Summer learning and its implications: insights from the Beginning School Study

There is perhaps no more pressing issue in school policy today than the achievement gap across social lines. Achievement differences between well-to-do children and poor children and between disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities and majority whites are large when children first begin school, and they increase over time. Despite years of study and an abundance of good intentions, these patterned achievement differences persist, but who is responsible, and how are schools implicated? The increasing gap seems to suggest that schools are unable to equalize educational opportunity or, worse still, that they actively handicap disadvantaged children. But a seasonal perspective on learning yields a rather different impression. Comparing achievement gains separately over the school year and the summer months reveals that much of the achievement gap originates over the summer period, when children are not in school. The authors review Beginning School Study research on differential summer learning across social lines (that is, by family socioeconomic level) and its implications for later schooling outcomes, including high school curriculum placements, high school dropout, and college attendance. These studies document the extent to which these large summer learning differences impede the later educational progress of children of low socioeconomic status. Practical implications are discussed, including the need for early and sustained interventions to prevent the achievement gap from opening wide in the first place and for high-quality summer programming focused on preventing differential summer learning loss.     

Policymaking in the Age of Internet: Is the Internet Tending to Make Policy Networks More or Less Inclusive?

Although many policy and political scientists have studied theInternet's role in electoral and organizational processes, thereis little work that examines the Internet's effect on policyprocesses. Has the Internet tended to make policy deliberationsmore inclusive? Has it affected patterns of influence reputationamong network participants? Has the Internet helped to bringnew organizations into policy debates? This study provides preliminaryanswers to these questions. Treating policy networks as a typeof interorganizational network, a "socialized" resource dependenceframework is developed. Deployment of the Internet is conceptualizedas an exogenous shock, where the shock alters the material resourcebase of a policy network and allows actors inside and outsidethe network to challenge structural power holders. Structuralpower holders attempt to "mold" use of the Internet to protecttheir position and its perquisites. To test this framework data were collected from two policy networksin "Newstatia"—one focused on adult basic education policyand the other on mental health policy. Both policy networksappear to have become more exclusive since the deployment ofthe Internet. Electronic central discussion networks (or "cores")were primarily populated by actors who were already entrenchedin positions of structural power within the network and possessedvery high influence ratings. Most Internet communication occursbetween members of the electronic core. At least preliminarily,the Internet appears to reinforce existing patterns of authorityand influence.     

Do maternal health problems influence child's worrying status? Evidence from the British Cohort Study

Conventional methods apply symmetric prior distributions such as a normal distribution or a Laplace distribution for regression coefficients, which may be suitable for median regression and exhibit no robustness to outliers. This work develops a quantile regression on linear panel data model without heterogeneity from a Bayesian point of view, i.e. upon a location-scale mixture representation of the asymmetric Laplace error distribution, and provides how the posterior distribution is summarized using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Applying this approach to the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS) data, it finds that a different maternal health problem has different influence on child's worrying status at different quantiles. In addition, applying stochastic search variable selection for maternal health problems to the 1970 BCS data, it finds that maternal nervous breakdown, among the 25 maternal health problems, contributes most to influence the child's worrying status.     

Size and Power of Recent Tests for Homogeneity in Exponential Mixtures

The article investigates diagnostic procedures for finite mixture models. The problem is to decide whether given data stem from an exponential distribution or a finite mixture of such distributions. Recently, three new test approaches have been proposed, the modified likelihood ratio test (MLRT) by Chen et al. (2001 Chen , H. , Chen , J. , Kalbfleisch , J. D. ( 2001 ). A modified likelihood ratio test for homogeneity in finite mixture models . Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, B 63 : 19 – 29 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), the ADDS test by Mosler and Seidel (2001 Mosler , K. , Seidel , W. ( 2001 ). Testing for homogeneity in an exponential mixture model . Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics 43 : 231 – 247 . [Google Scholar]), and the D-test by Charnigo and Sun (2004 Charnigo , R. , Sun , J. ( 2004 ). Testing homogeneity in a mixture distribution via the l ² distance between competing models . Journal of the American Statistical Society 99 : 488 – 498 .[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The size and power of these tests are determined by Monte Carlo simulation and their relative merits are evaluated. We conclude that the ADDS test shows always not much less and under some alternatives, in particular lower contaminations, considerably more power than its competitors. Also, new tables for the ADDS test are provided.     

Specification analysis in mixed hazard models and a test of crossing survival functions

The paper investigates diagnostic procedures for the specification of common hazard models in duration analysis. It is shown that under mixed hazard specifications the survival functions of different subgroups cannot cross. A nonparametric test for the crossing of two survival functions is provided and its applications in duration analysis are discussed. In particular, the proportional hazard model with unobserved heterogeneity (PHU) is investigated, and procedures are developed to test whether given data are consistent with the PHU model and whether they contain unobserved heterogeneity within the PHU specification. Examples in which crossing survivals are of substantive concern are discussed, including the dynamics of infectious diseases and the demand for vaccination.     

Clients' relational conceptions of conjoint couple and family therapy quality: a grounded formal theory

Based upon a qualitative metasynthesis of 49 articles centered on clients' experiences of their conjoint couple and family therapy, the investigators constructed a grounded formal theory of Clients' Relational Conceptions of Conjoint Couple and Family Therapy Quality. The theory suggests from pretherapy conceptions to posttherapy reflections, clients' perceptions of conjoint couple and family therapy quality appear to consist of clients' constructed meanings regarding a series of interrelated relationships between clients and their therapists and therapy environments, between clients and themselves, between clients and other family members, and between process and outcome both inside and outside therapy. Within and across these relationships, clients appear to focus on expectations, connections, balance, and change when evaluating the quality of their clinical experiences. Based upon this theory, the investigators recommend that researchers continue to explore this clinical phenomenon and that therapists regularly seek clients' conceptions of quality in therapy.     

My Pride and Joy? Predicting Favoritism and Disfavoritism in Mother–Adult Child Relations

In this article, we compare predictors of mothers' differentiation among their adult children regarding emotional closeness, pride, conflict, and disappointment. We distinguish between predictors of relational (closeness, conflict) and evaluative (pride, disappointment) dimensions of favoritism and disfavoritism. Multilevel modeling using data collected from 381 older mothers regarding their relationships with 1,421 adult children indicated that adult children's similarity of values played the most prominent role in predicting mothers' favoritism and disfavoritism, followed by children's gender. Children's deviant behaviors in adulthood predicted both pride and disappointment but neither relational dimension. Contrary to expectations, the quantitative analysis indicated that children's normative adult achievements were poor predictors of both relational and evaluative dimensions of mothers' differentiation. Qualitative data shed additional light on mothers' evaluations by revealing that disappointment was shaped by children's achievements relative to their mothers' values and expectations, rather than by the achievement of specific societal, educational, career, and marital milestones.     

The distinction between work pace and working hours in the measurement of quantitative demands at work

During recent years many researchers have criticized the widely used scales on psychological job demands. For instance, they comment that in most cases different types of demand seem to be mixed in one measure. In this paper we analyse the scale on quantitative job demands in the recently developed Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ), with special emphasis on Differential Item Functioning (DIF). DIF refers to basic differences between groups of respondents, which may affect how they respond to questionnaire items. The data material for our study comprised a representative sample of Danish employees. The respondents were categorized into 32 specific jobs according to the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO 1968). We analysed DIF with respect to the respondents' jobs with logistic regression analyses. These analyses showed that the items used in the original demand scale functioned very differently for different jobs in the population. The conclusion is that scales on quantitative demands are very sensitive to the choice of specific items. If many items on fast work pace and tempo are included in a scale, a number of blue-collar jobs will be identified as high-demand jobs. If, on the other hand, many questions on long working hours and overtime are included, the use of the scale will result in an entirely different picture. This issue has so far received little attention in occupational health psychology. The results have wide theoretical and methodological implications for research on quantitative job demands.