The goal of the present study was to explore young children's attitudes and responses to different forms of social withdrawal by eliciting responses to hypothetical vignettes. Participants included 137 children (49 boys, 88 girls) in kindergarten and grade 1 classes (M[subscript age] = 75.94 months, SD = 9.03) in Ottawa, Canada. Parents rated…

Several hypotheses have been generated about the functions of mock aggression, including its association with dominance. This paper describes a study that expanded this line of research by interviewing college students about a broad array of mock aggressive behaviors and their contexts, targets, benefits, and functions. The hypotheses were that:…

Uses clinical case studies showing autistic children's fascination with and understanding of machines, family studies focusing on occupations of fathers and grandfathers of children with autism or Asperger Syndrome, and experimental evidence using picture-sequencing methods to identify physical or intentional causality to show that children with…

In Canada, public access to federal government information is ruled by the Access to Information Act. This article explores loopholes in the Act, issues of data format and "tradeable" data (government information with substantial value), that could cause a conflict between its intent and effect. Tradeable data is troublesome because of…

Recent research has established closer links between language, cognition, and social life than Piaget or Vygotsky imagined. Connections have been established between object permanence development and acquisition of disappearance words and the quantity and quality of child-adult joint attentional social interactions and children's early word…

Chinese teachers in high-achieving (n=103) and low-achieving (n=77) schools completed measures of job satisfaction, intention to quit, and spurning (student rejection of teacher help). Teachers of lower achievers were spurned more often. For both groups, spurning predicted job satisfaction but not likelihood of quitting and also predicted stress…

Wong has argued that the role of the teacher/researcher is full of conflict in that the pull of either students or research may affect commitment to the other. It is argued that research is not inherently conflictual, but that one teacher/researcher's tension is another's intention. (SLD)

Interviews with 253 adults and adult educators in Canada, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United States elicited 5 conceptions of teaching: Engineering, Apprenticeship, Development, Nurturing, and Social Reform. Variations in the five cultures emerged in relation to actions, intentions, and beliefs and to the relationships among teacher,…

Reiterates the author's convictions about the inadequacy of mainstream educational research. If perceptual control theory is correct in positing a closed-loop, negative feedback relationship between individuals and their environments, then current and mainstream educational research is not adequate for explaining purposeful behavior. (SLD)

Data from 4 experiments in which 136 college students read a situation description and took the perspective of an uninformed addressee to determine whether a speaker was sarcastic suggest that readers use perspective-irrelevant information. The finding poses a problem for theories of language that assume the use of only relevant information. (SLD)

Investigated how well the theory of planned behavior could predict students' physical activity intention. Surveys indicated that direct measures of the theory of planned behavior explained 47 percent of variability in the measure of physical activity intention. Differences surfaced in the relative contributions of three predictors (attitude,…

Explored the role of folktales of deception in developing 3- and 4-year-olds' theory of mind. Found that the story's deceptions elicit discussions that change over successive readings as the child shows increasing comprehension of the deceptions and decreasing need of parental support. Parent's and child's gender influenced frequency and…

Analysis of cooperative education policy documents from nine Ontario school districts indicated that statements about evaluation, remediation, equity, and teacher qualifications were inconsistent. Although the Ministry of Education and Training prescribes co-op for delivery of academic subjects. districts focus exclusively on career preparation…

The authors explore children's use of intention information in evaluating the moral quality of others' actions. They also address links among mental state understanding, motives-based moral reasoning, and children's own moral behavior. (Contains 2 tables.)

Self-stigma is an important factor in people's decisions not to engage in therapy. To measure this construct, the authors developed the 10-item Self-Stigma of Seeking Help (SSOSH) scale. In Study 1 (n = 583), the SSOSH had a unidimensional factor structure and good reliability (0.91) among participants. Study 2 (n = 470) confirmed the factor…