Prenatal Maternal Stress,Child Cortical Thickness,and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms

Prenatal maternal stress predicts subsequent elevations in youth depressive symptoms, but the neural processes associated with these links are unclear. This study evaluated whether prenatal maternal stress is associated with child brain development, and adolescent depressive symptoms using a prospective design with 74 mother child pairs (40 boys). Maternal stress was assessed during pregnancy, child cortical thickness at age 7, and depressive symptoms at age 12. Prenatal maternal stress was associated with less cortical thickness primarily in frontal and temporal regions and with elevated depressive symptoms; child cortical thickness additionally correlated with adolescent depressive symptoms. The observed associations are consistent with the possibility that cortical thickness in superior frontal regions links associations between prenatal maternal stress and adolescent depressive symptoms.     

Preparing the Next Generation of Educational Measurement Specialists: A Call for Programs With an Integrated Scope and Sequence

The field of educational measurement has evolved considerably since the first doctoral programs were established. In response, programs have typically tacked on courses that address newly developed theories, methods, tools, and techniques. As our review of current programs evidences, this approach produces artificial distinctions among topics and techniques that are in fact a tightly coupled whole. This position paper advocates a redesign of the scope and sequence for doctoral programs focused on the preparation of the next generations of educational measurement specialists; a redesign that reflects the full life‐cycle of instrument development and use.     

Analytical attractions and the techno-continuum: Conceptualising data obsessions and consequences in elite sport

The proliferation of sports science and technological innovation within performance settings has precipitated the generation of increasing volumes of data to aid athletes. Copious data production has also perpetuated the privileging of scientific information, and a ‘thirst’ for ‘more data’ as an unproblematic ‘truth’. Of significance is not merely the use of technology for the production of data-for-data's sake, or the utility of data for a greater cause (e.g. the good of the team), but the quest for personalised data for individual athletes to be analysed, and reflected upon ad nauseam. Furthering scholarship on disciplining bodies, we argue that increased technological consumption, and the related excessive quantification of athletes’ bodies via data production, adds further insecurity into performance sports work. Finally, attention is given to the cultural step-change new techno-dispositions may now present.     

Social Pragmatics: Preschoolers Rely on Commonsense Psychology to Resolve Referential Underspecification

Four experiments show that 4- and 5-year-olds (total N = 112) can identify the referent of underdetermined utterances through their Naïve Utility Calculus—an intuitive theory of people’s behavior structured around an assumption that agents maximize utilities. In Experiments 1–2, a puppet asked for help without specifying to whom she was talking (“Can you help me?”). In Experiments 3–4, a puppet asked the child to pass an object without specifying what she wanted (“Can you pass me that one?”). Children’s responses suggest that they considered cost trade-offs between the members in the interaction. These findings add to a body of work showing that reference resolution is informed by commonsense psychology from early in childhood.     

Children's Conceptions of Ownership for Self and Other: Categorical Ownership Versus Strength of Claim

Children are capable of viewing object ownership as categorical and exclusive, but ownership claims can also vary by degree. This study investigated how children use these different conceptions of ownership in a giving and a taking task. In two studies, 4- to 7-year olds (N = 105) could give and take craft objects that they or another child had found (weaker claim) and made (stronger claim). In Study 1, no additional ownership information was given, and in Study 2 categorical ownership was stated (“these belong to you”). The results showed that children used categorical ownership for their own objects but used ownership strength for the other child's objects, taking more of the found items.     

Analysis of single comments left for bioRxiv preprints till September 2019

IntroductionWhile early commenting on studies is seen as one of the advantages of preprints, the type of such comments, and the people who post them, have not been systematically explored.Materials and methodsWe analysed comments posted between 21 May 2015 and 9 September 2019 for 1983 bioRxiv preprints that received only one comment on the bioRxiv website. The comment types were classified by three coders independently, with all differences resolved by consensus.ResultsOur analysis showed that 69% of comments were posted by non-authors (N = 1366), and 31% by the preprints’ authors themselves (N = 617). Twelve percent of non-author comments (N = 168) were full review reports traditionally found during journal review, while the rest most commonly contained praises (N = 577, 42%), suggestions (N = 399, 29%), or criticisms (N = 226, 17%). Authors’ comments most commonly contained publication status updates (N = 354, 57%), additional study information (N = 158, 26%), or solicited feedback for the preprints (N = 65, 11%).ConclusionsOur results indicate that comments posted for bioRxiv preprints may have potential benefits for both the public and the scholarly community. Further research is needed to measure the direct impact of these comments on comments made by journal peer reviewers, subsequent preprint versions or journal publications.     

Diana S. Greenwald: Painting by numbers—data-driven histories of nineteenth-century art,Princeton University Press, 2021

Journal of Cultural Economics -     

Positioning participation in the NGSS era: What counts as success?

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) strives to shift science learning from the teacher as a single cognitive agent, to a classroom community in which participants are working together in directing the classroom's communal knowledge to figure out questions about how phenomena occur, and building, testing, and refining their ideas to address those questions. To achieve this type of classroom environment, teachers should attend to students' knowledge and ideas and pay attention to how students are located within teacher-led interactions, such as being positioned as active discussants or designated listeners. In this study, we explore if and how this is occurring in the NGSS era. We used a naturalistic inquiry to explore how an experienced first-grade teacher used a new NGSS-aligned unit that called for students to use the science and engineering practices (SEP) to build content knowledge. We used a macro-analytic lens to answer the research question “how are class discussions shaped to address the SEP”? We used a micro-analytic lens to answer the research question “how are students positioned during these science discussions in this classroom?” Evidence suggests that the teachers' whole class discussions incorporated and involved the SEP which were specified in the unit lessons for content learning. However, on a micro-analytic level, we found that few students were positioned as active discussants. The teacher heavily relied on those students who could provide succinct and clearly relevant answers while positioning the remainder of the students as silent spectators. Implications from this research suggest that not only new NGSS curriculum materials need to focus on what students should know and do but they also need to address heuristics for teachers that show them how to position all of their students as active doers of science so all students have opportunities to build deeper, core science knowledge.     

Maternal Reminiscing and Autobiographical Memory Features of Mother–Child Dyads in a Cross-Cultural Context

Maternal reminiscing styles and mother–child memory features were examined in a cross-cultural context. Fifty-five Chinese (Guangzhou, China) and 48 Australian (Melbourne, Australia) mother–child dyads (child age: 3–6 years) independently retrieved autobiographical memories and jointly discussed past events. Australian mothers used greater elaborative and supportive reminiscing and provided more specific memories than Chinese mothers. Australian children provided greater memory elaboration than Chinese children, but they did not differ in memory specificity. Maternal reminiscing styles and cultural group were independently predictive of child memory elaboration but not specificity. Nonetheless, moderation analyses showed that the two maternal reminiscing styles (elaborative and supportive) interacted to predict child memory specificity. These findings indicate the importance of culture and types of reminiscing on memory development.