Navigating Middle Grades: Role of Social Contexts in Middle Grade School Climate

During early adolescence, most public school students undergo school transitions, and many students experience declines in academic performance and social-emotional well-being. Theories and empirical research have highlighted the importance of supportive school environments in promoting positive youth development during this period of transition. Despite this, little is known about the proximal social and developmental contexts of the range of middle grade public schools US students attend. Using a cross-sectional dataset from the eighth grade wave of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort 1998–1999, the current study examines the middle grade school social context from the perspectives of administrators and teachers in public schools with typical grade configurations (k–8 schools, middle schools, and junior high schools) and how it relates to students’ perceptions of school climate. We find that administrators and teachers in k–8 schools perceive a more positive school social context, controlling for school structural and demographic characteristics. This school social context, in turn, is associated with students’ perceptions of their schools’ social and academic climate. Implications for educational policy and practice are discussed.     

Aversive images cause less perceptual interference among violent video game players: evidence from emotion-induced blindness

ABSTRACT

Previous research has assessed links between violent video game playing, aggression, and desensitization in the moral domain, but here we find that frequent violent video game play additionally may be linked with differences in perceptual processing. In an emotion-induced blindness task – wherein graphic images typically outcompete and impair perception of targets – violent video game players suffered less perceptual disruption following aversive images than non-players did, despite no group difference following neutral images. This difference persisted when controlling for sex and other violent media consumption and despite no group differences in trait aggression, disgust propensity, or disgust sensitivity. Importantly, the recruitment method ensured that participants were not aware of links between the experiment and their videogame playing history. Although a causal relationship has yet to be established, the findings suggest that violent video game players might sometimes, literally see the world differently.     

A tutorial on adaptive design optimization

Experimentation is ubiquitous in the field of psychology and fundamental to the advancement of its science, and one of the biggest challenges for researchers is designing experiments that can conclusively discriminate the theoretical hypotheses or models under investigation. The recognition of this challenge has led to the development of sophisticated statistical methods that aid in the design of experiments and that are within the reach of everyday experimental scientists. This tutorial paper introduces the reader to an implementable experimentation methodology, dubbed Adaptive Design Optimization, that can help scientists to conduct “smart” experiments that are maximally informative and highly efficient, which in turn should accelerate scientific discovery in psychology and beyond.     

How Robert M. MacIver was forgotten: Columbia and American sociology in a new light, 1929-1950

It is necessary to reevaluate the role of the Department of Sociology at Columbia University in the years 1929-1950. The impact of Robert M. MacIver, who played a significant role in the exchange between European and American thinkers, is examined, as well as his marginalization. It is argued that in the 1930s it was characteristic that the sociologists in the centers in Chicago and Columbia exchanged their disciplinary functions. It was MacIver's Columbia that took on the role of advocate of humanistic sociology and Mead's and Cooley's heritage.     

CUE COMPETITION EFFECTS:

Abstract— The ability to predict future consequences on the basis of previous experience with the current yet of environmental cues is one of the most fundamental of all cognitive processes. Thix sttidv investigated how the validity of one cue influences the effectiveness of another cue for predicting a criterion. The results demonstrate a cue competition effect—increasing the validity of one cue decreased the effectiveness of another cue in a linear prediction task, even though the two cues were statistically independent.     

Reaction times and intelligence in Korean children.

Nine-year-old Korean children (N = 299) were tested for reaction time (RT) and intelligence measured by Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices. Reaction times were broken into decision times and movement times and into three degrees of complexity. The results showed low but generally statistically significant correlations between decision times and intelligence. Generally, no significant differences existed between movement times and intelligence. Boys showed significantly faster movement times than girls did.     

Aspectual asymmetries in the mental representation of events: Role of lexical and grammatical aspect

Temporal information is important in the construction of situation models, and many languages make use of perfective and imperfective aspect markers to distinguish between completed situations (e.g., He made a cake) and ongoing situations (e.g., He is making a cake). Previous studies in which the effect of grammatical aspect has been examined have shown that perfective sentences are often processed more quickly than imperfective ones (e.g., Chan, Yap, Shirai, & Matthews, 2004; Madden & Zwaan, 2003; Yap et al., 2004; Yap et al., 2006). However, these studies used only accomplishment verbs (i.e., verbs with an inherent endpoint, such as bake a cake). The present study on the processing of Cantonese includes activity verbs (i.e., durative verbs with no inherent endpoint, such as play the piano), and the results indicate a strong interaction between lexical aspect (i.e., verb type) and grammatical aspect. That is, perfective sentences were processed more quickly with accomplishment verbs, consistent with previous findings, but imperfective sentences were processed more quickly with activity verbs. We suggest that these different aspectual asymmetries emerge as a result of the inherent associations between accomplishment verbs and the bounded features of perfective aspect and between activity verbs and the unbounded features of imperfective aspect. The sentence stimuli from this study may be downloaded from mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

儿童在归纳推理中的多样性效应

3个实验探讨了儿童在归纳推理中是否具有多样性效应的争议。实验1采用寻找证据法,使用图片材料,得出5岁儿童在归纳推理中没有多样性效应,表现为典型性效应。实验2改用归属法发现:5岁儿童在归纳推理中表现出多样性效应。实验3采用寻找证据法,但使用实物材料,并且加大了多样性前提的差异程度,结果发现:3岁儿童在归纳推理中也表现出多样性效应。本研究结果表明,在适合的条件下,儿童在归纳推理中能表现出多样性效应。     

Planning Beyond the Next Trial in Adaptive Experiments: A Dynamic Programming Approach

Experimentation is at the heart of scientific inquiry. In the behavioral and neural sciences, where only a limited number of observations can often be made, it is ideal to design an experiment that leads to the rapid accumulation of information about the phenomenon under study. Adaptive experimentation has the potential to accelerate scientific progress by maximizing inferential gain in such research settings. To date, most adaptive experiments have relied on myopic, one‐step‐ahead strategies in which the stimulus on each trial is selected to maximize inference on the next trial only. A lingering question in the field has been how much additional benefit would be gained by optimizing beyond the next trial. A range of technical challenges has prevented this important question from being addressed adequately. This study applies dynamic programming (DP), a technique applicable for such full‐horizon, “global” optimization, to model‐based perceptual threshold estimation, a domain that has been a major beneficiary of adaptive methods. The results provide insight into conditions that will benefit from optimizing beyond the next trial. Implications for the use of adaptive methods in cognitive science are discussed.