Poverty, Minorities, and Respect for Law

Students spend most of their waking hours with their teachers and peers, who are considered to be the significant others, that influence their learning motivation and school life. Whether a student likes to go to school or not, whether she can adjust in school and engage in all learning activities, whether she can get good grades or fail depend not only on herself, but on the significant others. In this study, the aim is to find out how and in what ways teachers and peers influence adolescents in their academic life. Forty-one articles were reviewed to discuss around four research questions: What kinds of influences do peers have on adolescents in the academic context? In what ways do teachers’ high expectations affect the students? What kind of teacher-student relationships do students perceive in order to have positive attitudestowards school and have satisfying outcomes? What aspects in adolescents’ academic life are influenced by teachers’ self-efficacy? Teachers and peers are important motivators in students’ academic life. When the school, teacher and parents are aware of the influences from peers and teachers, they are given a chance to improve the factors involved so that students can learn best in a supportive atmosphere and environment

A child-centred exploration of the relevance of family and friends to theory of mind development

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2011 The Authors.Theory of Mind (ToM) is said to develop at around 4 years old. But some studies suggest it develops considerably earlier than this, with others suggesting it develops much later. Although several recent studies have found that social factors (like gender, family size, number of siblings, and number of friends) can impact on ToM, other studies contradict those findings. We wondered whether addressing several procedural issues and ensuring the task concerns real protagonists in real time, would bear on the above issues. Here, 114 children of 3–6 years completed four ToM tasks incorporating controls from experimental psychology, including randomly varying the order of ToM and non-ToM questions across participants. Now, children passed ToM tasks from around 5 years old, rather than 4 years or earlier. Girls did not develop ToM any earlier than boys. There was clear correlational evidence for the older-sibling effect and effects of friends but no reliable effects of nuclear or extended family. However, when these factors were set in the context of one another, the sibling effect was driven by a negative influence from younger siblings (as opposed to older siblings) and the friends effect was driven by friends at school (as opposed to friends at home). Finally, “friends” was a stronger predictor than siblings but memory (a cognitive factor) and age (a maturational factor) were the strongest predictors of all

Factors and processes in children's transitive deductions

Transitive tasks are important for understanding how children develop socio-cognitively. However, developmental research has been restricted largely to questions surrounding maturation. We asked 6-, 7- and 8-year-olds (N = 117) to solve a composite of five different transitive tasks. Tasks included conditions asking about item-C (associated with the marked relation) in addition to the usual case of asking only about item-A (associated with the unmarked relation). Here, children found resolving item-C much easier than resolving item-A, a finding running counter to long-standing assumptions about transitive reasoning. Considering gender perhaps for the first time, boys exhibited higher transitive scores than girls overall. Finally, analysing in the context of one recent and well-specified theory of spatial transitive reasoning, we generated the prediction that reporting the full series should be easier than deducing any one item from that series. This prediction was not upheld. We discuss amendments necessary to accommodate all our earlier findings

Dynamical evolution of star forming regions - II. Basic kinematics

We follow the dynamical evolution of young star-forming regions with a wide range of initial conditions and examine how the radial velocity dispersion, $\sigma$, evolves over time. We compare this velocity dispersion to the theoretically expected value for the velocity dispersion if a region were in virial equilibrium, $\sigma_{\rm vir}$ and thus assess the virial state ($\sigma / \sigma_{\rm vir}$) of these systems. We find that in regions that are initially subvirial, or in global virial equilibrium but subvirial on local scales, the system relaxes to virial equilibrium within several million years, or roughly 25 - 50 crossing times, according to the measured virial ratio. However, the measured velocity dispersion, $\sigma$, appears to be a bad diagnostic of the current virial state of these systems as it suggests that they become supervirial when compared to the velocity dispersion estimated from the virial mass, $\sigma_{\rm vir}$. We suggest that this discrepancy is caused by the fact that the regions are never fully relaxed, and that the early non-equilibrium evolution is imprinted in the one-dimensional velocity dispersion at these early epochs. If measured early enough ($<$2 Myr in our simulations, or $\sim$20 crossing times), the velocity dispersion can be used to determine whether a region was highly supervirial at birth without the risk of degeneracy. We show that combining $\sigma$, or the ratio of $\sigma$ to the interquartile range (IQR) dispersion, with measures of spatial structure, places stronger constraints on the dynamical history of a region than using the velocity dispersion in isolation.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA