Who are they and What do they Need: Characterizing and Supporting the Early Childhood Assistant Teacher Workforce in a Large Urban District

Scholarship and policy emphasize strengthening the early childhood education (ECE) workforce, but this work neglects a large segment of the workforce: assistant teachers. This study responds to gaps in knowledge by examining the demographic characteristics, qualifications, professional supports, and workplace experiences of assistant teachers (N = 120) in a representative sample of ECE centers (n = 35) in a large urban district. In addition to studying assistant teachers’ receipt of in‐service training and coaching, we draw from social network theory to investigate the professional support assistant teachers provide and receive via their collegial networks. We use a variance decomposition approach to explore how on‐the‐job supports, such as training, coaching, and networks, contribute to assistant teachers’ work‐related stress and job satisfaction—two key predictors of ECE teacher attrition. Results indicate that few ECE staff members seek assistant teachers for work‐related advice. Coaching is found to be an important contributor to assistant teachers’ job satisfaction; professional advice via collegial networks is a meaningful but under‐examined source of support for stress and job satisfaction. We consider implications for supporting and retaining assistant teachers and propose next steps for research on this understudied segment of the teaching workforce.     

Intrusive parenting,teacher sensitivity,and negative emotionality on the development of emotion regulation in early head start toddlers

Toddler emotion regulation develops within the context of relationships but is also influenced by toddlers’ individual characteristics. Drawing on transactional and differential susceptibility frameworks, this study examined direct and interactive associations of intrusive parenting, teacher sensitivity, and negative emotionality on toddler emotion regulation development in a sample of Early Head Start families utilizing center-based child care. Latent growth models indicated that, after controlling for a series of family and child care covariates, intrusive parenting at 14 months had diminishing effects on trajectories of emotion regulation across toddlerhood (14 to 36 months), whereas teacher sensitivity in child care was promotive for emotion regulation growth. Toddlers with high negative emotionality were not more susceptible to the effects of intrusive parenting or teacher sensitivity on emotion regulation development, however, results suggested emerging evidence for individual differences in the protective nature of teacher sensitivity in the context of high intrusion at home. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for informing parents and early care and education providers in nurturing relationships with the children who may be the most challenging to care for but may stand to make the greatest gains in emotion regulation development in quality caregiving settings.     

Romantic attachment,dyadic coping,and parental adjustment across the transition to parenthood

This study explored the mediating role of common dyadic coping (common DC) on the longitudinal associations between attachment‐related anxiety and avoidance and parental adjustment to the first year postpartum. A total of 92 Portuguese couples completed self‐report questionnaires of romantic attachment, common DC, parenting stress, and parental confidence. Results showed that more avoidant parents (at mid‐pregnancy) engaged less in common DC (at 6 weeks postpartum), which consequently increased their partner's parenting stress (only in mothers) and decreased their partner's parental confidence (in both parents) at 6–9 months postpartum. Anxious attachment did not predict parents' adjustment directly or indirectly. Interventions aimed at preventing adjustment difficulties to early parenthood in more avoidant parents should focus on enhancing their common DC strategies soon after childbirth.     

父母和班主任自主支持对青少年幸福感和孤独感的影响：个体为中心的视角

为探讨不同来源自主支持对青少年幸福感和孤独感的影响,采用问卷调查的方法,测量了2941名青少年感知到的父母和班主任自主支持、生活满意度、积极情感、消极情感和孤独感。结果发现：（1）存在四个自主支持潜在剖面：父母低-班主任较高自主支持组（5.88%）、父母中等-班主任低自主支持组（5.00%）、较高自主支持组（56.21%）以及高自主支持组（32.91%）。（2）男生、年龄大的青少年更可能归为父母中等-班主任低自主支持组。（3）高自主支持组幸福感较高、孤独感较低,较高自主支持组其次,父母低-班主任较高自主支持组幸福感最低、孤独感最高。（4）对青少年幸福感和孤独感而言,父母自主支持更重要。     

bootstrap法在合成分数信度区间估计中的应用

在介绍bootstrap法原理的基础上,本文以一个同质测量模式的模拟数据为例,对结构方程模型下使用bootstrap法对合成分数信度的区间估计的应用中进行了演示。     

Expectations and Realizations: The Role of Expectancies in Achievement Settings

High expectancies of success are widely assumed to have positive effects on performance in achievement situations. However, previous investigations have tended to ignore task difficulty or assume that expectancies affect performance in a linear fashion. In two investigations, we found that (a) expectancies were more closely related to performance at difficult tasks than easy tasks and (b) low expectancies produced the poorest levels of performance, but moderate and high expectancies were equally advantageous. The practical, methodological, and theoretical implications of these findings are considered.This research was supported by a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation (SBR-8958211) to Jonathon D. Brown, and a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship to Margaret A. Marshall.     

Applying evidence to support ethical decisions: Is the placebo really powerless?

Using placebos in day-to-day practice is an ethical problem. This paper summarises the available epidemiological evidence to support this difficult decision. Based on these data we propose to differentiate between placebo and “knowledge framing”. While the use of placebo should be confined to experimental settings in clinical trials, knowledge framing — which is only conceptually different from placebo — is a desired, expected and necessary component of any doctor-patient encounter. Examples from daily practice demonstrate both, the need to investigate the effects of knowledge framing and its impact on ethical, medical, economical and legal decisions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “Placebo: Its Action and Place in Health Research Today,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 12–13 April, 2003.     

Child witnesses' metamemory realism

This study investigated the degree of realism in the confidence judgments of 11 to 12-year-olds (41 girls and 40 boys) of their answers to questions relating to a short film clip showing a kidnapping event. Four different confidence scales were used: a numeric scale, a picture scale, a line scale and a written scale. The results demonstrated that the children showed a high level of overconfidence in their memories. However, no significant differences between the four confidence scales were found. Weak gender differences were found in that the girls were slightly, but significantly, better calibrated than the boys. In addition, although both boys and girls overestimated the total number of memory questions they had answered correctly, the boys gave higher estimates compared with the girls. In brief, the results indicate that, at least in the context investigated, 11-12 year-old children's confidence in and estimations of their own event memory show poor realism (overconfidence and overestimation). A comparison with previous research on adults indicates that 11 to 12-year-old children show noticeably poorer realism.     

Testing indirect effect with a complete or incomplete dichotomous mediator

Past methodological research on mediation analysis mainly focused on situations where all variables were complete and continuous. When issues of categorical data occur combined with missing data, more methodological considerations are involved. Specifically, appropriate decisions need to be made on estimation methods of the indirect effects and on confidence intervals for testing the indirect effects with accommodations of missing data. We compare strategies that address these issues based on a model with a dichotomous mediator, aiming to provide guidelines for researchers facing such challenges in practice.     

Cognitive processes operating in hindsight

The aim of this investigation was to study the cognitive processes involved in the "knew-it-all-along" effect, especially in regard to use of inferential processes. The results of three experiments showed that the magnitude of the phenomenon did not increase with more use of inferential processes. It is proposed that only under misleading circumstances do inferential processes associated with overconfidence increase the magnitude of the phenomenon. For a majority of the tasks introspectively classified as solved by pure guessing, the hindsight phenomenon entirely disappeared whereas "intuition" tasks lead to the strongest bias. The results are generally consistent with the accuracy-assessment model (A. Winman et al. , 1998).