More than a Body's Work: Widening Cultural Participation through an International Exploration of Young People's Construction of Visual Image and Identity

The article presents the rationale, methodology, and selected outcomes from More than a body's work, a collaborative, international, arts educational interactive research project. The project, taking place in both New York and England, explored the ways in which young people construct and ‘perform’ identity through the construction of their body and its appearance. The project's central intention was both to investigate diversity in young people's personal and cultural experience, and demonstrate their potential for creative engagement in mediating and expressing identity through a visual form. With its inclusive ethos, More than a body's work facilitated opportunities for young people who may not ordinarily have access to the arts to be partners in collaborative arts production, generating models of wider participation through innovative participatory approaches to visual art and interdisciplinary practice. The ongoing project is developmental, continuing to involve young people as participants, responding to the synthesis of local, national and international influences creatively deployed within youth culture. In considering More than a body's work's significance as a model for inclusive practice within art education, the article will discuss its strategies and its potential impact in relation to current initiatives and policies within the arts, culture and education.     

Social play as joint action: A framework to study the evolution of shared intentionality as an interactional achievement

Social play has a complex, cooperative nature that requires substantial coordination. This has led researchers to use social games to study cognitive abilities like shared intentionality, the skill and motivation to share goals and intentions with others during joint action. We expand this proposal by considering play as a joint action and examining how shared intentionality is achieved during human joint action. We describe how humans get into, conduct, and get out of joint actions together in an orderly way, thereby constructing the state of “togetherness” characteristic of shared intentionality. These processes play out as three main phases, the opening (where participants are ratified and joint commitments are established), the main body (where progress, ongoing commitments, and possible role reversals are coordinated), and the closing (where the intention to terminate the action is coordinated and where participants take leave of each other). We use this process in humans as a framework for examining how various animal species get into, maintain, and get out of play bouts. This comparative approach constitutes an alternative measure of those species’ possession of shared intentionality. Using this framework, we review the play literature on human children and different social species of mammals and birds in search of behavioral markers of shared intentionality in the coordination of play bouts. We discuss how our approach could shed light on the evolution of the special human motivation to cooperate and share psychological states with others.     

Metacognitive regulation contributes to digital text comprehension in E-learning

Metacognition and Learning - This study examined the contribution of self-reported metacognitive regulation of reading to expository digital text comprehension in an e-learning environment,...     

The effects of owner identity and external governance systems on R&D investments: A study of Western European firms

This paper builds on agency and institutional theory to extend the analysis of the effects of ownership and control on R&D investments by considering the influence of different types of ownership and of institutional corporate governance systems. Our empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset of 1000 firms publicly-traded in six European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden and the UK). Controlling for industry- and firm-level effects, our findings show that higher shareholding by families is negatively associated with R&D investment. Moreover, widely-held firms invest less in R&D in the United Kingdom than in Continental European countries, thus suggesting the existence of a greater pressure towards the reduction of R&D in market-based governance systems. The results are robust against possible sample selection biases due to firms’ discretional R&D disclosure.     

Implicit and explicit attitudes towards sport among young elite athletes with high versus low burnout symptoms

The development of cynical attitudes towards elite sport is a core symptom of athlete burnout and has been associated with dropout from elite sport. To date, this phenomenon has mainly been studied by investigating explicit attitudes towards sport, whereas athletes’ automatic evaluations (i.e. implicit attitudes) that have been shown to influence behavior as well were not considered. This study aimed to compare explicit and implicit attitudes towards sport of young elite athletes with high (N = 24) versus low (N = 26) burnout symptoms. Using self-reported measures, general and athlete burnout symptoms were assessed. Additionally, a single-target implicit association test was administered to examine participants’ automatic evaluation of sport. Statistical analysis revealed greater emotional/physical exhaustion and sport devaluation in athletes reporting high compared to low burnout symptoms. Implicit attitudes towards sport did not significantly differ between the groups. Furthermore, no significant correlations were observed between different athlete burnout symptoms and implicit attitudes. Athletes with high burnout symptoms show a tendency to explicitly detach themselves from sport, thus fostering sport devaluation as a core symptom of athlete burnout. However, this process does not seem to be reflected in their implicit attitudes towards sport.     

Late Emergence of the First Possession Heuristic: Evidence From a Small‐Scale Culture

Western preschool children often assign ownership based on first possession and some theorists have proposed that this judgment might be an early emerging, innate bias. Five‐ to 9‐year‐olds (n = 112) from a small‐scale group in Kenya (Kikuyu) watched videotaped interactions of two women passing an object. The object's starting position and the women's gestures were varied. Use of the first possession heuristic increased with age, and 8‐ to 9‐year‐olds performed similarly to German 5‐year‐olds (n = 24). Starting position and gestures had no effect. A control study confirmed that 5‐year‐old Kikuyus (n = 20) understood the video material. The findings reveal that the first possession heuristic follows different developmental trajectories cross‐culturally and stress the role of children's sociocultural environment.     

Transformation of a print reference collection

Prompted by the need to move an aged and sorely neglected print reference collection into a new smaller academic medical library, the Reference Team of the Dana Medical Library at the University of Vermont embarked on a massive project to shrink and revitalize its paper reference collection. Employing a comprehensive and contemporary approach, the project ultimately resulted in a refurbished collection that would more effectively meet the information needs of the 21st century library user. This paper describes the process employed, and the numerous quality improvements to the physical collection, supporting infrastructure, and collection management practices that resulted.     

A triad of Filipino adolescents’ zones of lived experiences of information and communications technology (ICT)

Considering that today’s students feel extremely more comfortable with computers than did earlier generations of students vis-à-vis the notion that, as a social category, they have become one of the most interesting topics in research papers and journals in the field of behavioral and social sciences since the 1950s (Batan 2002), their individual and collective experiences of information and communications technology (ICT) could be expected to create a portrait of accounts that might inform educational policy makers as to how their ICT needs and concerns could be better addressed through a more responsive and a well-defined IT-driven educational platform. The central question that this phenomenological study purported to answer was: “How does a select group of Filipino adolescents collectively experience information and communications technology (ICT)?” Findings of this study revealed that the individual and collective articulations, verbalizations, and musings of the 60 adolescents recruited from two regions in the Philippines exposed three distinct but interrelated conceptual zones of ICT, namely: the zone of technology perspective (ZTP), zone of technology power and efficacy (ZTPE), and zone of technology deficits (ZTD). Implications of the study are also discussed in the paper. “There is a demand for qualitative research with an insider perspective, as young voices appear not to have been sufficiently heard.” (Hauan and Heggli 2002:13)      

Timing with opportunity cost: Concurrent schedules of reinforcement improve peak timing

The temporal generalization gradient produced by the peak-interval (PI) procedure reflects behavior under the control of positive reinforcement for responding after the criterial time, but shows negligible discouragement for early responses. The lack of consequences for premature responding may affect estimates of timing accuracy and precision in the PI procedure. In two experiments, we sought to encourage more accurate timing in pigeons by establishing an opportunity cost for such responding. Concurrent ratio and interval schedules of reinforcement reduced the dispersion of keypecking around the target time. A sequence of three response-rate states (low-high-low) characterized performance in individual trials. Opportunity cost substantially reduced the mean and standard deviation of the duration of the middle-high state that typically enveloped the target time, indicating improved temporal acuity. We suggest a model as a first-order approximation to timing with opportunity cost.