specific needs of the communities they serve, especially around the recruitment, retention, and promotion of bilingual ECEs. Program administrators and community members describe each programs’ goals, development, and key components unique to their target population as well as key takeaways. We conclude with an overview of critical components that we identified across these programs in order to create pathways for change within the workforce and the communities they serve.     

Text Recycling in Scientific Writing

Science and Engineering Ethics - Text recycling, often called “self-plagiarism”, is the practice of reusing textual material from one’s prior documents in a new work. The practice...     

What works for serious juvenile offenders? A systematic review

This study examines the outcomes of best available empirical research regarding the effectiveness of treatment programs implemented in secure corrections to prevent the recidivism of serious (violent and chronic) juvenile offenders (from 12 to 21 years old). In this review 30 experimental and quasi-experimental studies are analyzed, comparing 2831 juveniles in the treatment groups and 3002 youths for the control groups. The global effect size of these 30 studies in terms of standardized mean difference was d = 0.14 in favour of the treatment groups. This size effect, in terms of "r" coefficient reached the value of 0.07, of low magnitude. The cognitive-behavioral methods of treatment were the most effective in decreasing recidivism. These results report that the rehabilitation programs for serious offenders achieve to reduce the general recidivism in comparison with the control juveniles in approximately seven percent.     

A training program to improve the memory of children with Down's syndrome

This study starts out from the general agreement about the explicit memory deficits in children with Down's syndrome. Our aim is to explore the possibilities of the computer as a valuable instrument with which to train memory by teaching cognitive rehearsal strategies. The sample was made up of 40 students with Down's syndrome and was divided into two research groups: control and experimental. The results show a clear tendency towards memory improvement in the experimental group. These results can be considered indicators of the effectiveness of the intervention. They are also very interesting for education, in the sense that teachers can help the students with Down's syndrome to improve their memory capacity.