Retrieval of episodic versus generic information: Does the order of recall affect the amount and accuracy of details reported by children about repeated events?

Children (N = 157) 4- to 8-years old participated 1 (single) or 4 times (repeated) in an interactive event. Across each condition, half were questioned a week later about the only or a specific occurrence of the event (Depth-first), and then about what usually happens. Half were prompted in the reverse order (Breadth-first). Children with repeated experience who first were asked about what usually happens reported more event-related information overall than those asked about an occurrence first. All children used episodic language when describing an occurrence; however children with repeated-event experience used episodic language less often when describing what usually happens than did those with single experience. Accuracy rates did not differ between conditions. Implications for theories of repeated-event memory are discussed

Low German Mennonite Experiences in Alternative Education Programs in Southwestern Ontario

Low German Speaking (LGS) Mennonites have had a tumultuous relationship with Canadian educational institutions in the past, resulting in many from the community migrating to Mexico in the 1920s. Since the 1950s, LGS Mennonites from Mexico and South America have been migrating back to Canada, with over 40,000 making their homes in Ontario. Many in Ontario, however, still have misgivings about public education. With such a large presence in Ontario, Ontario schools need to make sure that they are inclusive places for this minority group. This MRP utilizes open-ended interviews to hear the experiences and views of Low German Speaking (LGS) Mennonite men in alternative education programs in Ontario. This MRP uncovers a better understanding of LGS Mennonite views, both positive and negative, about alternative education programs, as well as their views on mainstream education, and their desire for private schools. It also sheds light on the needs of teachers in these alternative programs, and provides recommendations for the programs. By having a better understanding of LGS Mennonite views on alternative education programs and education in general, schools can become places that LGS students and their families regard as inclusive, safe, and reflective of their unique experiences and identity

Understanding Policy for Newcomer Canadians with Emerging Print Literacy in Ontario Schools

Canada continues to be a nation of immigration where newcomer children arrive with a wide range of schooling and literacy backgrounds. This article explores the discourses of two Ontario Ministry of Education documents pertaining to students who are new to Canada and may have emerging print literacy in any language: “Supporting English Language Learners with Limited Prior Schooling – A practical guide for Ontario educators Grades 3 – 12” (2008) and “Policies and Procedures for Ontario Elementary and Secondary Schools, Kindergarten to Grade 12” (2007). Through an analysis that incorporates multiliteracies and cultural capital, the documents were analyzed for how they framed the students, how they encouraged the incorporation of students’ language repertoire, and how they discuss racism. The themes that arose from this analysis included discourses of adherence to national languages, use of students’ home languages as educational supports in the classroom, omission of any discussion of race, and Canada as the saving nation

Sources of Unreliable Testimony from Children

We distilled research findings on sources of unreliable testimony from children into four principles that capture how the field of forensic developmental psychology conceptualizes this topic. The studies selected to illustrate these principles address three major questions: (a) how do young children perform in eyewitness studies, (b) why are some children less accurate than others, and (c) what phenomena generate unreliable testimony? Throughout our research, our focus is on factors other than lying that produce inaccurate or seemingly inconsistent autobiographical reports.Collectively, this research has shown that (a) children’s eyewitness accuracy is highly dependent on context, (b) neurological immaturity makes children vulnerable to errors under some circumstances, and (c) some children are more swayed by external influences than others. Finally, the diversity of factors that can influence the reliability of children’s testimony dictates that (d) analyzing children’s testimony as if they were adults (i.e., with adult abilities, sensibilities, and motivations) will lead to frequent misunderstandings. It takes considerable knowledge of development—including information about developmental psycholinguistics, memory development, and the gradual emergence of cognitive control—to work with child witnesses and to analyze cases as there are many sources of unreliable testimony

A Hauntology of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook

Ce mémoire est une lecture hantologique du roman The Double Hook de Sheila Watson. Une telle lecture accorde une importance particulière aux fantômes et aux spectres qui se trouvent dans un texte ou qui le hantent. La hantologie étant un mouvement de pensée introduit par Jacques Derrida dans Spectres de Marx, cet ouvrage de Derrida se veut à la fois un point de départ et un site important de mon analyse auquel je retourne tout au long de ce mémoire. De plus, à travers les écrits de plusieurs spécialistes de la littérature canadienne-anglaise tels que Marlene Goldman, Margaret Turner et Cynthia Sugars, ce mémoire explore ce que le roman de Watson permet de découvrir à propos de ce qui hante l’imaginaire collectif canadien. Dans une première partie de ce mémoire, je concentre mon analyse sur les spectres textuels qui hantent les pages du roman de Watson. Les mythes autochtones, les récits chrétiens, les conventions du ‘Western’ et du roman régional, ainsi que les traces de plusieurs textes modernistes, semblent hanter la structure du roman et l’utilisation du langage qui crée l’histoire présentée par Watson. Dans le deuxième chapitre de ce mémoire, mon analyse se tourne vers les fantômes et les personnages fantomatiques qui existent dans le monde fictionnel créé par Watson. Les personnages tels que la mère de la famille Potter et Coyote sont fréquemment associés aux tropes du gothique et lus comme étant des spectres et ce sont de telles lectures qui ponctuent mon analyse de cet important roman.This thesis consists of a study of haunting, both at the textual and fictional level, in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook. In this hauntology of the novel, I explore the texts and cultural archetypes that haunt Watson’s novel as well as the ghosts, spectral figures, and haunting spaces and places represented in the novel. The theoretical movement of hauntology introduced by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx is a fundamental work in contemporary studies of the tropes of the Gothic and of a more generalized haunting that threatens notions of stability in our understanding of existence. Moreover, the haunting figures and texts in Watson’s novel subvert the heterogenous conception of a national discourse in Canada. The insights provided by scholars such as Marlene Goldman, Margaret Turner, and Cynthia Sugars, who are concerned with what Watson’s use of spectral figures in her narrative accomplishes in relation to writing the settler-colonizer nation of Canada, contribute to informing my argument about the place Watson’s novel occupies in the Canadian collective imaginary. In the first chapter of this thesis, I focus on the textual hauntings in the pages of Watson’s novel. Indigenous myths, Christian rituals, conventions of the western and regional novel, and modernist texts haunt the novel’s structure, content, and the language that constitutes it. In the second chapter of this thesis, I direct my attention towards the haunting and haunted figures that exist in the world created by Watson. In both chapters, my goal is to converse with the specters I see in the novel, to give a voice to what is not explicitly said and to find what lies between the fragments of Watson’s experimental prose

Interviewing Children about a Repeated Event: Does Prior Practice in Describing a Specific Instance of an Unrelated Repeated Event Improve the Amount and Quality of Elicited Information?

Five- to 6- and 7- to 8-year old (N=118) participated, in groups, in 4 sessions of the Laurier Activities over a 2-week period. The Laurier Activities centered around tasks such as listening to a story, completing a puzzle, mild physical exercise, relaxation, getting refreshed, and getting a surprise. Across sessions of these activities, instantiations of each task (e.g., the content of the story) were presented at different frequencies. Instantiations were fixed (the same every time), variable (changed every time), or “Hi/Lo” (the Hi frequency instantiation presented at 3 sessions, the Lo frequency instantiation presented at 1 session). Children were interviewed individually based on the NICHD protocol (Orbach et al., 2000) after a week delay. This protocol consists of rapport-building, ground rules, a practice phase in which the child is encouraged to report episodic details in response to open-ended questions, and a substantive phase. The current study focused on the Practice Phase of this interview and manipulated the type of practice in 3 between-subject conditions. In the experimental conditions, children practiced describing specific instances of a repeated autobiographical event (incident-specific practice), or what generally happens during the repeated event (general practice). Children in teh control condition described a single-experience, novel, event. Incident-specific practice benefited children most when recalling the Laurier Activities by encouraging them to disclose multiple incidents earlier, to recall more details, and to mention more differences among occurrences. Age by condition interactions suggested, however, that incident-specific practice led to a larger increase in performance over other conditions for younger children, while older children tended not to differ significantly across conditions on many variables of interest. Differences in accuracy across conditions were not significant for either age group. Findings are discussed in terms of practical implications for field interviewers

From Crime to Punishment: Moral Violations and the Social Function of Emotion

Punishments that are issued by the criminal justice system can enhance factors related to recidivism or contribute to offender rehabilitation. Investigating the ecological element of public attitudes toward punishment can inform efforts of second-order change for reducing recidivism and improving offender and community wellbeing (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Kelly, 1966; Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974). The form and duration of punishments can be influenced by the goals that punishments are meant to achieve. Punishment goals include retribution, incapacitation, individual deterrence, general deterrence, rehabilitation, and restorative justice. Each of the goals can lead to sanctions that impact offender behavior differently yet substantive predictors of when the different goals are pursued have yet to be discovered. An important stakeholder in the operations of the criminal justice system is the general public, and public opinions regarding sentencing practices can impact the punishments that are issued (Roberts, Stalans, Indermaur, & Hough, 2003). This paper will whether the moral characteristics of crimes along with social functional accounts of emotion can predict public support for the goals of punishment. Social functionalist accounts of emotion suggest that different emotions are elicited by appraisals that are made of events in the environment. Emotions then lead to different action tendencies for responding to the appraisals. The action tendencies are goal oriented and may take the form of punishment goals. The appraisal of a crime by the public can include an assessment of its moral qualities. Moral Foundations Theory suggests there are five categories of moral concern: harm, fairness, ingroup, authority, and purity (Haidt & Graham, 2007). This paper examined whether public appraisals of the five types of moral violation predict three appraisals of the offender: whether the offender committed an immoral act, whether the offender was morally incompetent, and whether the offender possessed an immoral nature. These secondary appraisals were then used to predict five emotions that people may experience when being informed of a crime: anger, fear, contempt, sympathy, and disgust. Finally, the emotions, each with their own goal-oriented action tendency, were used to predict the goals of punishment desired by the public. Predicted relations between the appraisals, emotions, and punishment goals were combined to form a path model. To test the model, 546 participants completed an online survey and a path analysis of the model was conducted. A majority of the predicted relations were significant; however, the model did not fit the data. Additional analyses were then performed to develop a model that did fit the data. Violations of authority and purity moral principles indirectly predicted support for all the punishment goals. Furthermore, while the appraisal of an immoral act lead to anger and support for retribution, the appraisal of an immoral nature lead to many emotions and support for a variety of punishment goals. Finally, fear did not predict support for any punishment goal, and sympathy for the offender predicted support for rehabilitation and restorative justice. The findings have implications for theory, interventions, and policy. The study shows that public attitudes toward criminal punishment can be predicted by moral concerns and emotions. Interventions could be developed to reduce the appraisal of an immoral nature, which was a strong predictor for the punitive punishment goals. Finally, the study presents ideas for how policies can be changed to reduce the size of the prison population. Punishments are necessary for responding to crime, but different punishments produced by different goals can differentially impact recidivism rates. Determining how perceptions of crime can lead to public support for various punishment goals can help inform systems change efforts at improving sentencing practices

Children’s ability to recall unique aspects of one occurrence of a repeated event

Preschool and school-age children’s memory and source monitoring were investigated by questioning them about one occurrence of a repeated lab event (n = 39). Each of the four occurrences had the same structure, but with varying alternatives for the specific activities and items presented. Variable details had a different alternative each time; hi/lo details presented the identical alternative three times and changed once. New details were present in one occurrence only and thus had no alternatives. Children more often confused variable, lo, and new details across occurrences than hi details. The 4- to 5-year-oldchildren were less accurate than 7- to 8-year-old children at attributing details to the correct occurrence when specifically asked. Younger children rarely recalled new details spontaneously, whereas 50% of the older children did and were above chance at attributing them to their correct occurrence. Results are discussed with reference to script theory, fuzzy-trace theory and the source-monitoring framework

How Do Interviewers and Children Discuss Individual Occurrences of Alleged Repeated Abuse in Forensic Interviews?

Police interviews (n = 97) with 5- to 13-year-olds alleging multiple incidents of sexual abuse were examined to determine how interviewers elicited and children recounted specific instances of abuse. Coders assessed the labels for individual occurrences that arose in interviews, recording who generated them, how they were used, and other devices to aid particularisation such as the use of episodic and generic language. Interviewers used significantly more temporal labels than did children. With age, children were more likely to generate labels themselves, but most children generated at least one label. In 66% of the cases, interviewers ignored or replaced children’s labels, and when they did so, children reported proportionately fewer episodic details. Children were highly responsive to the interviewers’ language style. Results indicate that appropriately trained interviewers can help children of all ages to provide the specific details often necessary to ensure successful prosecution