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Over the past few years, screen-based usage among children and youth has increased significantly, particularly among those with autism. Yet current screen time guidelines do not address the specific needs of autistic children and youth. Therefore, the objective of this study was to develop specific and clear guidelines and strategies that caregivers and expert clinicians agree upon to support the digital citizenship of children with autism. Using the Delphi method, 30 experts, including 20 clinicians and 10 caregivers, were invited to complete a series of three surveys. The experts had to rate their agreement levels on a series of statements that included possible guidelines and strategies. The final statements to be included in the guidelines were accepted by more than 75% of the panel. The final guidelines included six sections: (1) general principles, (2) considerations for timing and content of leisure screen time use, (3) strategies for caregivers and clinicians to monitor and regulate screen time use, (4) behaviors to monitor for screen time overuse, (5) additional guidelines for clinicians, and (6) resources. The agreed-upon guidelines developed in this study could be the stepping stones for clinical interventions targeting screen time overuse of children with autism, addressing the screen time challenges that many families are experiencing.

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) are an integral part of evaluating course outcomes. They are routinely used to evaluate teaching quality for the purposes of reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT), annual review, and the rehiring of adjunct faculty and lecturers. These evaluations are often based almost entirely on the mean or proportion of the ordinal overall score with no regard to statistical noise. This study examines the distribution of the statistic (mean or proportion) when SETs are administered online and in-person. Using non-parametric procedures, we show that the size of the 95% confidence interval of the statistic is a function of response rates. Prior to COVID-19, online administration of SETs resulted in significantly more uncertainty than in-person administration because the in-person response rates were higher. Due to a decrease in in-person response rates in the post-COVID vaccine period, both methods result in significant levels of uncertainty of the true statistic value. In classes of fewer than 30 students, the 95% confidence interval of the statistic is wide enough for instructors to be considered for a teaching award in one semester or below average in another semester, while holding teaching quality constant.

Given the widespread interest in the development of children's selective social learning, there is mounting evidence suggesting that infants prefer to learn from competent informants (Poulin-Dubois & Brosseau-Liard, "Current Directions in Psychological Science," 2016, 25). However, little research has been dedicated to understanding how this selectivity develops. The present study investigated whether causal learning and precursor metacognitive abilities govern discriminant learning in a classic word-learning paradigm. Infants were exposed to a speaker who accurately (reliable condition) or inaccurately (unreliable condition) labeled familiar objects and were subsequently tested on their ability to learn a novel word from the informant. The predictive power of causal learning skills and precursor metacognition (as measured through decision confidence) on infants' word learning was examined across both reliable and unreliable conditions. Results suggest that infants are more inclined to accept an unreliable speaker's testimony on a word learning task when they also lack confidence in their own knowledge on a task measuring their metacognitive ability. Additionally, when uncertain, infants draw on causal learning abilities to better learn the association between a label and a novel toy. This study is the first to shed light on the role of causal learning and precursor metacognitive judgments in infants' abilities to engage in selective trust.

Information provided at the moment a person makes a decision can influence behavior in predictable ways. The United Kingdom's Behavioural Insights Team have used this idea to help improve the insulation of lofts, collect taxes, and even reduce litter. The authors of this article developed software that appends a personalized message to each assignment in the class regarding the student's current grade. This "grade nudge" explains precisely how the assignment will impact the student's final grade given their current standing in the class. Through a randomized trial, the authors show that the nudge improves student homework performance by about four percentage points.

In order to address gaps in the literature surrounding the acquisition of translation equivalents (TEs) in young bilinguals, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, TEs were measured in the expressive vocabularies of thirty-four French-English bilinguals at 1;4, 1;10, and 2;6 using the MacArthur Bates CDI. Children's acquisition of TEs occurred gradually, with more balanced ratios of exposure and vocabulary associated with larger proportions of TEs at each wave. Experiment 2 compared a direct measure of TE comprehension with parent report of the same set of words. Results showed that parents may over-report children's TE comprehension, as our sample of two-year-old French-English bilinguals (n = 20) comprehended fewer TEs on a direct measure of receptive vocabulary than parents reported on the vocabulary checklist. The present study provides an original contribution to the literature on bilingual vocabulary development by employing both a longitudinal design and a direct measure of TE comprehension.

Even as libraries face the economic downturn, a record-setting number of people attended the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in Chicago, July 9-15. The tough economy, however, was felt in the number of exhibitors, which declined from the previous record set in 2007 in Washington, DC, and in anecdotal evidence that suggested that many participants traveled on their own dime. ALA reported total numbers of 28,941, including 22,762 attendees and 6,179 exhibitors, compared to a 22,047 total in Anaheim last year and 28,635 in Washington, with more than 7100 exhibitors. Still, ALA did not tout the turnout, perhaps because news regarding library budgets and other conferences--such as the move of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) congress and the cancellation of the Ohio Library Council's annual meeting--was sobering. Authors and publishers abounded, with an ambitious lineup of auditorium speakers and many author programs--including first novelists and memoirists--presented by the Association of Library Trustees, Advocates, Friends and Foundations (ALTAFF). While certain high-profile events drew smaller crowds than in previous years, librarians looking to make the most of their services turned out in droves for programs ranging from technology to readers' advisory. Social networking forums such as Twitter enabled an informal parallel conference to occur as people traded insights from programs, things they overheard on the floor, and the facts of their daily movements. The biggest buzz concerned a canceled panel, "Perspectives on Islam: Beyond the Stereotyping," sponsored by ALA's Ethnic & Multicultural Information Exchange Round Table (EMIERT). The Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said that three panelists withdrew in protest over the participation of Robert Spencer, whom CAIR calls "one of the nation's leading Islam-bashers." An online debate grew over how the panel was formed and when the panelists were informed of Spencer's role.

From the fall's cascade of great new books, "Library Journal's" editors select their favorites--a dark rendition of Afghan life, a look at the "self-esteem trap," a celebration of Brooklyn activism, and much more.

Why choose librarianship as a career? Seventeen percent of public librarians responding to this question in LJ's Job Satisfaction Survey began their answers with the words "I love...." And not for nothing: 70% reported being either "very satisfied" or "satisfied" with their jobs vs. the 31% who said they were "somewhat satisfied" or "not satisfied at all." Respondents with the greatest number of years in the field tended to express the highest levels of satisfaction, and, most promising for the future of the profession, 87% of all public library respondents said they would recommend it as a career to someone just entering college. Nonetheless, problems driving down satisfaction remain.

In commemoration of the Librarian of the Year Award's 20th anniversary, this article presents brief vignettes on all 19 of the title holders. When "Library Journal" named them Librarians of the Year, these inimitable 19 (for the 20th, Norma Blake, see EJ788676) had singled themselves out as risk takers, visionaries, bulldogs, pragmatists, optimists, and dreamers. They have since set off in various directions--some continue making headway in their same (mostly public library) positions; some have moved on to other library-related ventures; some now work as consultants in the field; and still others offer the distinct perspective of librarian-turned-patron. They have survived steep budget cuts, multiple branch closings, earthquakes, even cancer. The single common denominator: they all have strong opinions on and critical concerns about the library profession.

To the individual, garden areas link to the natural world, offering solace, refuge, inspiration, and purpose. To a low-income neighborhood, where often the only greenery sprouts from between cracks in concrete, their impact can be monumental, signaling sustainability, beautifying, attesting to value and worth--even prompting civic change. A 2000 survey by Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture showed that gardens in low-income neighborhoods were four times as likely as those in non-low-income neighborhoods to redirect focus onto other issues in the community. Beautiful library gardens already abound across the U.S., such as the reading garden of the Greene County Library in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the rooftop garden of Salt Lake City's new main library. The Horticultural Society of New York (HSNY), with its GreenBranches program, is taking the concept of a library garden beyond that of a secluded spot for summer reading, making it an opportunity for real cultivation and use that enables learning outside a library's static walls. This article discusses New York's GreenBranches program and describes how the program links the library to the street.

Last fall, at the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science in New York, Barbara Genco, collection development director at the Brooklyn Public Library, taught a course on collection development principles, theory, and practice. "Library Journal" asked her to distill her curriculum down to 20 talking points that address the future of collection development and the working world awaiting this generation of library school graduates. This article presents Genco's 20 maxims for collection building and contemporary collection development, as told to Raya Kuzyk, a regular "Library Journal" contributor.

Consumer health publishers in mid-2007 recall those elliptical machine addicts--they have fallen into a safe holding pattern that should maintain their weight in the market. In other words, mind-body books and recovery memoirs are back, as are a bevy of diet and fitness manuals. People buy into the health and medicine genre--"Library Journal's" annual book-buying survey once again gave the category top marks for circulation ("Circ's Up, Budgets Leap," "Library Journal" 2/15/07)--and even if this summer's selections lack originality or spin, they make up for it in popular appeal. The differences between this year's health trends and those of the recent past are not that great, but the key signature is intriguing, namely, a stronger emphasis on eating disorders and the willingness of medical professionals to dissect the nature of the patient-doctor relationship. As long as Americans keep these scores--42 percent of those age 55-64 have high blood pressure, 57 percent are physically inactive, and 12 percent are diabetic, according to one survey--they'll be stuck on the same old publishing track.

Disaster planning focuses on future function and recovery, on helping libraries expeditiously return to their original states of operation. It all but ignores the concept of continuous function throughout a disaster. This is not true in the private and government sectors, however, which have managed to cover a wider load of disaster response preparedness through the implementation of what is referred to as business continuity planning, or BCP (also known as business systems continuity, business continuity management, business continuity and recovery, and continuity of operations). For these sectors, BCP sprang from basic cost-benefit analysis. More than just time and money are at risk when a business is forced to shut down in a disaster: the longer a business stays dark, the more likely its customers and vendors are to turn to local competitors. Worse still, temporary shutdowns too often take a permanent turn. According to the Institute for Business and Home Safety, 43 percent of all businesses involved in local disasters never reopen. That is why many in the private sector--especially those in information technology, insurance, finance, warehousing, and manufacturing--have opted for something more than the wherewithal to pick up the pieces after a disaster; they intend to keep afloat all the while. In its 2001-06 "U.S. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Focus Report", Gartner Dataquest concluded that upward of 30 percent of all U.S. businesses had inadequate or nonexistent continuity and disaster plans. U.S. libraries, the subject of a study by the Heritage Health Index, lag even farther behind. Seventy percent, says the report, do not even have a disaster plan in place. This explains why the concept of BCP has only recently entered the library lexicon (cost and scale are no small factors, either--Hewlett-Packard's expenditure of $100 million on "business continuity and recovery centers" sets an impossible precedent). But what if libraries were to appropriate the BCP concept, redefining it in a context they could afford to think about? This article discusses some cost-effective strategies (forging alliances with other libraries, depository consortiums, networking) that librarians should consider as they establish a disaster response and recovery plan. (Contains 8 resources.)

In this article, the author revisits 11 graduates who were profiled as part of LJ's annual Placements & Salaries issue. Armed with a library science degree from various institutions, they had just secured jobs in librarianship and were off to a good start forging their careers. Since then, they have worked at elementary school, college, and university libraries in both private and public settings. These LJ cover graduates, namely Tami Suzuki, Kate Lippincott, Herbert Myers, Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Alice Hershiser, Chery Marzano, Elizabeth Beere, Susan Winch, Rita Ormsby, Carol Krueger, and Catherine Fleming, are presented, along with a brief profile.

In apparently no time at all, the distance between the once doggedly segregated religion and self-help shelves has shortened, and the two genres are fraternizing openly. Librarians have noticed an influx of books that cannot be definitively classified as religion or self-help. It is a phenomenal time for the breed of books dubbed "spiritual living", a genre that combines elements of self-help and devotional literature. The aim is to help readers incorporate faith into their everyday activities--parenting, business, healthcare, work, and relationships. In this article, the author mentions four books that have broken out of the Christian sector, but herald a new category that shows no sign of waning.

The authors provide a version of a double-auction market simulation designed for classes too large for most computer labs to accommodate in one sitting. Instead, students play the game from remote computers, wherever they may be and at any time during a given time period specified by the instructor. When the window of time expires, students can view the results in a variety of pedagogically relevant displays. The authors also provide a set of on-line activities that take the student "by the hand" through a simple analysis of the simulation. Educators can use, copy, modify, and distribute the source code for this software under the GNU General Public Licence.

With the exhibits at New York's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center open just two days, the show floor at this year's BEA was a real free-for-all, with lots of traffic from the moment the doors opened on Wednesday, May 26. But for LJ's review editors, it was worth enduring stubbed toes and rattled nerves to find fresh and interesting titles. In this article, the authors describe their personal favorites.

The past year's best audiobooks, all recipients of starred "LJ" reviews, are more varied than ever--they include a posthumously published novel ("The Girl Who Played with Fire"), two debut works of hard-boiled fiction ("The Manual of Detection" and "Bad Things Happen"), a meditation on the wonders of nature ("Summer World"), and a joint first-person account of injustice and redemption ("Picking Cotton"). To capture better the breadth of exceptional audio titles released in 2009, the author has expanded the number of "LJ" Best Audiobooks to 40. In this article, the author presents a list of top 40 audiobooks of 2009 and includes an Honorable Mentions listing.

It is not surprising that the expanding American waistline is correlating to a growing need for health information. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity contributes to an increased risk for hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, and some cancers. And though general medical books that list 100 different disorders may be handy for ready-reference, they often don't provide enough information on any one specific disorder. This article illustrates how various books on health topics have flooded the market. It concludes that publishers offerings will affect librarians and their patrons in that there will be a continued need for information on health topics; smaller libraries may have a tough time keeping up with the purchase of all those individual titles, however. Books with emotional components and humor should continue to be popular. Diet and exercise titles, too, though librarians who have cringed in the past at handing patrons fad diet books should be happier with the trend toward realistic diets and authoritative works. Not only are we living longer, healthier lives, we're younger than we ever thought we were.

This article presents a list of the best audiobooks of 2010. Among the past year's most memorable audiobooks, all recipients of starred "Library Journal" reviews, are four "LJ" Best Books, two postapocalyptic trilogy starters, two nonfiction tracts on marriage, a baseball novella, an adult/YA crossover novel, and an Obama biography.

What's hot? That's the question everyone asks during BookExpo America (BEA), held this year at New York's Jacob Javits Convention Center May 29-31. This article presents "Library Journal's" ("LJ's") review editors on their personal favorites from the BEA show floor. These include cookbooks, genre-crossers, small presses, romance books, and even a product called "The Book Seat"[TM], from Australian-based Emerging Products Ltd. This product is basically a cushy book holder which allows you to read without using your hands, especially when lying down. Another product found at the LEA was The Bookpod, from Genio, LLC, which is another book/document holder that keeps the book/page upright (or flat on your lap) while your hands are free for notetaking, keyboarding, even cooking.

On May 10, 1968, the Cannes Film Festival shuddered to a stop when filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut rushed the stage at the Palais des Festivals to protest French New Waver Henri Langlois's removal from his post as president of the National Cinematheque Francaise. Also that month, in that same spirit of film lovers' activism, television documentary producers and spouses Philip and Mary-Ann Hobel founded and self-financed the nonprofit Cinema Guild. The couple had initially intended Cinema Guild to be a conduit through which to distribute documentaries they had themselves seen through every stage of production: e.g., the ten-part series "The Fabulous Sixties" and "The Sensational Seventies." But what began as a handful of collaboratively produced titles grew, by the late 1970s, to a library of 300 titles from a number of sources. With the couple's venture into rights acquisitions in the early 1980s (following their Oscar win for "Tender Mercies") and their launch of a theatrical division in the late 1990s, the collection has today grown to 1000-plus titles strong, with 30-50 new films added annually. This article features the Cinema Guild which, in its 40 years, has trained its klieg lights on various injustices and realities of the national and international stage, from the perils of illegal immigration to child labor in the developing world. The venerable film distributor sets the scene for a seamless splice into the digital age.

This article describes the highlights of this year's BookExpo America (BEA) held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The attendees at BEA had not minded that the air was recycled, the lighting was fluorescent, and the food was bad. The first hot book sighting came courtesy of Anne Rice. Michelle Moran, author of newly published novel, "The Heretic Queen," had to shoo folks away as her signing ended. BEA attendees scooped up all 400 copies of "To Siberia" by Norwegian novelist Per Petterson, author of the award-winning novel "Out Stealing Horses." Stan Nichols' 250 copies of his best-selling trilogy, "Orcs," were gone by noon on the first show day, and a rush order went out for another 250, which disappeared as well.

This article presents a list of the best audiobooks of 2008, selected by intrepid band of audio reviewers, range from tales of Bengali and Haitian immigrants to political autobiographies. There's "cake" from Sloane Crosley and emotional pyromania from David Sedaris; a biographical tribute to Maya Angelou and debut novels laced with the supernatural from Andrew Davidson and Brunonia Barry. All in all, a very good year for the sonically inclined, which one can sweeten further by revisiting the creme de la creme audiobooks of 2007 and 2006.