Teachers' Reactions to Children's Aggression

Drawing on social schema theory ( Fiske & Taylor, 1991 ) and social identity theory ( Tajfel & Turner, 1979 ), this study examined the impact on teachers’ reactions to children's aggression of three variables, two of which were related to the aggressors and one was related to the teachers. Experienced female elementary school teachers (N =90) each read a scenario that described an aggressive episode committed by a group of boys against a boy from another class. The aggressors were either good or bad children, who were either popular or unpopular with their classroom peers. In addition, the scenario manipulated the teachers’ identification with, or commitment to, the class to be either high or low. Analysis of the teachers’ ratings of causal responsibility, liking, and recommended punishment revealed a consistent negative response from the teachers towards the aggressors versus the victim. However, the teachers’ responses were also interactively influenced by the aggressors’ goodness and popularity, as well as the teachers’ class identification. The results are discussed in relation to other findings on teachers’ responses to school aggression and bullying, as well as how their responses might best be explained.     

Implementation and process evaluation of a student "school-as-community" group. A component of a school-based drug abuse prevention program

Little documentation exists regarding the functioning of formalized adolescent groups as drug abuse prevention agents. Two studies are described that were conducted at high schools whose students are at high risk for drug abuse. Twenty-one schools were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (a) standard care, (b) classroom drug abuse education only, or (c) classroom plus school-as-community. Results of the first study indicated that the school-as-community component--which involved weekly meetings and periodic events at seven schools--was implemented as planned, drug abused focused, and perceived as productive in discouraging drug abuse. In the second study, staff in the classroom plus school-as-community condition self-reported involvement in the greatest number of community activities across the school year, compared with staff from the other two conditions. These two studies support the feasibility of formalized groups of high-risk youth to promote drug-free events.     

Dynamic Logit With Choice Aversion

We characterize a generalization of discounted logistic choice that incorporates a parameter to capture different views the agent might have about the costs and benefits of larger choice sets. The discounted logit model used in the empirical literature is the special case that displays a “preference for flexibility” in the sense that the agent always prefers to add additional items to a menu. Other cases display varying levels of “choice aversion,” where the agent prefers to remove items from a menu if their ex ante value is below a threshold. We show that higher choice aversion, as measured by dislike of bigger menus, also corresponds to an increased preference for putting off decisions as late as possible.     

Jia’s The Chinese Version

Abstract

The Chinese Character Simplification Programme of 1955–1957 that remains a national standard by force of law in the People’s Republic of China, not only degraded the aesthetic properties of the Chinese written character, but also hindered literacy by means of a haphazard formal reduction of the number of strokes, and by eliminating two-thirds of characters from the lexicon of those allowed for publication. In The Chinese Version painting series by Jia (b.1979), the artist arranges Chinese characters according to formal rather than semantic criteria, in order to generate by means of their juxtaposition, abstract or figurative patterns. Each character may retain its individual meaning, but not its function as a sequential syntagm. This strategy invests the characters with a formal aspect to ‘return’ that which was mutilated by the Simplification Programme. As the Simplification Programme’s formal changes ended characters’ role as image-signs, the artist’s choice to present each work as a painting alludes to their lost image capacity while appearing to imitate the outward aspect of printed characters, thereby implicitly turning against itself the pretext of character simplification for the sake of efficiency.     

Wiki-worthy: collective judgment of candidate notability

The use of socio-technical data to predict elections is a growing research area. We argue that election prediction research suffers from under-specified theoretical models that do not properly distinguish between ‘poll-like’ and ‘prediction market-like’ mechanisms understand findings. More specifically, we argue that, in systems with strong norms and reputational feedback mechanisms, individuals have market-like incentives to bias content creation toward candidates they expect will win. We provide evidence for the merits of this approach using the creation of Wikipedia pages for candidates in the 2010 US and UK national legislative elections. We find that Wikipedia editors are more likely to create Wikipedia pages for challengers who have a better chance of defeating their incumbent opponent and that the timing of these page creations coincides with periods when collective expectations for the candidate's success are relatively high.     

New procedures of ergonomics design in a large oil company

This study presents the challenge involved in the negotiation and construction of a standard process in a major petroleum company that has the purpose of guiding the implementation of ergonomic studies in the development of projects, systemising the implementation of ergonomics design. The standard was created by a multi-disciplinary working group consisting of specialists in ergonomics, who work in a number of different areas of the company. The objective was to guide "how to" undertake ergonomics in all projects, taking into consideration the development of the ergonomic appraisals of work. It also established that all the process, in each project phase, should be accompanied by a specialist in ergonomics. This process as an innovation in the conception of projects in this company, signals a change of culture, and, for this reason requires broad dissemination throughout the several company leadership levels, and training of professionals in projects of ergonomics design. An implementation plan was also prepared and approved by the corporate governance, complementing the proposed challenge. In this way, this major oil company will implement new procedures of ergonomics design to promote health, safety, and wellbeing of the workforce, besides improving the performance and reliability of its systems and processes.