Redcay’s STEM-oscope Model: Connecting STEM Education, Social Robots, and Metacognition

A qualitative analysis of second grade students’ responses to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Challenge demonstrated that young learners use metacognitive skills throughout challenges (beginning, middle, and end). Students work through Engineer by Design (EbD) loop: (1) define and research a problem (2) brainstorm and explore possible solutions (3) develop a prototype (4) test (5) reflect (6) redesign (7) re-test. Social robots can be used throughout STEM challenges to model think alouds. Educators prepare the environment for young learners. Specially, educators find meaningful ways for students to connect concrete and abstract ideas. Five themes emerged from students’ responses to two STEM challenges. The theme with the highest frequency demonstrated that students were making real-world connections. The additional themes included metalinguistic awareness, problem solving strategies, social metacognitive thinking, and concrete to abstract thinking. The five themes were connected to metacognitive thinking, EbD loop, and 6 E’s of Science Inquiry. The themes were arranged in a new model called Redcay’s STEM-oscope Model used to describe the connection between STEM education, social robots, and metacognition. The research study adds to the existing body of research about STEM education by directly linking metacognitive skills, STEM education, social robots

Student Perceptions of Textbooks: Prior Behaviors and Beliefs Can Influence Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) Adoption Impact

Many Open Educational Resource (OER) and Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) studies explore cost savings, impact on learning outcomes, and student perceptions of the materials. While OER/ZTC research reports positive student perceptions (Brandle et al., 2019), textbook research reports negative student perceptions of digital textbooks (Behnke, 2018). This study explores student buying behavior and perceptions of textbooks, finding that perceptions toward the usefulness of materials is high when access to materials is high. Given this student perception, textbook purchasing is likely related to outside factors. This study adds to the growing body of research about how OER and ZTC may influence student costs and access to course materials, finding that student attitude toward course materials needs to be considered alongside adoption

Look at this: the neural correlates of initiating and responding to bids for joint attention

When engaging in joint attention, one person directs another person's attention to an object (Initiating Joint Attention, IJA), and the second person's attention follows (Responding to Joint Attention, RJA). As such, joint attention must occur within the context of a social interaction. This ability is critical to language and social development; yet the neural bases for this pivotal skill remain understudied. This paucity of research is likely due to the challenge in acquiring functional MRI data during a naturalistic, contingent social interaction. To examine the neural bases of both IJA and RJA we implemented a dual-video set-up that allowed for a face-to-face interaction between subject and experimenter via video during fMRI data collection. In each trial, participants either followed the experimenter's gaze to a target (RJA) or cued the experimenter to look at the target (IJA). A control condition, solo attention (SA), was included in which the subject shifted gaze to a target while the experimenter closed her eyes. Block and event-related analyses were conducted and revealed common and distinct regions for IJA and RJA. Distinct regions included the ventromedial prefrontal cortex for RJA and intraparietal sulcus and middle frontal gyrus for IJA (as compared to SA). Conjunction analyses revealed overlap in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC) and right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) for IJA and RJA (as compared to SA) for the event analyses. Functional connectivity analyses during a resting baseline suggest joint attention processes recruit distinct but interacting networks, including social-cognitive, voluntary attention orienting, and visual networks. This novel experimental set-up allowed for the identification of the neural bases of joint attention during a real-time interaction and findings suggest that whether one is the initiator or responder, the dMPFC and right pSTS, are selectively recruited during periods of joint attention

The Impact of Gender Identity, Medical Transition, and Other Substances on Marijuana Use for Transgender Adults

Transgender individuals have been identified as having greater rates of substance use. Previous research often focused on the intersection of HIV risk and substance use on specific age ranges or on how minority stress and discrimination relate to substance use. Using data from the 2015 United States Transgender Survey, our study is one of the first to explore the relationship among gender identity, age, the role of medical transition, and the use of marijuana within the transgender community. A deeper understanding of the relationship of these variables will benefit the transgender community by allowing for more thorough and accurate assessment protocols for individuals seeking medical transition. Our study used descriptive statistics to examine the intersection of gender identity, age, and use of alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana. ANOVAs were completed to determine significant impact of gender identity, age, cigarette and alcohol use, and medical transition on the use of marijuana. Significantly, we found that 37% of marijuana use can be predicted by gender identity, age, medical transition, and alcohol and cigarette use. Individuals who experienced any surgical transition reported significantly more marijuana use compared with individuals with no history of surgical transition. Our study highlights the need for more in-depth research about the complicated factors that relate to the impact of transition-related medical care and the intersection of gender identity and age

"The Long-Defended Gate": Juvenilia, the Real Child, and the Aesthetics of Innocence, 1858-1939

Scholars frequently protest against reference to the real child in relation to adult-authored children’s literature. My dissertation exposes the fundamental flaw in extending this injunction to the literary production of real children. By recovering the wildly popular, critically acclaimed and bestselling juvenilia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I contend that child-authored texts make manifest individual children’s absorption and manipulation of culture. Although critics such as Beverly Lyon Clark aptly note a growing bifurcation of children’s and adult’s literature at the turn of the century, I argue that adult and child authors alike participated in the construction of the “real child” as a trope of literary representation. In highlighting the centrality of the child’s individualistic voice to both juvenilia’s success and canonical literature’s innovations, however, I resist literary-historical narratives that characterize the era of the Cult of the Child as one straightforwardly invested in childhood innocence. Instead, I claim that authors such as Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mark Twain joined the contemporary critics of child writers such as Marjory Fleming and Opal Whiteley in promoting a highly paradoxical aesthetics of innocence integral to the pursuit of narrative authenticity. I illustrate how the co-existence of idealized notions and pragmatic concerns regarding children in this time rendered the “long-defended gate” of childhood a prized but flexible boundary between innocence and experience. In keeping with such developments as the play movement, child study, and child-centered education, adults not only perceived children’s precocious talents as directly dependent upon their naiveté, but also went to great lengths to school children in this natural state. By reading juvenilia as children’s literature, however, I offer an interpretative methodology that resists Romantic binaries positing adults’ and children’s knowledge as distinctive from one another. Far from supporting Jacqueline Rose’s thesis that literature “colonizes” children, I assert that juvenilia marketed to young readers reveal the ways in which real children may actively engage with constructions of innocence and overcome the “impossible” power imbalance between children’s literature and children

Ludus Reading and RoboKind™ Robots Increase Early Literacy Rates

The research study aimed to examine the influence of a new model for reading instruction combining Ludus Reading and RoboKind™ Robots on first-grade students’ phonics skills and attitudes toward reading. Ludus Reading phonics instruction involves explicit and systematic lessons with underpinnings in play-based, technology, and multisensory techniques. RoboKind™ Robots are facially expressive, assistive humanoid robots that can be coded to talk, move, and display images on their chest screen. The RoboKind™ Robots were programmed to act as teaching assistants and help the teacher during the Ludus Reading phonic lesson. A quasi-experimental pre-post design was used to examine three research questions comparing the differences between pre-and post-scores when using Ludus Reading and RoboKind™ Robots in terms of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELSⓇ) Correct Letter Sound (CLS), DIBELSⓇ Whole Words Read (WWR), and Elementary Reading Attitude Survey [ERAS] scores between the group receiving Ludus Reading and RoboKind™ Robots instruction and the control group. The null hypotheses for Research Questions 1–3 were rejected. The results supported the use of Ludus Reading and RoboKind™ Robots to teach phonics because the experimental group demonstrated a statistically significant increase in their ability to decode and a positive attitude toward reading

Spontaneous mentalizing captures variability in the cortical thickness of social brain regions

Theory of mind (ToM)or thinking about the mental states of othersis a cornerstone of successful everyday social interaction. However, the brain bases of ToM are most frequently measured via explicit laboratory tasks that pose direct questions about mental states (e.g. In this story, what does Steve think Julia believes?). Neuroanatomical measures may provide a way to explore the brain bases of individual differences in more naturalistic everyday mentalizing. In the current study, we examined the relation between cortical thickness and spontaneous ToM using the novel Spontaneous Theory of Mind Protocol (STOMP), which measures participants spontaneous descriptions of the beliefs, emotions and goals of characters in naturalistic videos. We administered standard ToM tasks and the STOMP to young adults (aged 18-26 years) and collected structural magnetic resonance imaging data from a subset of these participants. The STOMP produced robust individual variability and was correlated with performance on traditional ToM tasks. Further, unlike the traditional ToM tasks, STOMP performance was related to cortical thickness for a set of brain regions that have been functionally linked to ToM processing. These findings offer novel insight into the brain bases of variability in naturalistic mentalizing performance, with implications for both typical and atypical populations

Student Perceptions of Textbooks: Prior Behaviors and Beliefs Can Influence Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) Adoption Impact

Many Open Educational Resource (OER) and Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) studies explore cost savings, impact on learning outcomes, and student perceptions of the materials. While OER/ZTC research reports positive student perceptions (Brandle et al., 2019), textbook research reports negative student perceptions of digital textbooks (Behnke, 2018). This study explores student buying behavior and perceptions of textbooks, finding that perceptions toward the usefulness of materials is high when access to materials is high. Given this student perception, textbook purchasing is likely related to outside factors. This study adds to the growing body of research about how OER and ZTC may influence student costs and access to course materials, finding that student attitude toward course materials needs to be considered alongside adoption.</p

The Development and Validation of the Zero Cost Textbook Satisfaction Scale (ZSS)

This paper aimed to develop and validate the Zero Textbook Satisfaction Scale (ZSS), a measurement tool to assess student satisfaction with Zero Textbook Costs (ZTC) resources. The validated ZSS is available via a CC BY-NC-ND license and is a valuable tool for faculty and institutions seeking to understand student perceptions of their OER/ZTC adoptions and for broad scale OER/ZTC adoption initiatives seeking to understand student experiences with materials across a wide variety of courses. The ZSS was administered, revised, and validated following DeVellis (2017) 8 steps for validating measurement tools. The secondary data was analyzed using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), which resulted in 11 items on 1 factor and a Cronbach’s alpha, which showed excellent internal consistency (α = .94). The ZSS validated tool is designed to be used by faculty who would like to assess student satisfaction with the open source textbooks, and compare data to other sites of adoption