International research guidance has shifted towards an increasingly proactive inclusion of children and adolescents in health research in recognition of the need for more evidence-based treatment. Strong calls have been made for the active involvement of children and adolescents in developing research proposals and policies, including in decision-making about research participation. Much evidence and debate on this topic has focused on high-income settings, while the greatest health burdens and research gaps occur in low-middle income countries, (...) highlighting the need to take account of voices from more diverse contexts. Between January and March 2014, 56 community representatives and secondary school students were involved in eight group discussions to explore views on the acceptability of involving children and adolescents in research, and how these groups should be involved in decision-making about their own participation. Discussions were voice-recorded and transcriptions analyzed using Framework Analysis, combining deductive and inductive approaches. Across these discussions, the idea of involving children and adolescents in decision-making about research participation was strongly supported given similar levels of responsibility carried in everyday life; existing capacity that should be recognized; the opportunity for learning involved; varying levels of parental control; and generational shifts towards greater understanding of science for adolescents than their parents. Joint decision-making processes were supported for older children and adolescents, with parental control influenced by perceptions of the risks involved in participation. Moves towards more active involvement of children and adolescents in planning studies and in making decisions about their participation are supported by these findings from Kenya. Important emerging considerations include the need to take account of the nature of proposed studies and prevailing attitudes and understanding of research in identifying children’s and adolescents’ roles. More research is needed to expand diversity and develop approaches to joint assent and consent processes that would fairly represent children’s and adolescents’ wishes and interests, towards their long term benefit. (shrink)

This essay introduces this special issue on virtue ethics in relation to military AI. It describes the current situation of military AI ethics as following that of AI ethics in general, caught between consequentialism and deontology. Virtue ethics serves as an alternative that can address some of the weaknesses of these dominant forms of ethics. The essay describes how the articles in the issue exemplify the value of virtue-related approaches for these questions, before ending with thoughts for further research.

Forty-five children between the ages of nine and twelve years, who were forced to flee their native Sudan and seek refuge in Egypt, were interviewed about their everyday life in Cairo. Phenomenological analyses of the transcripts revealed the physical, social and technological dimensions to their encounter with a new cultural world. The interviews also revealed the extent to which the children had to face racism, discrimination and social exclusion. Specific analyses of children’s difficulties in learning a new form of (...) Arabic and their involvement in play and games indicated that a refugee child develops his or her self-identity as a stranger by reflecting on particular confrontations with the new environment. Finally, comparative analyses across age groups led to the construction of a phenomenological-developmental model of the child refugee. Both the model and the findings are discussed in the context of Alfred Schutz’s (1964a) essay The Stranger, George Herbert Mead’s (1967) communicative model of the self and Binnie Kristal-Andersson’s (2000) psychological framework for understanding migration. (shrink)

Over the last three decades, an escalating portion of U.S. school children has been classified for special education; those with diagnoses entitled to services now number 15 percent of all public school pupils. At the same time, American scientists have focused increasingly on juvenile brains, studying what one psychiatric epidemiologist labeled ‘‘social incapacities.’’ This article reports on the laboratory labors of two scientific groups: neuroscientists who scan children’s brains in search of resting state differences according to diagnosis and psychiatric epidemiologists (...) who look to epigenetics to distinguish differential diagnostic populations. The article focuses on the medicalization of childhood differences and the harmonies and discordances between what researchers and parents understand to be at the root of children’s learning and social capacities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From Children's Perspectives:A Model of Aesthetic Processing in TheatreJeanne Klein (bio)Since the children's theatre movement began, producers have sought to create artistic theatre experiences that best correspond to the adult-constructed aesthetic "needs" of young audiences by categorizing common differences according to age groups. For decades, directors simply chose plays on the basis of dramatic genres (e.g., fairy tales), as defined by children's presupposed interests or "tastes," by subscribing to (...) Winifred Ward's broad descriptions of the "imaginative period" (ages six to nine), the "heroic period" (ages nine to twelve), and the "romantic period" (over age thirteen).1 Years later, Moses Goldberg elaborated upon these generalized divisions while cautioning that "no individual fits exactly into any set of categories."2 In his position paper on aesthetic development, he argued for individual access to aesthetic techniques, processes, and products for all ages, paralleled by four stages of cognitive capabilities, based on exposure to (1) arena-style participation theatre (for ages five to eight), which emphasizes story enactments; (2) a wide range of proscenium-style theatrical conventions; (3) relevant play content that directly relates characters' problems to spectators' lives and growing self-awareness; and (4) social issue plays that pose ethical dilemmas as cultural reflections.3 Meanwhile, Jed Davis compiled Age Group Profiles, organized by cognitive, spatial, emotional, and moral/ethical development, from his review of Piagetian literature; and Johnny Saldaña summarized stages of young interpretations of theatre from his seven-year longitudinal study.4Suffice it to say, the field of developmental psychology has come a long way since Piaget formulated his four constructivist stages. Since the mid-1950s, the cognitive revolution has spurred more integrated theories of information processing and depth-of-processing models that explain and predict how people construct schematic frameworks of knowledge and [End Page 40] assimilate and accommodate new information as a function of perception, attention, emotion, comprehension, memory, and social and moral behaviors. Although masculinist metaphors of hierarchical "staircases" and linear networks of associative learning still dominate computational models, feminist perspectives, which engender social cognitive, co-relational negotiations of narratives in situated contexts, have gained more widespread acceptance—by including theatre as an apt metaphor for development.5 Over the past twenty years or more, cognitive psychologists have finally discovered what dramatic theorists have known about narrative structures since Aristotle's Poetics: Powerful stories contain universal themes about the human condition through characters' conflicting actions. The most successful dramas are those that allow spectators to enter into a protagonist's psychological consciousness or "inner" vision in order to empathize with her "outer" reality.6While several developmental models of aesthetic understanding, experience, and appreciation exist in the realms of visual art and music education, few examples have been proposed in regard to theatre, particularly for child audiences.7 Instead, producers of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) tend to romanticize its social and moral "effects" upon youth by believing passionately that viewing one remarkable performance has the potential (the operative word) to "cause" positive, social changes in children's minds, hearts, and behaviors, given the presumed "power of human imagination."8 This obsession with progressive change foregrounds adults' desires to control human destiny by predicting "causes and effects" located in children's responses to live performances. However, this "folk theory" fails to explain how young imaginations actually function aesthetically from the contextual evidence of reception studies with child audiences. Just as feminists have argued for a distinctive "feminist aesthetics," based on women's alternative ways of knowing,9 I argue that children gaze upon theatre in differential ways by including age as a variable factor. "Children's aesthetics," their perceived interpretations of theatre, differ from that of adults' theorized postulations, based in part on their shorter life experiences with this medium. To this end, over the course of my career, I have sought to understand theatre from children's perspectives by focusing my research in the social cognitive theories and social science methods of child development, primarily through the vast literature of television and mass media studies conducted with young people over the past forty years. In particular, medium-specific studies that parse theatrical forms from dramatic content... (shrink)

Teaching students to ask and answer questions is critically important if they are to engage in reasoned argumentation, problem-solving, and learning. This study involved 35 groups of grade 6 children from 18 classrooms in three conditions (cognitive questioning condition, community of inquiry condition, and the comparison condition) who were videotaped as they worked on specific inquiry-based science tasks. The study also involved the teachers in these classrooms who were audio-taped as they interacted with the children during these tasks. (...) The results show that while there were no significant differences in the children's explanatory behaviour across the two time periods, there were significant differences in the total verbal interactions between the children in the cognitive questioning condition and their peers in the community of inquiry and comparison conditions. Furthermore, the children in the cognitive questioning condition obtained higher reasoning and problem-solving scores than peers in the other conditions. Interestingly, while there were no significant differences between the teachers’ basic and extended mediating behaviours in the three conditions at Times 1 and 2, there was a significant difference in extended mediation behaviours with the teachers demonstrating nearly three times more extended mediation to promote students’ learning at Time 2 than they did at Time 1. Teacher intervention in providing guidance in how to interact during cooperative, inquiry-based science appears to be critical to helping students engage in higher-level thinking and learning. (shrink)

Informal science learning sites create opportunities for children to learn about science outside of the classroom. This study analyzed children’s learning behaviors in ISLS using video recordings of family visits to a zoo, children’s museum, or aquarium. Furthermore, parent behaviors, features of the exhibits and the presence of an educator were also examined in relation to children’s behaviors. Participants included 63 children and 44 parents in 31 family groups. Results showed that parents’ science questions and (...) explanations were positively related to children observing the exhibit. Parents’ science explanations were also negatively related to children’s science explanations. Furthermore, children were more likely to provide science explanations when the exhibit was not interactive. Lastly there were no differences in children’s behaviors based on whether an educator was present at the exhibit. This study provides further evidence that children’s interactions with others and their environment are important for children’s learning behaviors. (shrink)

In this essay, Amy Voss Farris and Pratim Sengupta argue that a democratic approach to children's computing education in a science class must focus on the aesthetics of children's experience. In Democracy and Education, Dewey links “democracy” with a distinctive understanding of “experience.” For Dewey, the value of educational experiences lies in “the unity or integrity of experience.” In Art as Experience, Dewey presents aesthetic experience as the fundamental form of human experience that undergirds all other forms of experiences (...) and that can bring together multiple forms of experiences, locating this form of experience in the work of artists. Particularly relevant to the focus of this essay, computational literacy, Dewey calls the process through which a person transforms a material into an expressive medium an aesthetic experience. Farris and Sengupta argue that the kind of experience that is appropriate for a democratic education in the context of children's computational science is essentially aesthetic in nature. Given that aesthetics has received relatively little attention in STEM education research, the authors' purpose here is to highlight the power of Deweyan aesthetic experience in making computational thinking available and attractive to all children, including those who are disinterested in computing, and especially those who are likely to be discounted by virtue of location, gender, or race. (shrink)

Women are drastically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and this underrepresentation has been linked to gender stereotypes and ability related beliefs. One way to remedy this may be to challenge male bias gender stereotypes around STEM by cultivating equitable beliefs that both female and male can excel in STEM. The present study implemented a growth mindset intervention to promote children’s incremental ability beliefs and investigate the relation between the intervention and children’s gender stereotypes in an informal (...) class='Hi'>science learning site. Participants were visitors to a science museum who took part in an interactive space science show. Participants who were exposed to a growth mindset intervention, compared to the participants in the control condition, reported significantly less gender stereotyping around STEM by reporting equitably in the stereotype awareness measure. Relatedly, participants in the control condition reported male bias gender stereotype in the stereotype awareness measure. Further, children between 5 and 8-years-old reported greater male bias stereotypes awareness and stereotype flexibility in space science compared to children between 9 and 12-years-old. Lastly, children demonstrated in-group bias in STEM ability. Male participants reported gender bias favoring males’ ability in stereotype flexibility and awareness measures, while female participants reported bias toward females’ ability in stereotype flexibility and awareness measures. These findings document the importance of a growth mindset intervention in buffering against STEM gender stereotyping amongst children, as well as the significant role a growth mindset intervention can play within an informal science learning site. (shrink)

This study proposed a children’s digital art ability training system with artificial intelligence-assisted learning, which was designed to achieve the goal of improving children’s drawing ability. AI technology was introduced for outline recognition, hue color matching, and color ratio calculation to machine train students’ cognition of chromatics, and smart glasses were used to view actual augmented reality paintings to enhance the effectiveness of improving elementary school students’ imagination and painting performance through the diversified stimulation of colors. This study adopted (...) the quasi-experimental research method and designs the pre-test and post-test for different groups. The research subjects are the Grade 4 students of an elementary school in Taitung City, Taiwan. The test tools included an imagination test and an evaluation of painting performance ability. The test results of a total of 30 students before and after the experiment included the experimental group that received the children’s digital art ability training system with AI-assisted learning and 30 students in the control group that had not received the teaching were analyzed by covariance. These results were supplemented by the description and interpretation of student feedback, teachers’ reflection notes, and other qualitative data to understand the performance of the students in the experimental group in terms of imagination and painting performance. (shrink)

The present study investigates how laughter features in the everyday lives of 3-5-year old children in Swedish preschools. It examines and discusses typical laughter patterns and their functions with a particular focus on children’s and intergenerational (child-adult/educator) laughter in early education context. The research questions concern: who laughs with whom; how do adults respond to children’s laughter, and what characterizes the social situations in which laughter is used and reciprocated. Theoretically, the study answers the call for sociocultural approaches that (...) contextualize children’s everyday social interaction, e.g., in different institutions or homes, to study the diverse conditions society forms for learning, sociality and socialization and development of shared norms. Methodologically, the study makes use of mixed methods: it uses descriptive statistics that identify prevalent patterns in laughter practices and, on the basis of these results, examines social-interactional situations of children’s laughter in detail. It was found that children’s laughter tended to be directed to children and adults’ laughter tended to be directed to adults. 87% of children’s laughter was directed to other children, and adults directed their laughter to other adults 2,7 times as often as to children. The qualitative interaction analysis shows that children and adults exhibited different patterns of laughter. Children primarily sought and received affiliation through laughter in the peer group, and the adults were often focused on the institutional and educational goals of the preschool. Overall, the study shows that intergenerational reciprocal laughter was a rare occurrence and suggests that laughter between generations is interesting in that it can be seen as indicative of how children and adults handle alterity in their everyday life. By deploying multiple methods, the present study points to the importance of viewing emotion and norm sharedness in social interaction not just as a matter of communicating an emotion from one person to another, but as an intricate process of inviting the others into or negotiating the common emotional and experiential ground. (shrink)

One significant experience in children's early life is watching cartoons. This activity has a significant impact on a variety of variables, including kids' behavioral and cognitive development. This study focuses on school-age children, namely those in the 4–13 age range. This study focuses on the effects of the Violence-Oriented Cartoons channel on children's entire development, including language, motor, social learning, social cognitive, and moral development. 500 samples from various ages of children’s Group A and Group B were (...) gathered for this investigation. This study aims to investigate the behavioral and emotional effects of exposure to violence-oriented cartoons on children. In particular, it aims to evaluate the effects of this type of social behavior, aggressiveness levels, attention span, emotional reactions, and the desensitization of violence in comparison to nonviolent cartoons. Using a sample of 500 children, 200 were exposed to non-violence-oriented cartoons and 300 were exposed to violence-oriented cartoons. The study used two groups. The study highlights that children who watched violent cartoons showed significantly higher levels of aggression, lower social behavior, shorter attention spans, increased desensitization, and stronger negative emotional responses than children who watched nonviolent cartoons. Study finds the importance of careful consideration of children's media content and suggests the potential benefits of limiting exposure to violent imagery in cartoons. (shrink)

The authors study how an aerosol technology research group constructed a research agenda for itself and how its activity was changed in the process. The group's research agenda was heterogeneous, comprising several research areas in which the knowledge of aerosols was applied in different industrial contexts. The authors analyze the development of one of these areas, the research on the production of ultrafine particles from 1992 to 1997, employing the concept of mediated activity (...) that has been developed in the cultural-historical theory of activity. In the analysis, the activity is seen as the coevolution of the subject, the means, and the research object and the networks of collaboration with other activities. The applications developed in the collaborative networks significantly influence the identity and learning of the researchers, the construction of tools and instruments, and the selection of the phenomena to be studied. (shrink)

Information communication technology is spreading fast and wide. Driven by convenience, it enables people to undertake personal tasks and make decisions more easily and efficiently. Convenience enjoys an air of liberation as well as self-expression affecting all areas of life. The industry for children's toys is a major economic market becoming ever more tech-related and drawn into the battle for convenience. Like any other tech-related industry, this battle is about industry dominance and, currently, that involves networked toys. Networked toys aim (...) to enhance convenience for children and parents alike. Increasingly difficult to resist, these convenient networked devices are also a societal game changer. Neatly nestled in a lacuna juris and surrounded by a lack of clinical evidence, networked toys raise complex ethical issues concerning human development. This article lays bare the regulatory nexus for networked toys and invites ethical thinking to fill the gap to ensure sufficient protection for all human developmental stages. Networked toys not only affect but also might interfere with child development. Therefore, the article initially summarises the four key psychological stages through which the neurological development of the human brain processes. Each of these stages involves vital windows for human development in cognitive, emotional and social dimensions. Missing any of these developmental windows changes an individual human for life. The article then takes a look at the two main legal frameworks protecting the stages of human development which are applicable to networked toys: First, the examination of the human rights framework with its major segments emanating from the fundamental rights to privacy for family and home, to a child's education as well as to personal data reveals the use of current networked toys as a shielded part of parenting which tends to be at odds with privacy and data protection requirements. Second, the product liability framework for toy manufacturers requires evidence-based causality for putting a child's safety at risk. Unfortunately, these legal frameworks fail to offer sufficient protection of the human developmental stages. There is a lacuna juris. Although networked toys involve the risk of negatively impacting human development in every dimension, clinical psychological studies are impossible to acquire as court evidence for product liability because they take too long to provide reliable data while exposing several generations of children to the examined risk in the process. Meanwhile the temptation of convenience continues to drive the industry and consumers of networked toys and devices, which are already impacting children of all age groups. Accepting this phenomenon as an element of cognitive dissonance in society and in science falls far short of an appropriate ethical balance. The need for creating such an ethical balance concerning networked toys is all the more imperative because even if the networked toy industry managed to eliminate all psychological risks for human development and every legal conflict with privacy and security, significant ethical and societal risks of networked toys remain due to inevitable technological bias. Against these mounting changes, it is suggested that only an ethical approach of interdisciplinary research and learning seems most promising to develop an appropriate equilibrium between the complex challenges posed by networked toys and the societal values at stake. (shrink)

One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed that iconicity in the early lexicon may serve to help children learn how to learn words, supporting the acquisition of even noniconic, or arbitrary, word–referent associations. However, this proposal remains untested. Here, we investigate the iconicity of caregivers’ speech to young children during a naturalistic free‐play session with novel stimuli and ask whether the iconicity of caregivers’ (...) speech facilitates children's learning of the noniconic novel names of those stimuli. Thirty‐four 1.5‐2‐year‐olds (19 girls; half monolingual English learners and half bilingual English‐Spanish learners) participated in a naturalistic free‐play task with their caregivers followed by a test of word‐referent retention. We found that caregivers’ use of iconicity, particularly in utterances in which they named the novel stimuli, was associated with the likelihood that children learned that novel name. This result held even when controlling for other factors associated with word learning, such as the concreteness and frequency of words in caregiver speech. Together, the results demonstrate that iconicity not only can serve to help children identify the referent of novel words (as in previous research) but can also support their ability to retain even noniconic word‐referent mappings. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that children can infer causal relations from patterns of events. However, what appear to be cases of causal inference may simply reduce to children recognizing relevant associations among events, and responding based on those associations. To examine this claim, in Experiments 1 and 2, children were introduced to a “blicket detector”, a machine that lit up and played music when certain objects were placed upon it. Children observed patterns of contingency between objects and the machine’s activation (...) that required them to use indirect evidence to make causal inferences. Critically, associative models either made no predictions, or made incorrect predictions about these inferences. In general, children were able to make these inferences, but some developmental differences between 3- and 4- year-olds were found. We suggest that children’s causal inferences are not based on recognizing associations, but rather that children develop a mechanism for Bayesian structure learning. Experiment 3 explicitly tests a prediction of this account. Children were asked to make an inference about ambiguous data based on the base-rate of certain events occurring. Fouryear-olds, but not 3-year-olds were able to make this inference. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that children can infer causal relations from patterns of events. However, what appear to be cases of causal inference may simply reduce to children recognizing relevant associations among events, and responding based on those associations. To examine this claim, in Experiments 1 and 2, children were introduced to a “blicket detector,” a machine that lit up and played music when certain objects were placed upon it. Children observed patterns of contingency between objects and the machine's activation (...) that required them to use indirect evidence to make causal inferences. Critically, associative models either made no predictions, or made incorrect predictions about these inferences. In general, children were able to make these inferences, but some developmental differences between 3- and 4-year-olds were found. We suggest that children's causal inferences are not based on recognizing associations, but rather that children develop a mechanism for Bayesian structure learning. Experiment 3 explicitly tests a prediction of this account. Children were asked to make an inference about ambiguous data based on the base rate of certain events occurring. Four-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds were able to make this inference. (shrink)

To help infer the meanings of novel words, children frequently capitalize on their current linguistic knowledge to constrain the hypothesis space. Children's syntactic knowledge of function words has been shown to be especially useful in helping to infer the meanings of novel words, with most previous research focusing on how children use preceding determiners and pronouns/auxiliary to infer whether a novel word refers to an entity or an action, respectively. In the current visual world experiment, we examined whether 28‐ (...) to 32‐month‐olds could exploit their lexical semantic knowledge of an additional class of function words—prepositions—to learn novel nouns. During the experiment, children were tested on their ability to use the prepositions in, on, under, and next to to identify novel creatures displayed on a screen (e.g., The wug is on the table), as well as their ability to later identify the creature without accompanying prepositions (e.g., Look at the wug). Children overall demonstrated understanding of all the prepositions but next to and were able to use their knowledge of prepositions to learn the associations between novel words and their intended referents, as shown by greater‐than chance looks to the target referent when no prepositional phrase was provided. (shrink)

This book presents a new theory of how children acquire language and discusses its implications for a wide range of topics. It explores the roles of innateness and experience in language acquisition, provides further evidence for the theory of Universal Grammar, and shows how linguistic development in children is a driving force behind language shifts and changes.Charles Yang surveys a wide range of errors in children's language and identifies overlooked patterns. He combines these with work in biological evolution in order (...) to develop a model of language acquisition by which to understand the interaction between children's internal linguistic knowledge and their external linguistic experience. He then presents evidence from his own and others' research in the acquisition of syntax and morphology and data from historical language change to test its validity. The model is the first to make quantitative and cross-linguistic predictions about child language. It may also be deployed as a predictive model of language change which, when the evidence is available, could explain why grammars change in a particular direction at a particular time.Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language is a pioneering work at the centre of current concerns in linguistics and cognitive science. It will interest all those concerned to understand and explain language acquisition, Universal Grammar, and language change. (shrink)

This book offers current international initiatives, developed for working with children from "Birth to Eight" by a diverse group of noted professional authors. Their readings present an overview of early education as it evolved from the Froebelian kindergarten to today's practices in various Early Education settings around the globe. The international voices of the authors represent a balanced perspective of happenings in various nations and lend a conversational approach to each chapter. The chapters analyze the Universal Preschool Education movement (...) promoted by various countries, states, and agencies; examine model curriculum programs in a variety of teaching/learning settings; and identify directions the community can take in promoting effective early education programs. Particular attention is given to key issues and concerns faced by practitioners and families world-wide. Studies reveal successful approaches to bilingual education in a Chilean kindergarten, research findings on gender differences in primary school girls for learning science in Wales, literacy development strategies for teaching in UK multicultural classrooms and childhood centres, the process of integration special education with early childhood practices in China, and exemplars of community outreach to improve the well being of children through advocacy for governmental changes in early education policies and professional development. This book is for everyone interested in the well being of young children moving forward in a global age to meet the challenges of early citizenship in their world. (shrink)

Picture books are an important source of new language, concepts, and lessons for young children. A large body of research has documented the nature of parent-child interactions during shared book reading. A new body of research has begun to investigate the features of picture books that support children's learning and transfer of that information to the real world. In this paper, we discuss how children's symbolic development, analogical reasoning, and reasoning about fantasy may constrain their ability to (...) take away content information from picture books. We then review the nascent body of findings that has focused on the impact of picture book features on children's learning and transfer of words and letters, science concepts, problem solutions, and morals from picture books. In each domain of learning we discuss how children's development may interact with book features to impact their learning. We conclude that children's ability to learn and transfer content from picture books can be disrupted by some book features and research should directly examine the interaction between children's developing abilities and book characteristics on children's learning. (shrink)

Existing evidence suggests that children from around the age of 8 years strategically alter their public image in accordance with known values and preferences of peers, through the self-descriptive information they convey. However, an important but neglected aspect of this 'self-presentation' is the medium through which such information is communicated: the voice itself. The present study explored peer audience effects on children's vocal productions. Fifty-six children (26 females, aged 8-10 years) were presented with vignettes where a fictional child, matched to (...) the participant's age and sex, is trying to make friends with a group of same-sex peers with stereotypically masculine or feminine interests (rugby and ballet, respectively). Participants were asked to impersonate the child in that situation and, as the child, to read out loud masculine, feminine and gender-neutral self-descriptive statements to these hypothetical audiences. They also had to decide which of those self-descriptive statements would be most helpful for making friends. In line with previous research, boys and girls preferentially selected masculine or feminine self-descriptive statements depending on the audience interests. Crucially, acoustic analyses of fundamental frequency and formant frequency spacing revealed that children also spontaneously altered their vocal productions: they feminized their voices when speaking to members of the ballet club, while they masculinized their voices when speaking to members of the rugby club. Both sexes also feminized their voices when uttering feminine sentences, compared to when uttering masculine and gender-neutral sentences. Implications for the hitherto neglected role of acoustic qualities of children's vocal behaviour in peer interactions are discussed. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)'. (shrink)

School-aged children often participate in school field trips, summer camps or visits at informal learning institutions like zoos and museums. However, relatively little is known about children’s memory and learning from these experiences, what types of event details and facts are retained, how retention varies across age, and whether different patterns are observed for different types of experiences. We aimed to answer these questions through a partnership with a local zoo. Four- to 10-year-old children participated in a weeklong (...) summer camp, during which they engaged in dynamic events, including visits to zoo animals. On the last day of camp, we elicited autobiographical event narratives for two types of experiences: a child-selected animal event and an experimenter-selected animal event. We coded event narratives for length and breadth using previously used autobiographical memory narrative coding schemes. In addition, we created a coding scheme to examine retention of semantic information. We report the types of autobiographical event details and facts children recalled in their narratives, as well as age group differences that were found to vary depending on the type of information and type of event. Through this naturalistic, yet controlled, study we gain insights into how children remember and learn through hands-on activities and exploration in this engaging and dynamic environment. We discuss how our results provide novel information that can be used by informal learning institutions to promote children’s memory and retention of science facts. (shrink)

Prior evidence has shown that children’s understanding of balance proceeds through stages. Children go from a stage where they lack a consistent theory ( No Theory ), to becoming Center Theorists at around age 6 (believing that all objects balance in their geometric center), to Mass Theorists at around age 8, when they begin to consider the distribution of objects’ mass. In this study we adapted prior testing paradigms to examine 5-year-olds’ understanding of balance and compared children’s learning about (...) balance from evidence presented through primary sources (a guided activity) or secondary sources (picture books). Most of the research on young children’s understanding of balance has been conducted using a single object, weighted either proportionally (symmetrical object) or disproportionally (asymmetrical object). In this study, instead of using a single object, 5-year-olds ( N = 102) were shown 4 pairs of objects, two with the same weight and two with different weight. Children were told to place the objects on a beam where they thought they would balance. We found evidence for an intermediate level of understanding. Transition Theorists represent children who have two distinct theories, one for balancing same weight objects, and one for balancing different weight objects, but one of these theories is incorrect. Following the assessment of children’s understanding, we compared their learning about balance from evidence that was either presented through primary sources (a guided activity) or secondary sources (picture books). Children learn equally well from both sources of evidence. Findings are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

This ground-breaking textbook focuses on the use of play techniques and games to facilitate the positive behavioral, social, and emotional development of children with and without special needs. The chapters in this book center on the use of games and play to facilitate emotional expression, develop friendships and encourage appropriate behaviors in community contexts, such as schools, that are critical to children's adaptation in the world. For example, there are chapters explaining the importance of playground interactions for children, role play (...) to develop social skills and learn to express emotions, games to facilitate appropriate behavior and prosocial development in the classroom, and play as an outlet for the expression of emotion and development of children with special needs, including medical and mental health conditions. Readers will learn skills for coaching positive behaviors in individual and group settings, and will learn strategies to enhance social skills and help children develop emotionally in a variety of contexts (e.g., classrooms) and circumstances (e.g., having chronic illnesses or coping with mental health issues that make social engagement more challenging). Important "take-home" messages and critical techniques for fostering children's skills will be presented, and the engaging material presented in the chapters will facilitate knowledge of what to do and how to improve children's social and emotional development through play techniques and games. -- Back cover. (shrink)

Learning to accept and understand our identity as inhabitants of planet Earth is an essential aspect of living sustainably in a global community with others. What is involved in learning, that despite what divides us, we are first and foremost Earthlings and that the well-being of our planetary home is in our collective hands? What are the cognitive features of concepts that are inherent to thinking like an Earthling? This article considers themes that arise from research that (...) inform what is involved in developing a collective, planetary perspective as it relates to engaging in environmental sustainability. It samples research on how young people understand and reason about agency—their own and that of others—and about the relationship between individual and collective action. It considers the importance of recognizing and engaging with diverse perspectives on agency and collectivity as well as being able to adopt the perspectives of those in different roles and positions. While many of the concepts that are inherent to thinking as part of a collective community of Earthlings are challenging, many are also learnable and represent important instructional targets for helping the next generation to understand how to live together in sustainable ways on a small and finite planet. (shrink)

Decades of research have established that learners benefit when instruction includes hand gestures. This benefit is seen when learners watch an instructor gesture, as well as when they are taught or encouraged to gesture themselves. However, there is substantial individual variability with respect to this phenomenon—not all individuals benefit equally from gesture instruction. In the current paper, we explore the sources of this variability. First, we review the existing research on individual differences that do or do not predict (...) learning from gesture instruction, including differences that are either context-dependent (linked to the particular task at hand) or context-independent (linked to the learner across multiple tasks). Next, we focus on one understudied measure of individual difference: the learner's own spontaneous gesture rate. We present data showing rates of “non-gesturers” across a number of studies and we provide theoretical motivation for why this is a fruitful area for future research. We end by suggesting ways in which research on individual differences will help gesture researchers to further refine existing theories and develop specific predictions about targeted gesture intervention for all kinds of learners. (shrink)

This grounded study investigated the negotiation of authorship by faculty members, graduate student mentors, and their undergraduate protégés in undergraduate research experiences at a private research university in the northeastern United States. Semi-structured interviews using complementary scripts were conducted separately with 42 participants over a 3 year period to probe their knowledge and understanding of responsible authorship and publication practices and learn how faculty and students entered into authorship decision-making intended to lead to the publication of peer-reviewed technical (...) papers. Herein the theoretical model for the negotiation of authorship developed through the analysis of these interviews is reported. The model identifies critical causal and intervening conditions responsible for the coping strategies faculty and students employ, which, in our study, appear to often produce unfortunate consequences for all involved. The undergraduate student researchers and their graduate student mentors interviewed in this study exhibited a limited understanding of authorship and the requirements for authorship in their research groups. The power differential between faculty and students, the students’ limited epistemic development, the busy-ness of the faculty, and the faculty’s failure to prioritize authorship have been identified as key factors inhibiting both undergraduate and graduate students from developing a deeper understanding of responsible authorship and publication practices. Implications for graduate education and undergraduate research are discussed, and strategies for helping all students to develop a deeper understanding of authorship are identified. (shrink)

Despite advances in theory, often driven by feminist ethicists, research ethics struggles in practice to adequately account for and respond to the agency and autonomy of people considered vulnerable in the research context. We argue that shifts within feminist research ethics scholarship to better characterise and respond to autonomy and agency can be bolstered by further grounding in discourses from the social sciences, in work that confirms the complex nature of human agency in contexts of structural and (...) other sources of vulnerability. We discuss some of the core concepts and critiques emerging from the literature on women and children's agency in under‐resourced settings, highlighting calls to move from individualistic to relational models of agency, and to recognise the ambiguous, value‐laden, and heterogeneous nature of the concept. We then draw out what these conceptual shifts might mean for research ethics obligations and guidance, illustrating our analysis using a case vignette based on research ethics work conducted in South Africa. We conclude that if research practices are to be supportive of agency, it will be crucial to scrutinise the moral judgements which underpin accounts of agency, derive more situated definitions of and responses to agency, and enable people and participants to influence these based on their own experiences and self‐perceptions. (shrink)

Children’s learning often happens in the interactions with more knowledgeable members of the society, frequently parents, as stated by the sociocultural theory. Parent-child conversations provide children with a new understanding and foster knowledge development, especially in informal learning contexts. However, the family conversations in museums and science centers can be contingent on the motivation for the family visit or the activities organized on the spot. In order to establish how family motivation and on-the-spot activities influence children’s informal (...) learning experience, the present study was carried out in a family science center. The study focused on children’s learning experience in a hands-on exhibit featuring objects that allow for the exploration of the concepts of sound waves and light. Thirty-nine 7–10-year-old children and their families participated in the study. Twenty families received a worksheet to prompt an experimentation activity with one of the light exhibits. Motivation for the family visit was probed at the end of the visit. The target children of the families wore a GoPro HERO 5 camera attached to a chest harness throughout their visit. The video was coded for family interaction and experimentation with the light exhibit. Family conversations were coded for open-ended questions, responses to open-ended questions, explanations, associations, attention directing, and reading signage aloud. Family motivation for the visit was related to the quality of family conversation during the visit. The experimentation activity prompt did not affect the likelihood of noticing and engaging with the particular exhibit. At the same time, it did affect the quality of engagement: children who received the experimentation activity prompt were more likely to explore the effects the exhibit provided and experiment rather than play with the exhibit. Family motivation and on-the-spot activities are discussed as two possible factors to influence children’s learning experience in science centers. (shrink)

Understanding the day/night cycle requires integrating observations of the sky (an Earth-based perspective) with scientific models of the solar system (a space-based perspective). Yet children often fail to make the right connections and resort to non-scientific intuitions – for example, the Sun moving up and down – to explain what they observe. The present research explored whether children’s gestures indicate their conceptual integration of Earth- and space-based perspectives. We coded the spontaneous gestures of 85 third-grade children in U.S. public (...) schools (Mage = 8.87 years) as they verbally explained the overall cause of the day/night cycle, the cause of sunrise, and the cause of sunset after receiving science instruction as part of a prior study. We focused on two kinds of gestures: those reflecting the Sun’s motion across the sky and those reflecting the Earth’s axial rotation. We found that participants were more likely to produce Earth rotation gestures for a topic they explained more accurately (the overall cause of the day/night cycle), whereas Sun motion gestures were more common for topics they explained less accurately (the causes of sunrise and sunset). Further, participants who produced rotation gestures tended to provide more accurate verbal explanations of the overall cause. We discuss how gestures could be used to measure – and possibly improve – children’s conceptual understanding and why sunrise and sunset may be particularly difficult topics to learn. (shrink)

Within anthropology, as elsewhere in the human sciences, there is a tendency to divide knowledge making into two separate poles: conceptual (theory) vs. empirical (ethnography). In Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be, Dominic Boyer, James D. Faubion, and George E. Marcus argue that we need to take a step back from the assumption that we know what theory is to investigate how theory—a matter of concepts, of analytic practice, of medium of value, of professional ideology—operates in anthropology (...) and related fields today. They have assembled a distinguished group of scholars to diagnose the state of the theory-ethnography divide in anthropology today and to explore alternative modes of analytical and pedagogical practice. Continuing the methodological insights provided in Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be, the contributors to this volume find that now is an optimal time to reflect on the status of theory in relation to ethnographic research in anthropology and kindred disciplines. Together they engage with questions such as, What passes for theory in anthropology and the human sciences today and why? What is theory's relation to ethnography? How are students trained to identify and respect anthropological theorization and how do they practice theoretical work in their later career stages? What theoretical experiments, languages, and institutions are available to the human sciences? Throughout, the editors and authors consider theory in practical terms, rather than as an amorphous set of ideas, an esoteric discourse of power, a norm of intellectual life, or an infinitely contestable canon of texts. A short editorial afterword explores alternative ethics and institutions of pedagogy and training in theory. Contributors: Andrea Ballestero, Rice University; Dominic Boyer, Rice University; Lisa Breglia, George Mason University; Jessica Marie Falcone, Kansas State University; James D. Faubion, Rice University; Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Andreas Glaeser, University of Chicago; Cymene Howe, Rice University; Jamer Hunt, Parsons The New School for Design and the Institute of Design in Umea, Sweden; George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine; Townsend Middleton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Deepa S. Reddy, University of Houston–Clear Lake; Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago. (shrink)

Prior work shows that children selectively learn from credible speakers. Yet little is known how they treat information from non-credible speakers. This research examined to what extent and under what conditions children may or may not learn from problematic sources. In three studies, we found that children displayed trust toward previously inaccurate speakers. Children were equally likely to extend labels from previously accurate and inaccurate speakers to novel objects. Moreover, they expected third parties to share labels provided by previously (...) inaccurate speakers. Only when there was clear evidence that the speakers' information was wrong, did young children reject the label. Together, the findings provide evidence that young children do not completely ignore the labels supplied by non-credible speakers unless there is strong reason to do so. (shrink)

Infants show impressive speech decoding abilities and detect acoustic regularities that highlight the syntactic relations of a language, often codedvianon-adjacent dependencies (NADs, e.g.,issinging). It has been claimed that infants learn NADs implicitly and associatively through passive listening and that there is a shift from effortless associative learning to a more controlled learning of NADs after the age of 2 years, potentially driven by the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. To investigate if older children are able to learn NADs,Lammertink (...) et al. (2019)recently developed a word-monitoring serial reaction time (SRT) task and could show that 6–11-year-old children learned the NADs, as their reaction times (RTs) increased then they were presented with violated NADs. In the current study we adapted their experimental paradigm and tested NAD learning in a younger group of 52 children between the age of 4–8 years in a remote, web-based, game-like setting (whack-a-mole). Children were exposed to Italian phrases containing NADs and had to monitor the occurrence of a target syllable, which was the second element of the NAD. After exposure, children did a “Stem Completion” task in which they were presented with the first element of the NAD and had to choose the second element of the NAD to complete the stimuli. Our findings show that, despite large variability in the data, children aged 4–8 years are sensitive to NADs; they show the expected differences in r RTs in the SRT task and could transfer the NAD-rule in the Stem Completion task. We discuss these results with respect to the development of NAD dependency learning in childhood and the practical impact and limitations of collecting these data in a web-based setting. (shrink)

Caring science that has a foundation in ‘lived experience’ may be viewed as a ‘patient science’, in other words nursing has its starting point in the patient’s perspective. To support in learning caring science, the learning situation has to embrace the students’ lived experience in relation to the substance of caring science. One of the challenges in education involves making theoretical meanings vivid in the absence of actual patients. Written patient narratives and fiction like (...) novels in combination with scientific literature are often used in order to obtain lived experiences as the foundation for teaching. Questions concerning how film can be used in this context to support the learning of caring science have recently emerged. The aim of this study is to describe how film as learning-support may boost reflection when learning caring science. The data was collected through audio-taped seminars, written reflections and group-interviews with students on basic, advanced, and doctoral levels. The analysis is based on the Reflective Lifeworld Research (RLR) approach which is founded in phenomenology. The results show how film as a learning-support enhances the understanding of the caring science theory, and provides a deeper understanding of the subject. Film can be very touching and provides support for the students’ embodied reflections. Hence, it is important that the students are encouraged to watch films from a caring science perspective. This requires a structure for learning-support related to the film, such as having a focus and purpose for watching the film, as well as support for follow-ups. The film itself does not create such support and guidance; instead, it must be combined with well-considered pedagogic thoughts on what learning is and how learning can be supported. The results are highlighted with the help of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of ‘the lived body’, and ‘the flesh of the world’. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 12, Special Edition July 2012. (shrink)

This research sets out to study and compare the effects of story watching on television and story listening by an elder on children’s cognitive skills, specifically in building up their vocabulary and comprehension. A total of two hundred children aged between 7 to 12 years from low socio-economic background were selected through matching. They were divided into two different groups based on the medium they were exposed to, either oral or visual. The study took place in laboratories set at (...) four different schools in Karachi, Pakistan. Ten stories were told to the half children, while the other group watched 10 animated episodes having same content for 10 consecutive weeks. Children’s perception and vocabulary skills were evaluated through questionnaires, which were filled out after each story. Results affirmed the hypothesis that story listening is more effective than cartoon watching in terms of cognitive learning. The study is beneficial for various disciplines of social sciences including psychology, sociology, education and mass communication. (shrink)

A large literature suggests that the organization of words in semantic memory, reflecting meaningful relations among words and the concepts to which they refer, supports many cognitive processes, including memory encoding and retrieval, word learning, and inferential reasoning. The co‐activation of related items has been proposed as a mechanism by which semantic knowledge influences cognition, and contemporary accounts of semantic knowledge propose that this co‐activation is graded—that it depends on how strongly related the items are in semantic memory. Prior (...) research with adults yielded evidence supporting this prediction; however, there is currently no evidence of graded co‐activation early in development. This study provides the first evidence that in children the co‐activation of related items depends on their relational strength in semantic memory. Participants (N = 84, age range: 3–9 years) were asked to identify a target (e.g., bone) amid distractors. Children's responses were slowed down by the presence of a related distractor (e.g., puppy) relative to unrelated distractors (e.g., flower)—suggesting that children co‐activated related items upon hearing the name of the target. Importantly, the degree of this co‐activation was predicted by the strength of the target–distractor relation, such that distractors more strongly related to the targets slowed down children to a larger extent. These findings have important implications for understanding how organized semantic knowledge affects other cognitive processes across development. (shrink)

Context: Convictions arising from different, separate and distinct domains and paradigms, Papert’s constructionism, literature on play from the domain of early childhood education, complexity theory) agree in favor of a need for a shift in education that will allow children to access what Papert refers to as “hard learning” that consequently leads to “hard fun.” Problem: Nevertheless, such an achievement demands supporting learning in a manner that seems difficult for teachers to comprehend and handle. Method: In this article, (...) we provide three learning stories. These constitute parts of an effort to develop a joint mathematics and science curriculum for early childhood education parallel to supporting teachers so that they deliver and, at the same time, are able to value and assess the learning involved. The first story concerns teachers’ learning whereas the second and third story concern 5-year-olds’ learning. Results: In all three stories, we see how the researcher, teachers and children learn together. By the end of this article, the three stories will allow us to describe and redefine MbL and at the same time highlight the constructivism foundations of MbL and the common ground between MbL and the constructionism paradigm. Implications: Furthermore, the stories as a whole will allow us to argue that all it takes to move away from traditional practices is a shift in how learning is conceptualized. Constructivist content: The article is built on the constructionism approach, which focuses on the value of learners acquiring access to powerful ideas through meaningful constructivist learning processes. (shrink)

Background and purposeJapanese elementary school children are trained in arts and crafts, music, arithmetic, the Japanese language, life environment studies, physical education, and so on. Children must learn through doing as they develop physically, because the range of activities in their daily lives is still narrow. Subject learning is inseparable from daily life. Teachers should plan lessons with an awareness of the physicality of activities. Therefore, this study clarified the relationship between the ability for skillful and quick physical movement (...) and subject learning among Japanese elementary school students.MethodsFor the second to fourth grades of elementary school, the measurement results and subject evaluation were compared at the individual level. Students were divided into a group with high grades in subject learning and one with middle and lower grades, and a t-test was conducted to observe if there was a significant difference in the records of two physical activities: repeated side jump and softball throw.Main findingsSignificant difference was found for repeated side jumps depending on whether the arts and crafts grades were high for all children in grades 2–4. Additionally, there was a significant difference in softball throwing records between the second and third graders, depending on whether the children’s performance in arts and crafts was high. Conversely, there was no significant difference between the second to fourth grade children’s musical scores and repeated side jump records. There was a negative correlation between sophomore and senior year music performances and the softball throwing record. Thus, the development of children’s dexterity is related to subject learning.ConclusionConsidering that elementary school teachers spend sufficient time with children on a daily basis teaching subjects such as physical education and music, it may be beneficial for them to be aware of dexterity’s importance across multiple subjects. Furthermore, it allows for an approach that engages children in physical activities from early childhood which can help in preparing them for learning a variety of subjects in school. (shrink)

Most of what we know about teaching comes from research among people living in large, politically and economically stratified societies with formal education systems and highly specialized roles with a global market economy. In this paper, we review and synthesize research on teaching among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. The hunter-gatherer lifeway is the oldest humanity has known and is more representative of the circumstances under which teaching evolved and was utilized most often throughout human history. Research among contemporary (...) hunter-gatherers also illustrates a complex pattern of teaching that is both consistent with and distinct from teaching in other small- and large-scale societies with different subsistence practices and cultural forms. In particular, we find that the cultural emphasis on individual autonomy and socio-political egalitarianism among hunter-gatherers differently shapes how teaching occurs. For example, teaching clearly exists among hunter-gatherers and appears in many forms, including institutionalized instruction in valued cultural and technical skills. However, teaching tends to be less common in hunter-gatherer societies because people live in small, intimate egalitarian, groups that support each other’s learning in a variety of ways without teaching. Furthermore, foundational cultural schemas of autonomy and egalitarianism impact the nature of teaching. For example, adults and older children limit their interventions, permitting autonomous learning, and, when they occur, teaching episodes are generally brief, subtle, indirect, and situated in a present activity. We discuss the implications of this research in terms of discussions of the evolution of human cognition and the co-evolution of teaching and culture through the process of cultural niche construction. (shrink)

We explored the home learning environments of 173 Mexican preschool children (aged 3–6 years) in relation to their numeracy performance. Parents indicated the frequency of their formal home numeracy and literacy activities, and their academic expectations for children’s numeracy and literacy performance. Children completed measures of early numeracy skills. Mexican parent–child dyads from families with either high- or low-socioeconomic status (SES) participated. Low-SES parents (n= 99) reported higher numeracy expectations than high-SES parents (n= 74), but similar frequency of home (...) numeracy activities. In contrast, high-SES parents reported higher frequency of literacy activities. Path analyses showed that operational (i.e., advanced) numeracy activities were positively related to children’s numeracy skills in the high- but not in the low-SES group. These findings improve the understanding of the role of the home environment in different contexts and provide some insights into the sources of the variable patterns of relations between home learning activities and children’s numeracy outcomes. They also suggest that SES is a critical factor to consider in research on children’s home numeracy experiences. (shrink)

Background: There are few standardized measures available to assess executive function in a naturalistic setting for children. The Children’s Cooking Task is a complex test that has been specifically developed to assess EF in a standardized open-ended environment. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the internal consistency, inter-rater reliability, sensitivity and specificity, and also convergent and divergent validity of the Norwegian version of CCT among children with pediatric Acquired Brain Injury and healthy controls.Methods: The present study has (...) a cross-sectional design, based on baseline data derived from a multicenter RCT. Seventy-five children with pABI from two university hospitals with parent-reported executive dysfunction and minimum of 12 months since injury/completed cancer therapy, as well as 59 HCs aged 10–17 years, were assessed with CCT using total errors as the main outcome measure. The pABI group completed tests assessing EF on the impairment level within the ICF framework, and on the participation level. In addition, they completed tests of intellectual ability, processing speed, attention, learning, and memory. Finally, overall functional outcome was evaluated for the children with pABI.Results: Acceptable internal consistency and good inter-rater reliability were found for the CCT. Children with pABI performed significantly worse on the CCT than the HCs. The CCT identified group membership, but the sensitivity and specificity were overall classified as poor. Convergent validity was demonstrated by associations between the CCT and performance-based tests assessing inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and working memory, as well as teacher-reported executive dysfunction. Divergent validity was supported by the lack of association with performance-based measures of learning and memory, attention, and verbal intellectual ability. However, there was a moderate association between the CCT and performance-based tests of processing speed. Lastly, better performance on the CCT was associated with a better functional outcome.Conclusion: Our study with a relatively large sample of children with pABI and HC’s demonstrated good psychometric properties of the CCT. CCT performance was associated with the overall level of disability and function, suggesting that CCT is related to the level of activity in everyday life and participation in society. Hence, our study suggests that the CCT has the potential to advance the assessment of EF by providing a valid analysis of real-world performance. Nevertheless, further research is needed on larger samples, focusing on predictors of task performance, and evaluating the ability of CCT to detect improvement in EF over time. The patterns of error and problem-solving strategies evaluated by the CCT could be used to inform neuropsychological rehabilitation treatmentand represent a more valid outcome measure of rehabilitation interventions. (shrink)

Past research reveals a tension between children's preferences for egalitarianism and ingroup favoritism when distributing resources to others. Here we investigate how children's evaluations and expectations of others' behaviors compare. Four- to 10-year-old children viewed events where individuals from two different groups distributed resources to their own group, to the other group, or equally across groups. Groups were described within a context of intergroup competition over scarce resources. In the Evaluation condition, children were asked to evaluate which (...) resource distribution actions were nicer. In the Expectation condition, children were asked to predict which events were more likely to occur. With age, children's evaluations and expectations of others' actions diverged: Children evaluated egalitarian actions as nicer yet expected others to behave in ways that benefit their own group. Thus, children's evaluations about the way human social actors should behave do not mirror their expectations concerning those individuals' actions. (shrink)

Background This analysis is about practical living bioethics and how law, ethics and sociology understand and respect children’s consent to, or refusal of, elective heart surgery. Analysis of underlying theories and influences will contrast legalistic bioethics with living bioethics. In-depth philosophical analysis compares social science traditions of positivism, interpretivism, critical theory and functionalism and applies them to bioethics and childhood, to examine how living bioethics may be encouraged or discouraged. Illustrative examples are drawn from research interviews and observations (...) in two London paediatric cardiac units. This paper is one of a series on how the multidisciplinary cardiac team members all contribute to the complex mosaic of care when preparing and supporting families’ informed consent to surgery. Results The living bioethics of justice, care and respect for children and their consent depends on theories and practices, contexts and relationships. These can all be undermined by unseen influences: the history of adult-centric ethics; developmental psychology theories; legal and financial pressures that require consent to be defined as an adult contract; management systems and daily routines in healthcare that can intimidate families and staff; social inequalities. Mainstream theories in the clinical ethics literature markedly differ from the living bioethics in clinical practices. Conclusion We aim to contribute to raising standards of respectful paediatric bioethics and to showing the relevance of virtue and feminist ethics, childhood studies and children’s rights. (shrink)

BACKGROUND: The offer of return of research results to study participants has many potential benefits. The current study examined the offer of return of research results by analyzing consent forms from 2 acute lymphoblastic leukemia studies of the 235 institutional members of the Children's Oncology Group. METHODS: Institutional review board (IRB)-approved consent forms from 2 standard-risk acute lymphoblastic leukemia studies (Children's Cancer Group [CCG] 1991 and Pediatric Oncology Group [POG] 9407) were analyzed independently by 2 (...) reviewers. RESULTS: The authors received replies from 202 of the 235 institutions that were contacted (85%). One hundred eighty-one institutions had CCG 1991 (n = 96) or POG 9905 (n = 85) protocols that were approved by an IRB. Most institutions provided contact information for the principal investigator (n = 175; 97%) and a member of the institution's research services office (n = 154; 85%). Only 5 (2.8%) institutions provided an indication of a participant's right to receive a summary of research results; most of these institutions provided details on how (n = 5) or when (n = 5) this was to occur. All of these institutions (n = 162; 89.5%) provided a specific statement offering new information that might affect a participant's decision to continue to participate in a study. Only 2 institutional consent forms offered participants the option to receive research results, and only 10 (5.5%) consent forms contained an unambiguous, specific statement offering to provide new information after the study was closed. CONCLUSIONS: Few institutional review board-approved consent forms explicitly indicate the right of research recipients to receive a summary of the results of the research in which they have participated. (shrink)

In order for artificial intelligent systems to interact naturally with human users, they need to be able to learn from human instructions when actions should be imitated. Human tutoring will typically consist of action demonstrations accompanied by speech. In the following, the characteristics of human tutoring during action demonstration will be examined. A special focus will be put on the distinction between two kinds of motion events: path-oriented actions and manner-oriented actions. Such a distinction is inspired by the literature pertaining (...) to cognitive linguistics, which indicates that the human conceptual system can distinguish these two distinct types of motion. These two kinds of actions are described in language by more path-oriented or more manner-oriented utterances. In path-oriented utterances, the source, trajectory, or goal is emphasized, whereas in manner-oriented utterances the medium, velocity, or means of motion are highlighted. We examined a video corpus of adult–child interactions comprised of three age groups of children—pre-lexical, early lexical, and lexical—and two different tasks, one emphasizing manner more strongly and one emphasizing path more strongly. We analyzed the language and motion of the caregiver and the gazing behavior of the child to highlight the differences between the tutoring and the acquisition of the manner and path concepts. The results suggest that age is an important factor in the development of these action categories. The analysis of this corpus has also been exploited to develop an intelligent robotic behavior—the tutoring spotter system—able to emulate children's behaviors in a tutoring situation, with the aim of evoking in human subjects a natural and effective behavior in teaching to a robot. The findings related to the development of manner and path concepts have been used to implement new effective feedback strategies in the tutoring spotter system, which should provide improvements in human–robot interaction. (shrink)

We tested whether analogical training could help children learn a key principle of elementary engineering—namely, the use of a diagonal brace to stabilize a structure. The context for this learning was a construction activity at the Chicago Children's Museum, in which children and their families build a model skyscraper together. The results indicate that even a single brief analogical comparison can confer insight. The results also reveal conditions that support analogical learning.