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Adolescence can be a particularly difficult time for youth as they experience the physical, social, and academic changes that accompany maturation. One of the most critical challenges for schools is teaching adolescent students positive social and emotional skills, which are crucial for them to succeed academically and emotionally. "Strong Kids" is a social-emotional learning curriculum designed to reduce students' internalizing symptoms. "Strong Kids" has shown promise in elementary schools; this was the first study to evaluate the newly updated version of the program in a middle level school setting. Two general education teachers implemented the curriculum with eight students at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders. Researchers used a mixed methods design to evaluate outcomes. Findings suggest that "Strong Kids" was effective at improving students' social-emotional knowledge and internalizing symptoms; however, there were no significant changes in their externalizing symptoms.

The purpose of this study was to examine any relationships between students' perceptions of the effects of school uniforms and student socioeconomic status. A survey was administered to 182 students in a charter school to gather perception information, and a separate survey was administered to parents to gather socioeconomic status information. An examination of individual survey items revealed older students were more likely to report that school uniforms help to reduce bullying and teasing, and some students of high socioeconomic status reported that uniforms help reduce arguments with parents about clothing. Student responses on 10 survey items were grouped into one factor called School Climate, reflecting student perceptions on how uniforms affect the school's climate. Analyses revealed no significant relationships between the School Climate factor and socioeconomic status. However, Hispanic students reported a significantly more positive response overall than non-Hispanic students. These findings suggest students of various socioeconomic status perceive school uniforms similarly, but older students could be more likely to associate uniforms with a reduction in bullying.

I have carried Connell's work with me as I have embarked on a career within human geography with specialist interest in gender and generation. Although my empirical lens has shifted and expanded in different ways and at different times, those same theoretical underpinnings have remained in place. I found myself returning to Connell's work on The Men and The Boys in my most recent academic work, namely through a 'young dads and lads' project. Particularly noteworthy are the ways in which these young men move (and are moved by others) in between 'boyhood,' 'manhood,' and back again. Connell's work helps me understand how processes of childhood socialization gendered these boys, and how as young men they are gendered still through processes of fatherhood. I am left questioning what is left behind when boys become men. I also am left needing to thank Raewyn for my lectureship--perhaps these reflections will go some way toward doing so. Keywords: boyhood, Connell, young dads, young men, When asked at my lectureship interview which theoretical framework I drew upon most, I immediately stated 'Feminist geography.' Not satisfied with this somewhat vague response, the most senior member of [...]

Many common tasks require or are made more efficient bycoordinating with others. In this paper we investigate thecoordination dynamics of a joint action pick-and-place task inorder to identify the behavioral dynamics that underlie theemergence of human coordination. More precisely, weintroduce a task dynamics approach for modeling multi-agentinteraction in a continuous pick-and-place task where twoagents must decide to work together or alone to move an objectfrom one location to another. Our aims in the current paper areto identify and model (1) the relevant affordance dynamics thatunderlie the selection of the different action modes required bythe task and (2) the trajectory dynamics of each actor’s handmovements when moving to grasp, relocate, or pass the object.We demonstrate that the emergence of successful coordinationcan be characterized in terms of behavioral dynamics modelswhich may have applications for artificial agent design.

The actualization of affordances can often be accomplished innumerous, equifinal ways. For instance, an individual coulddiscard an item in a rubbish bin by walking over and droppingit, or by throwing it from a distance. The aim of the currentstudy was to investigate the behavioral dynamics associatedwith such metastability using a ball-to-bin transportation task.Using time-interval between sequential ball-presentation as acontrol parameter, participants transported balls from apickup location to a drop-off bin 9m away. A high degree ofvariability in task-actualization was expected and found, andthe Cusp Catatrophe model was used to understand how thisbehavioral variability emerged as a function of hard (timeinterval) and soft (e.g. motivation) task dynamic constraints.Simulations demonstrated that this two parameter statemanifold could capture the wide range of participantbehaviors, and explain how these behaviors naturally emergein an under-constrained task context.

Biological systems are capable of acting in a sharedenvironment to produce emergent, self-organized behavior thatis the result of the constraints imposed by local interactions–such as bird flocking or ant swarming behavior. Theseexamples present minimal demands for a shared-intentionbetween co-actors, whereas other instances necessitate theformation of a shared goal. In these goal-directed tasks, howmuch of the observed complexity can be explained by theconstraints imposed by both the environment and adherence tothe shared task goal? This paper begins to investigate thisquestion by presenting results from a two-person cooperative“shepherding” task first developed in Nalepka et al. (2017) butwith fewer constraints. Results provide further evidence thatthe emergent behavior is the result of the constraints imposedby the task. The included task-dynamic model suggests ageneral model that can be used to understand multiagentherding behavior in a variety of contexts.

The current study incorporates concepts from dynamicalsystems theory (DST) and embodied cognition topropose a novel method of answering traditionalquestions in social psychology. Namely, we wereinterested in understanding postural sway complexityduring the important interpersonal task of disclosing ahidden stigmatized identity (e.g., mental health disorder,history of sexual abuse). Using detrended fluctuationanalysis and multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis,we captured postural activity while people shared theirpersonal secrets to an imagined other. Results suggestthat disclosure context, defined by both disclosureconfidant and antecedent goals, is indeed embodied inour complex postural activity.

Theories about relationships impact the ways in which we imagine that teachers and students can or should interact. These theories often involve either individualistic or relational assumptions. A contrast has been made between theories that assume that the individual is primary, and the relationship secondary, and those that assume that the relationship is primary and the individual secondary. Roughly mapping on to these assumptions are the implications that educational relationships either ought to facilitate autonomy or community, emancipation or socialization. I argue that educational contexts occupy a liminal space at the boundaries of multiple contexts, and so have limited ability to either emancipate or socialize students relative to these contexts. However, the very liminality of the educational space allows for a unique view and exploration of these contexts using autonomy and community as means rather than ends of education. Learning, described here as "re-co-gnition," is facilitated as students move away from and then return to the liminal (relational), and teachers and students view again together (recognize) the boundaries of these various contexts as they intersect at the school. Implications for teaching in this liminal space are explored for recognizing relationships between student and teacher, childhood and adulthood, home and the "outside world," and boundaries within and between disciplines.

Autistic people often experience difficulties navigating face-to-face social interactions. Historically, the empirical literature has characterised these difficulties as cognitive 'deficits' in social information processing. However, the empirical basis for such claims is lacking, with most studies failing to capture the complexity of social interactions, often distilling them into singular communicative modalities (e.g. gaze-based communication) that are rarely used in isolation in daily interactions. The current study examined how gaze was used in concert with communicative hand gestures during joint attention interactions. We employed an immersive virtual reality paradigm, where autistic (n = 22) and non-autistic (n = 22) young people completed a collaborative task with a non-autistic confederate. Integrated eye-, head- and hand-motion-tracking enabled dyads to communicate naturally with each other while offering objective measures of attention and behaviour. Autistic people in our sample were similarly, if not more, effective in responding to hand-cued joint attention bids compared with non-autistic people. Moreover, both autistic and non-autistic people demonstrated an ability to adaptively use gaze information to aid coordination. Our findings suggest that the intersecting fields of autism and social neuroscience research may have overstated the role of eye gaze during coordinated social interactions. Autistic people have been said to have 'problems' with joint attention, that is, looking where someone else is looking. Past studies of joint attention have used tasks that require autistic people to continuously look at and respond to eye-gaze cues. But joint attention can also be done using other social cues, like pointing. This study looked at whether autistic and non-autistic young people use another person's eye gaze during joint attention in a task that did not require them to look at their partner's face. In the task, each participant worked together with their partner to find a computer-generated object in virtual reality. Sometimes the participant had to help guide their partner to the object, and other times, they followed their partner's lead. Participants were told to point to guide one another but were not told to use eye gaze. Both autistic and non-autistic participants often looked at their partner's face during joint attention interactions and were faster to respond to their partner's hand-pointing when the partner also looked at the object before pointing. This shows that autistic people can and do use information from another person's eyes, even when they don't have to. It is possible that, by not forcing autistic young people to look at their partner's face and eyes, they were better able to gather information from their partner's face when needed, without being overwhelmed. This shows how important it is to design tasks that provide autistic people with opportunities to show what they can do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]