Using Puppets to Elicit Talk During Interviews on Engineering with Young Children

Interviewing can be tricky at best, but with a younger audience (\u3c 5 years) there are some additional barriers that inhibit the interview process such as shyness, short attention span,lack of vocabulary, and level of parental guidance (Clark, 1999). When in an interview, a child may try to ‘second guess’ what the researcher wants them to say, especially if they believe that the interviewer may already know the answer (Gallop, 2000). Additionally young children tend to give monosyllabic answers to open ended questions (Tizard &Hughes, 1984), and might require more prompting than adults.One aide that has been recently investigated is the use of puppets to elicit children’s talk for research (Epstein et al., 2008). Puppets have been shown to: • Decrease children’s fears of the interview process • Lower anxiety levels • Help assess children’s knowledge • Help children to adjust to environment • Provide effective communication and teaching tools. Most research focuses on puppets within clinical contexts, but recently the use has been extended towards other applications such as qualitative interviews (Epstein et al., 2008),mathematical lessons (Cauley, 1988), promoting science engagement (Naylor et al,2007), and teaching phonics (Johnston & Watson, ???). However, there has not been any documented use of this research approach within engineering education.There are three common interview techniques involving puppets in practice: the Alien Puppet Interview (API) (Krott and Nicoladis, 2005), the Puppet Interview (PI) (Cassidy,1988; Verschueren, Buyuk and Marcoen, 2001) and the Berkeley Puppet Interview (BPI) (Measelle et al., 1998; Ablow et al., 1999). Each technique has a different strategy depending on how the child interacts with the puppet.As part of a larger project, children ages 3-5 were interviewed about an engineering task that they had just completed with their parents during a museum event. The interview was a hybrid mix of the Alien Puppet Interview and the Puppet Interview, depending on the way in which the child interviewee chose to interact with the puppet. Thirty interviews were analyzed for children’s interaction, quality of answers, and behavior toward the puppet.In the paper, we will provide more details about the specific interview approach used for our study (as well as insights into how children responded to this interview approach) in addition to a larger discussion of the three interview techniques in order to provide a research methodology resource for other pre-college engineering education researchers to use

Warming of Central European lakes and their response to the 1980s climate regime shift

Lake surface water temperatures (LSWTs) are sensitive to atmospheric warming and have previously been shown to respond to regional changes in the climate. Using a combination of in situ and simulated surface temperatures from 20 Central European lakes, with data spanning between 50 and ∼100 years, we investigate the long-term increase in annually averaged LSWT. We demonstrate that Central European lakes are warming most in spring and experience a seasonal variation in LSWT trends. We calculate significant LSWT warming during the past few decades and illustrate, using a sequential t test analysis of regime shifts, a substantial increase in annually averaged LSWT during the late 1980s, in response to an abrupt shift in the climate. Surface air temperature measurements from 122 meteorological stations situated throughout Central Europe demonstrate similar increases at this time. Climatic modification of LSWT has numerous consequences for water quality and lake ecosystems. Quantifying the response of LSWT increase to large-scale and abrupt climatic shifts is essential to understand how lakes will respond in the future

Parasites of non-native freshwater fishes introduced into england and wales suggest enemy release and parasite acquisition

When non-native species are introduced into a new range, their parasites can also be introduced, with these potentially spilling-over into native hosts. However, in general, evidence suggests that a high proportion of their native parasites are lost during introduction and infections by some new parasites from the native range might occur, potentially resulting in parasite spill-back to native species. These processes were investigated here using parasite surveys and literature review on seven non-native freshwater fishes introduced into England and Wales. Comparison of the mean numbers of parasite species and genera per population for each fish species England andWaleswith their native ranges revealed\9 % of the native parasite fauna were present in their populations in England and Wales. There was no evidence suggesting these introduced parasites had spilled over into sympatric native fishes. The non-native fishes did acquire parasites following their introduction, providing potential for parasite spill-back to sympatric fishes, and resulted in non-significant differences in overall mean numbers of parasites per populations between the two ranges. Through this acquisition, the non-native fishes also had mean numbers of parasite species and genera per population that were not significantly different to sympatric native fishes. Thus, the non-native fishes in England and Wales showed evidence of enemy release, acquired new parasites following introduction providing potential for spill-back, but showed no evidence of parasite spill-over