Embodying “tech”: Articulatory setting,phonetic variation,and social meaning

This article examines the co‐occurring realization of two sociophonetic variables within a style—the LOT vowel in English and word‐initial /l/—to explore the link between articulatory setting and stylistic practice. At an arts‐focused high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, the curricular and social practices of students in the technical theatre department centre around manual labour. Ethnographic analysis demonstrates that “tech” constitutes a locally enregistered persona, informed by tech students’ positioning as working‐class subjects through their bodily, sartorial, and technological practices. Tech students also produce higher and more rounded variants of LOT, and more velarized productions of /l/, than their non‐tech peers, and I suggest that articulatory setting is at play in the cohesive indexicality of these variants. I advocate for the continued exploration of co‐occurring sociolinguistic variables which treat the body as a broader stylistic context, and propose that studies of co‐occurring features focus on the ideological processes by which combinations of variables come to index thematic styles.     

Who Participates and Who Benefits From Employer‐Provided Child‐Care Assistance?

Support from employers to help parents balance work and family responsibilities has become an increasingly important issue, particularly in the United States, where public support for families is scarce. Little is known about the effectiveness of employer‐provided child‐care support. Who participates in these programs, and what are their benefits? This study is among the first to address these questions using a dataset that combines administrative with survey data from employees at a large organization. Findings indicate that employer financial support for child care can be structured so that employees with the greatest need benefit and employee participation is not associated with stigma. Results suggest the employer benefits from increased employee commitment and reduced employee stress, but employees do not report increased parent or child satisfaction with care. Although employer financial support alone cannot compensate for structural problems with regard to child care, it may reduce stress and increase employee commitment in the workplace.     

Marriage and Family Therapy Trainees' Reports of Explicit Weight Bias

Discrimination based on an individual's weight has been observed in health care, education, retail, and other public sectors (Puhl & Huer, Obesity, 17, 941, 2007). Such inequity, known as “weight bias,” generates negative short‐term and long‐term consequences for the individuals that experience it (Puhl & Brownell, Weight bias in health care settings, 2007). Past research has shown that healthcare trainees exhibit weight bias (Phelan et al., Obesity, 22, 1201, 2014; Wigton & McGaghie, Journal of General Internal Medicine, 16, 262, 2001), yet little focus is given to weight bias in marriage and family therapy (MFT) education. The purpose of this study was to survey MFT students (N = 162) to explore weight bias and how contextual factors associate with weight bias. Participants in MFT programs reported explicit weight bias, with specific contextual factors associating with more bias. Female participants reported more fear of gaining weight, and individuals who identified as overweight had higher rates of explicit weight bias. Contextual differences and implications for training programs are discussed.     

Between a ROC and a hard place: Teaching prevalence plots to understand real world biomarker performance in the clinic

The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve and the Area Under the Curve (AUC) of the ROC curve are widely used in discovery to compare the performance of diagnostic and prognostic assays. The ROC curve has the advantage that it is independent of disease prevalence. However, in this note, we remind scientists and clinicians that the performance of an assay upon translation to the clinic is critically dependent upon that very same prevalence. Without an understanding of prevalence in the test population, even robust bioassays with excellent ROC characteristics may perform poorly in the clinic. While the exact prevalence in the target population is not always known, simple plots of candidate assay performance as a function of prevalence rate give a better understanding of the likely real‐world performance and a greater understanding of the likely impact of variation in that prevalence on translation to the clinic.     

好的教学是否只有一种模式

在北美乃至世界的教育领域,存在着一种在教学中应用建构主义的倾向.尽管我们对建构主义的基本理论不持异议,但我们的确不主张匆忙采纳任何单一的、占统治地位的教学观念.在这一问题上,必须要采取慎重的态度,否则我们将被疑为进行单纯的理论替换,并有推崇单一模式教育概念之嫌.在这个跨学科和跨文化背景的研究中,我们发现好的教学有多样性,并不是所有都建立在建构主义基础上.在本文中,我们将探讨五种不同的教学观,其中每一种都有成为好的教学理论的潜质:传输式教学观、发展式教学观、学徒式教学观、培育式教学观和社会改革教学观.希望本文能说服读者,在教学改革或评估中, 摒弃寻找单一模式教学观的想法.     

Transferring friendship: girls' and boys' friendships in the transition from primary to secondary school

This paper seeks to explore the issues and concerns that impact upon girls' and boys' friendship groups as they transfer from primary to secondary school. Using the girls' and boys' own voices, we document the extent to which their existing social relationships are disrupted as they adapt to and engage with a new school setting. Through semi‐structured interviews and questionnaires conducted in the final year of primary school and the first year of secondary school, we identify students' concerns regarding their attitudes to friendship. We consider the extent to which account is taken of this aspect of children's friendships and explore and analyse commonalities and differences in their responses. We argue that the priorities of our student groups are different to those advocated by the school. We further attempt to examine how the girls and boys in our sample negotiate their new environment.     

A Longitudinal Study of Breadth and Intensity of Activity Involvement and the Transition to University

We examined prospective relations between activity involvement and successful transitioning to university. A sample of 656 students from 6 Canadian universities completed questionnaires before beginning university and at the end of their first year. Breadth (number of different activity domains) and intensity (mean frequency) of activity involvement as well as changes in breadth and intensity, were examined jointly. Consistent with developmental theory, higher levels of pre‐university breadth and intensity of activity involvement and greater increases in breadth and intensity over time predicted various indicators of positive adjustment to university.