School competence and emotional/behavioral problems among Norwegian school children as rated by teachers on the Teacher Report Form

Of 1,409 eligible children aged 6-13 years in grades 1 to 7 who were randomly selected from a national sample of Norwegian schools, 858 participated in the present study (60.9%). The sample was stratified by school centrality, region and size of grade cohort. The teachers assessed their children's academic performance, adaptive school functioning, and levels of emotional/behavioral problems using the 2001 version of the Teacher Report Form (TRF). Only one child was randomly selected from each grade cohort. Girls had significantly higher scores than boys in the Working Hard, Appropriate Behavior, Learning, and Total Adaptive Functioning domains. For girls, only the Working Hard domain was of medium effect size. While boys had significantly higher scores than girls on Attention, Thought Problems, Rule-Breaking, Aggression, Externalizing Problems and Total problems, only Attention Problems showed a medium effect size. Significant sex by age interaction effects were also found for Rule-Breaking, Externalizing, Internalizing, Anxious-Depressed and Total Problems. In all these comparisons, 10-13-year-old boys had significantly higher scores than 6-9-year olds, while girls had similar problem levels across age groups. Our mean Total Problems score (17.2) was lower than the grand mean (21.6) reported in a multi-country comparison but higher than in another Norwegian large-scale survey. Overall, our findings indicate that teachers in Scandinavia report, just as do parents, relatively low levels of emotional/behavioral problems among school-aged children.     

Personality and strength-related attitude dimensions: Between and within-person relationships

Examined personality variables as predictors and moderators of strength-related attitude dimensions (SRAD) using multilevel modeling. Results revealed significant person-level variation in attitude importance, extremity, and ambivalence across attitude objects. Study 1 found the personality variable of need to evaluate (NE) predicted extremity across attitude objects, and finding meaning in life (ML) was predictive of importance across objects. Study 2 revealed that neuroticism and state anxiety were significant predictors of ambivalence across attitude objects. Finally, the NE, the Need for Cognition, and Openness to Experience each moderated the within-person relationship between extremity and ambivalence across objects, with higher values on the individual difference variables being related to stronger within-person relationships. Implications for research on attitude strength and the relationships between personality variables and attitudes are discussed.     

The Effects of Identity-Relevance and Task Difficulty on Task Motivation,Stress, and Performance

Tested the hypothesis that the identity-relevance of a performance domain would predict task motivation, stress, and actual performance. Psychology majors and non-majors (N = 94) completed either moderately difficult or very difficulty questions from a standardized verbal aptitude test. Before the test participants were told that performance on the test was either predictive of success as a psychologist (identity-relevant condition) or were given no information on the predictive ability of the test (control condition). Results revealed that only psychology majors evidenced higher motivation and stress in the identity-relevant condition in comparison to the control condition. The results of actual test performance revealed that when identity-relevance was high, psychology majors tended to do better than non-majors on a task of moderate difficulty, but tended to do worse on a task of high difficulty. Implications of the results for identity-relevance as a motivational and emotional lynchpin for performance are discussed. The author would like to thank Cynthia Ellison, Melissa Kinder, and Kelly Riddle for their assistance in data collection. A paper based on the results of the present study was presented at the 2004 meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association and was the co-recipient of the outstanding professional paper award.     

Logic-based XML data integration: a semi-materializing approach

We first describe the approach to XML data integration in the XPathLog/LoPiX project that uses a warehouse strategy. We show that the DOM model and the XML Query Data Model are not suitable for this task since the integrated database is not necessarily a tree, but a set of overlapping (original and integrated) trees. The problem is solved by using a node-labeled graph-based data model, called XTreeGraph, for the internal XML database that represents multiple, overlapping XML trees, or tree views.In the second part, we return to the standard XML data model—by still keeping the overlapping tree idea by “simulating” it: The data is internally represented by XML where the “overlayed” resulting tree is represented by XLink elements that refer to the original sources. By using a logical, transparent data model for XLinks as investigated in [May, in: 11th WWW Conference, 2002], all queries behave as stated against the XTreeGraph. The use of links for partial materialization also turns the approach from a warehouse approach into a mixed approach that combines the advantages of the warehouse approach and of the virtual approach. The approach is again illustrated by using XPathLog as data integration language.     

Secularism,Criticism, and Religious Studies Pedagogy

Abstract. Secularization, the idea that religion would gradually diminish over time, was once widely assumed to be true by scholars of religion, but the unexpected resurgence of religious traditions has called it into question. Related debates on the distinction between religion and the secular have destabilized religious studies further. What does the crisis of secularization and secularism mean for the religious studies classroom? This essay proposes a model of religious criticism in the wake of secularism. No longer simply claiming a “view from nowhere,” students and instructors can (by observing standards of evidence, reason, and self‐disclosure) combine criticism with learning. Drawn from aesthetic and ethical traditions of criticism, religious criticism can be practiced by “teaching the conflicts” and through the pedagogical models of Freire and hooks.     

Concrete mindset impairs filtering in visual working memory

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Two studies tested whether a mindset manipulation would affect the filtering of distractors from entering visual working memory (VWM). In Study 1, participants...     

Implications of document-level literacy skills for Web site design

The proliferation of World Wide Web (Web) sites and the low cost of publishing information on the Web have placed a tremendous amount of information at the fingertips of millions of people. Although most of this information is at least intended to be accurate, there is much that is rumor, innuendo, urban legend, and outright falsehood. This raises problems especially for students (of all ages) trying to do research or learn about some topic. Finding accurate, credible information requires document-level literacy skills, such as integration, sourcing, corroboration, and search. This paper discusses these skills and offers a list of simple ways that designers of educational Web sites can help their visitors utilize these skills.     

Functional role theories of representation and content explanation: with a case study from spatial cognition

The aim of this paper is to show that the widespread opinion, according to which functional role theories of representation fail to account for content explanations of human and animal behaviour, cannot be confirmed with respect to each type of functional role theory. Functional resemblance theories (as referred to by O’Brien and Opie in Representation in mind, Elsevier, 2004) allow for content explanations of successfully performed cognitive abilities as much as for explanations of systematic errors resulting from misrepresentation. How functional roles do their explanatory work in actual scientific research examples is shown by a detailed exploration of model assumptions about homing performances based on path integration mechanisms in humans and animals.