More than just being there: balancing the participation equation

The research and evaluation evidence is mounting: out-of-school-time (OST) programs can keep young people safe, support working families, and improve academic achievement and social development. Over 6 million children are enrolled in after-school programs nationwide, but an estimated 14.3 million children still care for themselves in the nonschool hours. Because of this discrepancy, OST stakeholders need information about how to maximize participation in OST programs. The Harvard Family Research Project (HRFP) has developed a conceptual model, based on scholarly theory, empirical research, and knowledge gained from providers, that describes the characteristics that predict participation in OST programs as well as the potential benefits of that participation. In the center of the model, participation is conceived as a three-part construct of enrollment, attendance, and engagement. This equation serves as the basis for framing this issue of New Directions for Youth Development. The chapter provides an overview of why participation in OST programs matters for young people, describes some of the barriers and challenges to youth participation, teases out more precise definitions of participation, and presents HFRP's conceptual model of participation. It focuses on the participation equation and concludes by highlighting some overarching themes that recur throughout the issue and that have an impact on future directions for research and evaluation.     

Knowledge and education for peoples’ sovereignty

ABSTRACT

Living examples of peoples’ sovereignty can illustrate the path toward positive people-centred alternatives to control by the capitalist State, wealthy private land-owners and corporations. Efforts to undermine Indigenous and other peoples’ sovereignty have been deliberate and continue to take place in industrialized and ‘developing’ countries. Yet peoples’ sovereignty has the capacity to unite and educate people in important ways. Many examples of education to promote peoples’ sovereignty are emerging, building on the knowledge that communities have generated over time. This is a very different educational model than the one most commonly recognized and implemented in industrialized societies. People working in higher education everywhere have the responsibility to educate our students about the history of colonization and destruction of peoples’ sovereignty, so that they understand the real history of their countries, to build alliances with other educators globally, and to form bonds of solidarity with peoples’ movements.     

Research by children

This paper draws on an international literature to consider ways in which children work as researchers. Children's and teenagers' activities at various stages of research projects, their levels of participation, and their use of a range of research methods are described, with a review of some of the problems and advantages of children doing research.     

The racialization of privacy: racial formation as a family affair

Theory and Society - A right to family privacy is considered a cornerstone of American life, and yet access to it is apportioned by race. Our notion of the “racialization of privacy”...     

Seeing a talking face matters: Infants' segmentation of continuous auditory-visual speech

Visual speech cues from a speaker's talking face aid speech segmentation in adults, but despite the importance of speech segmentation in language acquisition, little is known about the possible influence of visual speech on infants' speech segmentation. Here, to investigate whether there is facilitation of speech segmentation by visual information, two groups of English-learning 7-month-old infants were presented with continuous speech passages, one group with auditory-only (AO) speech and the other with auditory-visual (AV) speech. Additionally, the possible relation between infants' relative attention to the speaker's mouth versus eye regions and their segmentation performance was examined. Both the AO and the AV groups of infants successfully segmented words from the continuous speech stream, but segmentation performance persisted for longer for infants in the AV group. Interestingly, while AV group infants showed no significant relation between the relative amount of time spent fixating the speaker's mouth versus eyes and word segmentation, their attention to the mouth was greater than that of AO group infants, especially early in test trials. The results are discussed in relation to the possible pathways through which visual speech cues aid speech perception.     

Autism in Special and Inclusive Schools: 'there has to be a point to their being there'

What kind of schools are most suitable for pupils affected by autism? This article reviews meanings of autism and autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). We report evidence from observations in schools and interviews with pupils and adults, drawing on a qualitative study of special education in two contrasting education authorities one with special autistic schools, the other with inclusive schools. Current theory, policy and practice in the education of pupils with autistic tendencies are discussed in relation to the data.     

Comparison of Akaike information criterion and consistent Akaike information criterion for model selection and statistical inference from capture-recapture studies

SUMMARY We compare properties of parameter estimators under Akaike information criterion (AIC) and 'consistent' AIC (CAIC) model selection in a nested sequence of open population capture-recapture models. These models consist of product multinomials, where the cell probabilities are parameterized in terms of survival ( ) and capture ( p ) i i probabilities for each time interval i . The sequence of models is derived from 'treatment' effects that might be (1) absent, model H ; (2) only acute, model H ; or (3) acute and 0 2 p chronic, lasting several time intervals, model H . Using a 35 factorial design, 1000 3 repetitions were simulated for each of 243 cases. The true number of parameters ranged from 7 to 42, and the sample size ranged from approximately 470 to 55 000 per case. We focus on the quality of the inference about the model parameters and model structure that results from the two selection criteria. We use achieved confidence interval coverage as an integrating metric to judge what constitutes a 'properly parsimonious' model, and contrast the performance of these two model selection criteria for a wide range of models, sample sizes, parameter values and study interval lengths. AIC selection resulted in models in which the parameters were estimated with relatively little bias. However, these models exhibited asymptotic sampling variances that were somewhat too small, and achieved confidence interval coverage that was somewhat below the nominal level. In contrast, CAIC-selected models were too simple, the parameter estimators were often substantially biased, the asymptotic sampling variances were substantially too small and the achieved coverage was often substantially below the nominal level. An example case illustrates a pattern: with 20 capture occasions, 300 previously unmarked animals are released at each occasion, and the survival and capture probabilities in the control group on each occasion were 0.9 and 0.8 respectively using model H . There was a strong acute treatment effect 3 on the first survival ( ) and first capture probability ( p ), and smaller, chronic effects 1 2 on the second and third survival probabilities ( and ) as well as on the second capture 2 3 probability ( p ); the sample size for each repetition was approximately 55 000. CAIC 3 selection led to a model with exactly these effects in only nine of the 1000 repetitions, compared with 467 times under AIC selection. Under CAIC selection, even the two acute effects were detected only 555 times, compared with 998 for AIC selection. AIC selection exhibited a balance between underfitted and overfitted models (270 versus 263), while CAIC tended strongly to select underfitted models. CAIC-selected models were overly parsimonious and poor as a basis for statistical inferences about important model parameters or structure. We recommend the use of the AIC and not the CAIC for analysis and inference from capture-recapture data sets.