CONFRONTING ASSUMPTIONS: PRESERVICE TEACHERS' BELIEFS ABOUT READING AND LITERATURE

This article describes one group of preservice teachers' beliefs about reading and literature. What teachers think of these subjects affects how they implement literature-based reading instruction and influences their students' views of reading and literature. During one part of a language arts education course, 39 students read about and discussed major assumptions of reader response, engaged in self-selected novel studies, and designed literature-based learning units. Students reflected on what they learned at the end of these activities. Through qualitative analysis of students' reflective writings, I identified eight beliefs students had formulated. More than three-quarters of the class gained insights into the reading process, the interpretative nature of reading, and pleasure reading. Half the students came to view writing as a means of identifying, shaping, and enriching readers' responses to literature. Finally, more than half the class described features of quality literature and one-third wrote about using literature outside the language arts. This study documents ways teacher educators can help preservice teachers examine assumptions about reading and literature that will influence how they deliver instruction.     

A Case Study of Participatory Action Research in a Public New England Middle School: Empowerment, Constraints and Challenges

PAR recognizes teachers and students as co-creators in a learning process that builds self-efficacy essential to long-term educational success. In enabling contexts, PAR projects also allow teachers to critically deconstruct societal power, examine how these dynamics are reproduced in the classroom, and work against the silencing of student voices. This case study describes the process of implementing an inquiry-based PAR model into a formal urban middle school program intended to reduce drop out rates. The anthropologist/researchers employed participant observation, interviews, and review of student work to explore the dynamics, challenges, and constraints confronted during the process. The intervention demonstrated the gap between practice and theory in a middle school environment marked by well-defined hierarchies and roles as well as high-stakes testing.     

Social Justice and Race in the United States: Key Issues and Challenges for Couple and Family Therapy

Social justice tends to be narrowly defined as equality without due recognition of human dignity and respect for those whose daily lives continue to be adversely impacted by race. This article seeks to explore key issues and challenges at the intersection of social justice and race for couple and family therapy. These include: (a) defining social justice; (b) diversity and inclusion; (c) power and privilege; (d) witness; and (e) personal responsibility.     

Affirmative Action as Help: A Review of Recipient Reactions to Preferential Selection and Affirmative Action

We review research on four areas of recipient reactions to affirmative action: (a) self-evaluations of ability and performance, (b) motivation and task interest, (c) performance and achievement, and (d) evaluations of selection procedures. Not surprisingly, the process by which affirmative action was implemented strongly affected the findings. Self-evaluations of ability and specific components of performance were adversely affected when selection procedures did not provide unambiguous, explicit, and focused evidence of recipient qualifications. In contrast, measures of motivation were largely unaffected by any type of selection, although task choice was adversely affected when the selection process did not provide clear evidence of recipient qualifications. Task performance was complexly affected by selection process and other contextual variables. Finally, selection procedures that did not provide unambiguous, explicit, and focused evidence of qualifications were regarded by recipients as less fair than procedures that did not provide evidence of competencies. We interpret the literature using a model of affirmative action as help (Turner, Pratkanis, & Hardaway, 1991), draw further parallels to research on recipient reactions to aid, and develop strategies for the effective management of affirmative action programs.     

Graduate study in psychology: 1971-2004

This article traces the evolution of graduate study in psychology in the United States and Canada during the past 3 decades. The authors summarize the 2003-2004 characteristics of graduate programs and departments in psychology and compare these data to those obtained in 1970-1971, 1979-1980, and 1992-1993. The most recent data were obtained from the 2005 edition of Graduate Study in Psychology and were based on 495 institutions, 601 departments, and 1,970 graduate programs. Information is presented for both entire departments (e.g., faculty characteristics, student profiles, admission criteria, Graduate Record Examination and grade point averages, tuition costs, financial assistance) and individual graduate programs (e.g., areas of study, number of applicants, acceptance rates, enrollment statistics, retention rates). Particular attention is devoted to the emergence of PsyD programs in professional psychology, the ascendancy of neuroscience programs in academic psychology, and the steady rise in acceptance rates across programs over the past 33 years.     

Microgenesis and ontogenesis of perceptual organization: evidence from global and local processing of hierarchical patterns

In two experiments, visual search and speeded classification were used to study perception of hierarchical patterns among participants aged 5 to 23 years. Perception of global configurations of few-element patterns and local elements of many-element patterns showed large age-related improvements. Only minor age-related changes were observed in perception of global configurations of many-element patterns and local elements of few-element patterns. These results are consistent with prior microgenetic analyses using hierarchical patterns. On the one hand, the rapid and effortless grouping of many small elements and the individuation of few large elements both mature by age 5. In contrast, the time-consuming and effortful grouping of few large elements and the individuation of many small elements improve substantially with age, primarily between ages 5 and 10. These findings support the view that perceptual organization involves multiple processes that vary in time course, attentional demands, and developmental trajectories.     

Pitfalls of the Peer World: How Children Cope with Common Rejection Experiences

This study examines the reliability and validity of a newly developed self-report measure designed to assess children's coping strategies in response to everyday rejection experiences. The Survey for Coping with Rejection Experiences (SCORE) was administered to 225 children and factor analysis of responses resulted in the conceptually meaningful subscales of active, aggressive, denial, and ruminative coping. A subset of 95 children also completed a battery of self- (depression, social anxiety), parent- (internalizing and externalizing problems), and peer- (social preference, aggression, withdrawal) ratings of socioemotional adjustment. Children's coping strategies were meaningfully associated with adjustment measures, although these associations differed for boys and girls in several instances. Importantly, both aggressive and ruminative coping strategies were positively associated with internalizing problems even after controlling for the effect of children's actual sociometric status. In addition, denial coping emerged as a significant moderator of the relation between status and adjustment.     

Independent representation of parts and the relations between them: evidence from integrative agnosia

Whether objects are represented as a collection of parts whose relations are coded independently remains a topic of ongoing discussion among theorists in the domain of shape perception. S. M., an individual with integrative agnosia, and neurologically intact ("normal") individuals learned initially to identify 4 target objects constructed of 2 simple volumetric parts. At test, the targets were mixed with distractors, some of which could be discriminated from the targets on the basis of a mismatching part, whereas the rest could be discriminated only on the basis of the altered spatial arrangements of parts. S. M. learned to identify the target objects, although at a rate slower than that of the normal participants. At test, he correctly rejected distractors on the basis of mismatching parts but was profoundly impaired at rejecting distractors made of the same local components but with mismatching spatial arrangements. These results suggest that encoding the spatial arrangements of parts of an object requires a mechanism that is different from that required for encoding the shape of individual parts, with the former selectively compromised in integrative agnosia.