Motives, Conflicts and Mediation in Home Engineering Design Challenges as Family Pedagogical Practices (Fundamental)

Much is known about the importance of the family as a learning environment in STEM education [1], but less is known about conducting engineering design challenge activities in home environments. Although many studies highlight the development of STEM concepts and skills, more research is needed to understand how to support this development through caregiver-child interactions at home. This study aims to (a) investigate caregiver-child interactions that support the development of child(ren)’s STEM conceptualizations and skills in engineering design challenge activities within family pedagogical practices, and (b) examine caregivers’ pedagogical expectations within family pedagogy. Guided by Vygotsky’s cultural-historical view, the authors analyze child(ren)’s development of STEM conceptualizations and skills in parent-child interactions, with a focus on motives, conflicts, and mediation. Seven families with nine children (grades 1-5) participated in three to five engineering activities over six months. The research team sent at-home engineering kits that contained an instruction card, materials, and tools for engineering challenge activities in five engineering disciplines. Caregivers were instructed to video-record their engineering activities, creating approximately 100 hours of video data. Then, caregivers participated in in-depth online interviews about their pedagogical expectations in educating children, specifically in STEM education. Qualitative findings from the home engineering data indicated that conflicts occurred (a) between caregivers’ suggestions and children’s ideas, (b) in misalignments between children’s readiness to take risks and caregivers’ level of facilitation, and (c) between caregivers’ and children’s motives. From the in-depth interviews, caregivers’ narratives illustrated their pedagogical expectations in STEM learning as (a) broadening the child’s understanding of engineering and STEM domains, (b) developing independent learning skills through quality family time, and (c) nurturing thinking and problem-solving skills in daily conversations. For the first theme, caregivers commonly highlighted the value of failures and trial-and-error in lifelong education. Secondly, caregivers noted the importance of independent learning skills through their families’ life experiences. The final theme was caregivers’ awareness of the how their communities valued STEM skills

Rethinking China.s Path of Industrialization

This study shows that China.s post-1949 state-led industrialization has closely followed an underlying path that began in the late nineteenth century. It was initiated by pressing national defence needs and has since been motivated by the same and strong incentives for a faster catch-up with the West despite radical regime shifts. Government determined or influenced resource allocation benefited selected industries and hence nurtured vested interest groups connecting and integrating with the ruling elite, which have strengthened and sustained the path. This means that the path is inherently inefficient which is evidenced by a newly constructed dataset. Reform measures can only temporarily improve efficiency performance, but are unable to break the path in the absence of a genuine political democracy.government engineered industrialization, path dependence, central planning, economic reform, efficiency

Intermedia Substitutability and Market Demand by National Advertisers

We assess substitutable and complementary relationships among eight national advertising media classes, as well as the magnitude of their own-price elasticities. We use a translog demand model, whose parameters we estimate by three-stage least squares, based on 1960-94 annual U.S. data.We find aggregate demand by national advertisers for each of the eight media is own-price inelastic, and that cross-price elasticities suggest slightly more substitute than complementary relationships, although both are rather weak. These patterns are consistent with long prevailing institutional arrangements and media selection practices.

Health Care Developments in EU Member States: Regressing Trensds and Institutional Similarity?

Due to various structural pressures predictions of retrenchment and conformity of social policies have been legion, both in terms of expenditure and institutional set-up. Recent research has focused on changes in cash benefits. Comparative analyses of changes in services, the other pillar of social policy, have however so far been limited to a few countries. The purpose of this paper is to perform a diachronical cross-national analysis of health care services. We thus raise questions of decline and convergence of European health care systems. Contrary to previous claims we find that European health care systems are not particularly hit by retrenchment and convergence is absent in key health care dimensions, namely coverage, financing and provision. The empirical analysis is based on institutional indicators rather than expenditure levels. We utilize OECD Health Data and provide both a descriptive analysis and multi-level regressions.Health care; Citizenship rights; EU; welfare

The Charter and Anglophone Legal Theory, part II

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has generated not only new terrain over which discursive positions are mobilized, but it has catalysed theoretical reflection about law, society, state, and the self. Examining the implications of the Charter for Anglophone legal theory, the author conducts both a qualitative and quantitative survey of jurisprudential work on the Charter and concludes that the Charter\u27s impact on legal theory has been significant. The Charter has prompted expansion of the range of interdisciplinary influences, contextualized theoretical reflection, and made jurisprudence more engaged with and relevant to Canadian social life. The Charter also has facilitated a fragmentation or jurisprudential pluralism, reflective of underlying shifts in Canadian political discourse. The Charter\u27s most significant impact, however, will have been its impetus to transform theoretical engagement with the law in directions far removed from the stale confines of analytical positivism

Risk, Institutions and Growth: Why England and Not China?

We analyze the role of risk-sharing institutions in transitions to modern economies. Transitions requires individual-level risk-taking in pursuing productivity-enhancing activities including using and developing new knowledge. Individual-level, idiosyncratic risk implies that distinct risk-sharing institutions – even those providing the same level of insurance – can lead to different growth trajectories if they differently motivate risk-taking. Historically, risk sharing institutions were selected based on their cultural and institutional compatibility and not their unforeseen growth implications. We simulate our growth model incorporating England’s and China’s distinct pre-modern risk-sharing institutions. The model predicts a transition in England and not China even with equal levels of risk sharing. Under the clan-based Chinese institution, the relatively risk-averse elders had more control over technological choices implying lower risk-taking. Focusing on non-market institutions expands on previous growth-theoretic models to highlight that transitions can transpire even in the absence of exogenous productivity shocks or time-dependent state variables. Recognizing the role of non-market institutions in the growth process bridges the view that transitions are due to luck and the view that transitions are inevitable. Transitions transpire when ‘luck’ creates the conditions under which economic agents find it beneficial to make the choices leading to positive rates of technological change. Luck came in the form of historical processes leading to risk-sharing institutions whose unintended consequences encouraged productivity-enhancing risk-taking.institutions, risk, growth, development

The influence of groove on sexual attraction: Evidence for an effect of misattributed arousal in males but not females

First described by Schachter & Singer (1962), the phenomenon of misattributed arousal (arousal perceived as coming from a wrongly presumed source and irrelevantly influencing evaluations of it) has been widely documented, with two recent studies, Marin, Schober, Gingras, & Leder (2017) and Chang et al. (2021), providing suggestive evidence of music as a source of misattributed arousal with an enhancing effect on sexual attraction. The aim of the present study was to provide more unambiguous evidence of such a musical arousal effect. In an online experiment simulating a face-to-face dating event, participants (41 females and 43 males) rated the attractiveness of opposite-sex faces in a series of slideshows presented twice, once accompanied by a high-groove drum track and the other time by a low-groove drum track. They then rated the drum tracks for groove. While whole-sample analyses yielded no significant findings, subsample analyses showed that the groove ratings of the male participants, though not the female participants, positively predicted their attractiveness ratings, in partial support of the arousal hypothesis. We discuss possible reasons for the pattern of findings, including sex differences in groove response and more generally in the evaluation of cues of physiological arousal

Emotion and Language in Philosophy

In this chapter, we start by spelling out three important features that distinguish expressives—utterances that express emotions and other affects—from descriptives, including those that describe emotions (Section 1). Drawing on recent insights from the philosophy of emotion and value (2), we show how these three features derive from the nature of affects, concentrating on emotions (3). We then spell out how theories of non-natural meaning and communication in the philosophy of language allow claims that expressives inherit their meaning from specificities of emotions—namely, from being felt, evaluative attitudes toward propositional or non-propositional contents (4)