Adjustment and Developmental Outcomes of Students Engaged in Service Learning

In an effort to better understand the psychosocial and adjustment processes experienced by college students engaged in service learning, 22 randomly selected reflection journals were content-analyzed from a class of 44 child development students who had been engaged in service learning in a variety settings. Three of the themes that emerged in the journals involved students: feeling awkward during the first visits; feeling uncertain about redirecting children\u27s misbehavior; and having ambivalent feelings when bringing their service learning experiences to an end. The coping mechanisms and resources upon which students draw to successfully grow beyond these initial challenges are discussed, as well as practical suggestions for facilitators of the service learning experience

Methods of Supporting Students\u27 Critical Reflection in Courses Incorporating Service Learning

Service learning seeks to provide students with real-life, community-based experiences related to the content offered in the class room

College Student Affection Issues in Child and Family Focused Community Service-learning Settings

This article offers an examination of the ways in which college students manage and cope with client displays of physical or emotional affection toward them during their work in child- or farnily-related service learning placements. This paper also offers suggestions for assisting college students who may encounter displays of affection during their work with children. In order to explore this topic, a convenience sample of 77 college student service learning journals were collected and content-analyzed for common or recurrent themes across the journals. Analyses of the journals revealed that both men and women struggle to find appropriate responses to client affection

Colorblind Ideology and Perceptions of Minority Children During a Fictionalized Parent-Child Discipline Scene

Belief in colorblind ideology among 200 social service providers and its associations with their evaluations of a fictionalized minority family were examined. Perceptions of the family in the first scenes of the movie Crooklyn included the mother’s competency, abusiveness, supportiveness, and irresponsibility, as well as her children’s respectfulness, obedience, lack of control, and aggressiveness. Colorblind ideology was operationalized as participants’ reported degree of belief that differences should be ignored when encountering others. Significant associations were found between degree of belief in ignoring differences and perceptions of the children as aggressive and out-of-control. Therefore, as the tendency to believe in ignoring differences increased, the tendency to see the Crooklyn children as aggressive and out-of- control also increased. Imposing colorblind ideologies when evaluating minority children may be associated with increasingly negative perceptions, and therefore may not be in the children’s best interest. Implications for improving social service-provision also are discussed

Phase-Locked Signals Elucidate Circuit Architecture of an Oscillatory Pathway

This paper introduces the concept of phase-locking analysis of oscillatory cellular signaling systems to elucidate biochemical circuit architecture. Phase-locking is a physical phenomenon that refers to a response mode in which system output is synchronized to a periodic stimulus; in some instances, the number of responses can be fewer than the number of inputs, indicative of skipped beats. While the observation of phase-locking alone is largely independent of detailed mechanism, we find that the properties of phase-locking are useful for discriminating circuit architectures because they reflect not only the activation but also the recovery characteristics of biochemical circuits. Here, this principle is demonstrated for analysis of a G-protein coupled receptor system, the M3 muscarinic receptor-calcium signaling pathway, using microfluidic-mediated periodic chemical stimulation of the M3 receptor with carbachol and real-time imaging of resulting calcium transients. Using this approach we uncovered the potential importance of basal IP3 production, a finding that has important implications on calcium response fidelity to periodic stimulation. Based upon our analysis, we also negated the notion that the Gq-PLC interaction is switch-like, which has a strong influence upon how extracellular signals are filtered and interpreted downstream. Phase-locking analysis is a new and useful tool for model revision and mechanism elucidation; the method complements conventional genetic and chemical tools for analysis of cellular signaling circuitry and should be broadly applicable to other oscillatory pathways