A Study of the Growth and Decline of North Dakota Towns, 1920-1970

Differences in percentage population change among North Dakota incorporated places of 250 to 2,500 inhabitants for the period 1920- 1970 were first explained statistically by means of spatial and economic variables. Additional insight concerning town population change was gained by a more detailed examination of selected towns, in which the number and type of business functions were stressed. For each decade in the period 1920-1970, the relationship between percentage population change of towns with populations between 250 and 2,500 and four independent variables was measured by means of a stepwise multiple correlation and regression procedure. It was found that a positive relationship significant at the 5% level or better existed between population change of towns and distance to the nearest town of equal or larger population for the first four decades studied. Distance to the nearest urban center had a positive relationship to town population change in the 1920s and 1930s; a negative one in the 1950s and 1960s. Town population size was related to population change only during the two most recent decades. Change in value of farm land and buildings had a significant, positive relationship to population change during the 1920s and 1930s. Additional variables tested included per capita retail sales tax receipts of towns, which were positively related to town population change in the 1950s and 1960s. Status as a county seat was determined by Chi-square tests to have been related to population gain during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Although many significant relation ships were found, the low degree of explanation provided by the variables (generally less than 20%) suggested that town population change is a complex phenomenon. Case studies of four North Dakota, towns were made in which the varying economic bases of the towns were stressed. Two of the towns, Maddock and Hunter, were found to be farm trade centers whose businesses and ultimately population were based on providing goods and services to the surrounding farm population. Beulah was shown to depend both on agriculture and on mining. Marmarth, a former railroad division point in an area with sparse farm population, lost most of its inhabitants because it had no economic base to replace the railroad

Nurse-Physician Collaboration and Nurse Satisfaction

The purpose of this study was two-fold: (a) to describe nurses\u27 perception of collaborative practice behaviors with physicians in a 529 bed mid-western acute care hospital setting and to relate those findings to nurses\u27 satisfaction, and (b) to describe the perceptions of collaborative practice behaviors reported by physicians. The study was a cross-sectional descriptive correlational design. The convenience sample included 264 nurses, 72 staff physicians and 22 medical residents in a sample setting of medical-surgical, critical care, pediatrics, women\u27s health services, emergency, and surgical services departments. The study used the Collaborative Practice Scales (CPS) to measure nurse and physician perceptions of collaborative practice behaviors and the Work Quality Indoc (WQI) to measure nurse satisfaction with their work and work environment. The hypothesis was tested utilizing ANOVA followed by a Scheffe\u27s test on all significant results. A statistically significant relationship was found between medical-surgical nurses\u27 perception of nurse-physician collaboration and nurse satisfaction

In modeling digital learning, remember pictorial competence.

Barr and Kirkorian summarize decades of research about young children’s learning and transfer from screen media, offer a new theoretical model of factors involved in early multimedia learning, and suggest a future research agenda to study learning from commercial media products “in the wild” of everyday family life outside the lab. In this commentary, the authors offer background on the development of symbolic understanding and “pictorial competence” for young children’s learning from screen media and attempt to deepen the discussion of cognitive factors and individual differences that affect early learning

Page and screen: Storybook features that promote parent-child talk during shared reading

The purpose of this study was to systematically vary the medium used for shared reading (digital versus print), the presence of an audio narration feature, and the inclusion of a character offering conversational prompts to identify their impact on parent-child language. In a randomized experimental design, 67 children (2.75-5.10 years old) shared a book with a parent twice. Built-in conversational prompts were effective in increasing the quantity and quality of extratextual language and conversation. There was no evidence that the book being digital in format nor having automatically-playing narration decreased language or conversation quality compared to reading the print version. Based on this study, it appears that carefully designed digital books, including those with narration, provide similar opportunities for engaging in high-quality shared reading as print books. Parents may wish to select digital books with built-in prompts to provide even greater opportunities and support for rich conversation

The role of demonstrator familiarity and language cues on infant imitation from television

An imitation procedure was used to investigate the impact of demonstrator familiarity and language cues on infant learning from television. Eighteen-month-old infants watched two pre-recorded videos showing an adult demonstrating a sequence of actions with two sets of stimuli. Infants' familiarity with the demonstrator and the language used during the demonstration varied as a function of experimental condition. Immediately after watching each video, infants' ability to reproduce the target actions was assessed. A highly familiar demonstrator did not enhance infants' performance. However, the addition of a narrative, developed from mothers' naturalistic description of the event, facilitated learning from an unfamiliar demonstrator. We propose that the differential effect of demonstrator familiarity and language cues may reflect the infants' ability to distinguish between important and less important aspects in a learning situation. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Cartographic and projective techniques for a Corvallis area electrical load forecast

The Corvallis area study is made to help evaluate the local need for additional system capacity ten years in the future. The product of the study is an areally detailed projection of electrical demand. The demand is derived in two steps: the location, nature, and intensity of specific land uses are predicted, and usage indicators are applied to those activities. The usage indicators are not developed in this paper. The projections of land use are based in part on the capacities for and constraints on development as outlined in zoning ordinances and the Corvallis Comprehensive Plan. Other determinants of growth potential include location, ownership, available services, and an impression of the future rate and direction of urban expansion. The overall projection is the sum of 464 small-area projections. These are made with a limited use of extrapolation and an extensive use of informed opinion--contacts with planners, developers, and administrators being the primary external guidance. The projections of housing units are converted to population figures and are compared with an existing population projection, and they are found to be in reasonable accord. The results of the project are presented cartographically, showing the expected growth in both population and electrical demand

An Enhanced eBook Facilitates Parent-Child Talk During Shared Reading by Families of Low Socioeconomic Status

Language input plays a key role in children’s language development, but children from families of low socioeconomic status often get much less input compared to more advantaged peers. In “dialogic reading” (Whitehurst et al., 1988), parents are trained to ask children open-ended questions while reading, which effectively builds expressive vocabulary in at-risk children. In the research reported here, a dialogic questioning character in a narrated eBook provided effortless support for parents to ask questions while reading. Parents of lower socioeconomic status talked more than three times as much with their children using significantly more utterances and unique words when using the eBook with questioner, compared to parents using the unmodified eBook. Children also talked much more, with more varied language, in this condition. By the end of the session, parents took over asking their own unprompted questions and engaged in more conversational turns with their children. This intervention has promise to increase parent-child conversation to help bridge the word gap

Can one written word mean many things? Prereaders’ assumptions about the stability of written words’ meanings

Results of three experiments confirmed previous findings that in a moving word task, prereaders 3 to 5 years of age judge as if the meaning of a written word changes when it moves from a matching to a nonmatching toy (e.g., when the word “dog” moves from a dog to a boat). We explore under what circumstances children make such errors, we identify new conditions under which children were more likely correctly to treat written words’ meanings as stable: when the word was placed alongside a nonmatching toy without having been alongside a matching toy previously, when two words were moved from a matching toy to a nonmatching toy, and when children were asked to change what the print said. Under these conditions, children more frequently assumed that physical forms had stable meanings as they do with other forms of external representation

Do very young children learn from video?

This paper summarizes research on infants' early behavior toward televised images, and explores a "video deficit" in toddlers' learning from video. A shift in recognizing video images as representations allows older children to learn educational content from television programs and to distinguish realistic programming (e.g., the news) from fantasy (e.g., cartoons and dramas)