CCi digital futures 2014: the Internet in Australia

This report presents findings from the third survey of the Australian component of the World Internet Project. The survey was conducted in late 2013. This research is a project of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology. This report provides an overview of the study, presenting a broad picture of the Internet in Australia, with comparisons to our earlier 2007, 2009 and 2013 studies, and to the international findings of our partners in the World Internet Project. At the end of each section we have added some further analysis, examining aspects of the Australian data in more detail, and providing some international context using results from the findings of our international research partners. &nbsp

Use of High-Level Questioning to Increase Student Achievement in Reading

This action research project explored the impact of asking students higher-level questions during guided reading instruction to increase reading comprehension and engagement. The study took place with eight students in two different on grade-level guided reading groups in a second and a third grade classroom. Baseline data was collected before students were presented increasingly higher-level questions over the course of six-weeks and a post-assessment was given to monitor students’ growth in the areas of comprehension and engagement. Data collected during the study included comprehension pre and post assessments with scoring rubric, pre and post reading attitude surveys, weekly teacher observation checklists, and teacher observation journals. Week by week student comprehension engagement increased and at the completion of the intervention, students demonstrated an overall increased ability to engage with and comprehend what they had read. The intervention of introducing higher-level questioning into guided reading instruction proved effective and will continue to be implemented as instructional best-practice in each of the participating teachers’ classrooms. Keywords: higher-level questioning, reading comprehension, reading engagemen

The Regional Response to Federal Funding for Bicycle and Pedestrian Projects

Examines the efficacy of federal funding for non-motorized modes of transportation based on funding patterns across metropolitan regions, case studies of policies and projects, and an analysis of the funding's impact on bicycling and walking behavior

Facilitating Pre-Service Teachers to Engage Emergent Bilinguals in Productive Struggle

This study utilized a multiple case study with qualitative research to examine how Pre-service teachers (PSTs) might engage Emergent Bilinguals (EBs) in productive struggle—grappling to solve problems (Warshauer, 2015). The researchers created a rubric based on Warshauer’s (2015) case study to record the types of questions PSTs asked as they tutored fourth grade EBs. Warshauer (2015) claimed PSTs should allow students more wait time and ask questions. She referred to such questions as affordance and probing guidance, which facilitates productive struggle. In order to discover more about the PSTs’ thinking, the researchers interviewed the PSTs before and after their first, third, and seventh lesson. The researchers’ findings are that the PSTs struggled to incorporate more affordance and probing guidance-based questions as the semester progressed. However, PSTs use of telling based questions decreased during the semester. Another finding was two of the EBs spoke only English at the beginning of the semester, but later used code switching during the lessons. Perhaps the students felt more comfortable with their surroundings, and speaking in Spanish helped facilitate them to engage in productive struggle. Furthermore, PSTs utilized culturally relevant teaching strategies during their lessons and created an environment to encourage positive mindsets for learning mathematics. Implications are teacher educators should teach PSTs how to engage all students in productive struggle

Understanding strategic information use during emotional expression judgments in Williams syndrome

Detailed analysis of expression judgments in Williams syndrome reveals that successful emotion categorization need not reflect ‘classic’ information processing strategies. These individuals draw upon a distinct set of featural details to identify happy and fearful faces that differ from those used by typically developing comparison groups: children and adults. The diagnostic visual information is also notably less interlinked in Williams syndrome, consistent with reports of diminished processing of configural information during face identity judgments. These results prompt reconsideration of typical models of face expertise by revealing that an age-appropriate profile of expression performance can be achieved via alternative routes

Distinct profiles of information-use characterize identity judgments in children and low-expertise adults

Face processing abilities vary across the lifespan: increasing across childhood and adolescence, peaking around 30 years of age, and then declining. Despite extensive investigation, researchers have yet to identify qualitative changes in face processing during development that can account for the observed improvements on laboratory tests. The current study constituted the first detailed characterization of face processing strategies in a large group of typically developing children and adults (N=200) using a novel adaptation of the Bubbles reverse correlation technique (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001). Resultant classification images reveal a compelling age-related shift in strategic information-use during participants’ judgments of face identity. This shift suggests a move from an early reliance upon high spatial frequency details around the mouth, eye-brow and jaw-line in young children (~8yrs) to an increasingly more interlinked approach, focused upon the eye region and the center of the face in older children (~11yrs) and adults. Moreover, we reveal that the early vs. late phases of this developmental trajectory correspond with the profiles of information-use observed in weak vs. strong adult face processors. Together, these results provide intriguing new evidence for an important functional role for strategic information-use in the development of face expertise

Should I Trust You? Autistic Traits Predict Reduced Appearance-Based Trust Decisions

Facial impressions of trustworthiness guide social decisions in the general population, as shown by financial lending in economic Trust Games. As an exception, autistic boys fail to use facial impressions to guide trust decisions, despite forming typical facial trustworthiness impressions (Ewing et al., 2015). Here, we tested whether this dissociation between forming and using facial impressions of trustworthiness extends to neurotypical men with high levels of autistic traits. Forty-six Caucasian men completed a multi-turn Trust Game, a facial trustworthiness impressions task, the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, and two Theory of Mind tasks. As hypothesized, participants’ levels of autistic traits had no observed effect on the impressions formed, but negatively predicted the use of those impressions in trust decisions. Thus, the dissociation between forming and using facial impressions of trustworthiness extends to the broader autism phenotype. More broadly, our results identify autistic traits as an important source of individual variation in the use of facial impressions to guide behaviour. Interestingly, failure to use these impressions could potentially represent rational behaviour, given their limited validity

Appearance-based trust processing in schizophrenia

Objectives: Schizophrenia is characterized by impaired social interactions and altered trust. In the general population, trust is often based on facial appearance, with limited validity but enormous social consequences. The aim was to examine trust processing in schizophrenia and specifically to examine how people with schizophrenia use facial appearance as well as actual partner fairness to guide trusting decisions. Design: An experimental economic game study. Methods: Here, we tested how patients with schizophrenia and control participants (each N = 24) use facial trustworthiness appearance and partner fairness behaviour to guide decisions in a multi-round Trust Game. In the Trust Game, participants lent money to ‘partners’ whose facial appearance was either untrustworthy or trustworthy, and who either played fairly or unfairly. Clinical symptoms were measured as well as explicit trustworthiness impressions. Results: Overall, the patients with schizophrenia showed unimpaired explicit facial trustworthiness impressions and unimpaired facial appearance biases in the Trust Game. Crucially, patients and controls significantly differed so that the patients with schizophrenia did not learn to discriminate in the Trust Game based on actual partner fairness, unlike control participants. Conclusion: A failure to discriminate trust has important implications for everyday functioning in schizophrenia, as forming accurate trustworthiness beliefs is an essential social skill. Critically, without relying on more valid trust cues, people with schizophrenia may be especially susceptible to the misleading effect of appearance when making trusting decisions. Practitioner points: Findings. People with schizophrenia made very similar facial trustworthiness impressions to healthy controls and also used facial appearance to guide trust decisions similarly to controls. However, the patient group were less able to explicitly distinguish between fair and unfair partners based on their behaviour compared with the control group. Moreover, people with schizophrenia failed to use actual partner fairness to guide their financial decisions in the Trust Game, unlike controls, and this impairment was specific to a social task. People with schizophrenia may be particularly reliant on facial appearance when trusting others, as they may struggle to incorporate more valid trustworthiness information in their decision-making, such as actual partner fairness

Let\u27s talk about antibiotics: A randomised trial of two interventions to reduce antibiotic misuse

BACKGROUND: Children with acute respiratory tract infections (ARTIs) receive ≈11.4 million unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions annually. A noted contributor is inadequate parent-clinician communication, however, efforts to reduce overprescribing have only indirectly targeted communication or been impractical. OBJECTIVES: Compare two feasible (higher vs lower intensity) interventions for enhancing parent-clinician communication on the rate of inappropriate antibiotic prescribing. DESIGN: Multisite, parallel group, cluster randomised comparative effectiveness trial. Data collected between March 2017 and March 2019. SETTING: Academic and private practice outpatient clinics. PARTICIPANTS: Clinicians (n=41, 85% of eligible approached) and 1599 parent-child dyads (ages 1-5 years with ARTI symptoms, 71% of eligible approached). INTERVENTIONS: All clinicians received 20 min ARTI diagnosis and treatment education. Higher intensity clinicians received an additional 50 min communication skills training. All parents viewed a 90 second antibiotic education video. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: Inappropriate antibiotic treatment was assessed via blinded medical record review by study clinicians and a priori defined as prescriptions for the wrong diagnosis or use of the wrong agent. Secondary outcomes were revisits, adverse drug reactions (both assessed 2 weeks after the visit) and parent ratings of provider communication, shared decision-making and visit satisfaction (assessed at end of the visit on Likert-type scales). RESULTS: Most clinicians completed the study (n=38, 93%), were doctors (n=25, 66%), female (n=30, 78%) and averaged 8 years in practice. All parent-child dyad provided data for the main outcome (n=855 (54%) male, n=1043 (53%) CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Rate of inappropriate prescribing was low in both arms. Clinician education coupled with parent education may be sufficient to yield low inappropriate antibiotic prescribing rates. The absence of a significant difference between groups indicates that communication principles previously thought to drive inappropriate prescribing may need to be re-examined or may not have as much of an impact in practices where prescribing has improved in recent years. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT03037112

Atypical information-use in children with autism spectrum disorder during judgments of child and adult face identity

Unusual patterns of fixation behaviour in individuals with autism spectrum disorder during face tasks hint at atypical processing strategies that could contribute to diminished face expertise in this group. Here, we use the Bubbles reverse correlation technique to directly examine face-processing strategies during identity judgments in children with and without autism, and typical adults. Results support a qualitative atypicality in autistic face processing. We identify clear differences not only in the specific features relied upon for face judgments, but also more generally in the extent to which they demonstrate a flexible and adaptive profile of information-use