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The transfer of learning is arguably the most enduring goal of education. The history of science reveals that numerous theories transfer from natural-science to the socio-political realm, but educational practitioners often deem such transfers romantic and rhetorical, ignoring the opportunities and challenges such transfers may hold. In terms of opportunities, romantic transfer encourages students to relate science to events in social life and further to discover new ways to understand social issues and propose social hypotheses. In terms of challenge, romantic transfers are often based on superficial and even imprecise understandings of science and depend on oversimplified labels and metaphors. In many cases, the romantic transfers are imaginative. Although logically romantic transfers are based on analogical resonance, empirically they are hardly proven to be valid. Nevertheless, when students imagine social and ideological implications of the hard science terminologies and theorems, they are at risk for considering the emergent ideologies as proven by hard sciences that are often considered authoritative, objective, and universal. Literal understanding of science-inspired by still unexamined ideologies can lead to maladaptive and even dangerous social actions. Because many of the romantic transfers are interdisciplinary and controversial, teachers may avoid explicit discussion about romantic transfer with students, and do not wish to assume responsibility of doing so. However, the question remains whether avoiding explicit discussion and debates about romantic transfer would inhibit students from spontaneously romanticize science concepts. This dissertation presents four studies that systematically investigate questions of romantic transfer—informal, emergent, and metaphorical boundary transections from natural science to social ideologies that often occur unexpectedly. My first study shows that participants who scored high in transferential thinking style also scored high in scientism beliefs and that participants who scored high on both tend to give literal interpretations to (religious) text. Following, my second study shows that students who reviewed the conservation of energy in physics are more likely to believe that luck is conserved, a naïve karmic religious idea. My third study shows that students are able to transfer spontaneously from theories in physics to more politically charged contexts. Specifically, students who learned the theory of entropy are more likely to prefer tightened social control, whereas students who learned self-organization theory are more likely to prefer stronger individual agency and relaxed social control. Study-4 involved interviews with the participants from Study-3 and shows that students’ narratives about social control are largely consistent with the thermodynamic concepts they have learned. Occasionally, students can critically evaluate the plausibility of their romantic transferences. This dissertation shows that science instruction implicitly empowers students to make social hypotheses and to engage in moral-civic-political discourse. To consider pedagogies that respond to such an opportunity without falling victim to hasty generalizations, we need both science and civic educations to equip students with the methods to examine self-generated social hypothesis. We also need pedagogies that promote the awareness and tolerance of metaphors to offset the dangers of literalism.

Daily social media use is routine for most contemporary adolescents. However, as social technology use rises, we are still largely unclear about the nature of adolescents’ multifaceted experiences and the mechanisms that may disrupt well-being. In two studies, I use qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the relationship between adolescents’ social media use and their psychosocial well-being. I conducted a survey and social browsing experiment (n=588), followed by semi-structured interviews with a purposeful sub-sample of youth (n=28). In Study 1, I present an architecture of emotional life infused with social technologies. Adolescents’ survey self-reports portray social media use as a predominantly positive experience. Exploratory principal component analysis further indicates that positive and negative emotions form orthogonal response components. In interview narratives, youth describe affect influences across four functional dimensions: self-expression is an opportunity for both feeling validated and feeling judged; exploration facilitates inspiration but also distress; relational interactions contribute to closeness and to disconnection; and browsing leads to entertainment and boredom, as well as to admiration and envy. Together, these analyses suggest that the relationship between social technology usage and well-being – whether enhanced or degraded – is not confined to an ‘either/or’ framework, but that the emotional see-saw of social media use is weighted by both positive and negative influences. In Study 2, I use an experiment to assess the merit of a pervasive yet seemingly untested theory about browsing: that the “highlight reel” nature of social media is itself a cause of disruptions in well-being. Positive-only portrayals of others’ lives hypothetically disrupt well-being because they evoke negative social comparisons and contribute distorted perceptions of others’ happiness. I randomly assigned teens to a highlight reel browsing experience or to one of two interventions designed to reduce distorted impressions. Browsing conditions do not cause differences in comparison or post-browsing emotions. However, regardless of condition, negative comparisons predict immediate declines in affective well-being. The interventions moderate the relationship between social comparison and affect, thereby reducing the toll of negative comparison. I discuss implications of adolescents’ differential susceptibility to browsing highlight reels and to light-touch interventions.

This dissertation is inspired by the creativity in children’s books and films, and by the possibilities for education as they are advancing with modern technology and media. Research tells us that youth are spending less time reading books and more time watching movies and television, and there is a growing trend in our culture to translate popular kids’ books into movies. Given this, I wondered: How can fiction books and their Hollywood film adaptations be leveraged to educate youth? To answer this, I present two papers, both of which explore instructional approaches for using crossmedia (books and film) in middle school classrooms in pursuit of enhancing student engagement and socioacademic success. In Paper 1, I describe The Giver Project and share findings to show how a piloted crossmedia curriculum, called The Giver Educator’s Resource was implemented in seven sixth-grade classrooms across three states: Colorado, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. Using The Giver as a case study, I use teacher interviews and student writing to explore teachers’ evaluations of the instructional approaches introduced in that curriculum. My findings indicate that teachers positively evaluate lessons that are enjoyable for students, connect to students’ social realities, and synchronistically provide academic and social benefit. Further, teachers prefer lessons that are interactive in nature and allow students to collaboratively write and act out scenes from a book or movie. In Paper 2, I extend my analysis of an activity from The Giver Educator’s Resource that was most positively reviewed by teachers. Based on those findings, I introduce an instructional approach called the Storyteller’s Literary Arts Workshop (Storyteller’s LAW). I use teacher interviews, student writing, and classroom-discussion transcripts from The Giver Project—juxtaposed with theories of constructionism, research in dialogic instruction, and practices in fanfiction—as a frame for understanding 1) the socioacademic properties in the Storyteller’s LAW and 2) why the approach was so positively evaluated by teachers. The content of this dissertation has implications for the development of future K–12 curricula that utilize entertainment media as a means to bring informal media to formal learning environments.

The existence of significant differences in the civic knowledge, civic attitudes and civic skills of young people from different socio-economic (SES) backgrounds represent civic competence gaps that affect their ability to act as personally responsible, participatory and justice-oriented citizens in their society (Carretero et al, 2016; MEN, 2004; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). Identifying civic competence gaps, their magnitude, and the factors that account for them should be a priority for researchers, policy-makers and educators in Latin America because they can threaten the strength, stability and legitimacy of democracies in the region (Levinson, 2010). I use data from three nationally representative samples of 8th grade students who participated in the 2009 International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS) to identify civic competence gaps between youth from high and low SES backgrounds in Chile, Colombia and Mexico, using eight measures related to civic competence. I document large gaps in students’ civic knowledge in the three countries, and small gaps in their internal sense of political efficacy, intention to participate in future electoral processes and legal and illegal protests, as well as in their attitudes toward corruption, authoritarianism and disobeying the law. I do not find gaps in their attitudes toward civil disobedience. I then use the Oaxaca-Blinder method (Oaxaca, 1973; Blinder, 1973) to identify how 1) differences in access to school resources, positive school climates and interactive civic learning opportunities, and 2) differences in the civic knowledge gains that students from different SES backgrounds obtain from equal school resources, school climates and civic learning opportunities, account for the civic knowledge gaps in these countries. Findings suggest that the largest portion of the civic knowledge gap in Chile is due to differences in civic knowledge gains, but in Colombia and Mexico the largest portions are due to differences in access. In all three countries high SES students have significantly more access than low SES students to the school resources, school climate and civic learning opportunities that are associated with higher civic knowledge, and in every case, the school SES accounts for the largest portion of the explained civic knowledge gaps. Given equal characteristics, low SES students in Colombia and Mexico –but not in Chile- obtain more civic knowledge gains than high SES students from school resources, school climate and civic learning opportunities.

Our understanding of the relationship between risk factors and resilience has been framed primarily by probability. Resilience has been conceptualized as “beating the odds”: doing better than our statistical predictions would expect given the amount of risk the individual has faced. Undoubtedly, this research has offered a rich picture into trajectories of psychosocial development. However, it has limited our exploration of the mechanisms that explain why risk factors result in resilience. Context-driven work exploring these mechanisms has been limited by the subjective nature of risk factors. In order to extend our understanding of risk factors and resilience we have to understand the difference between actual and statistical risk; we have to understand how individuals make meaning of risk factors within the different ecological systems in their lives. In this study I explore how 38 inner-city charter school youth (ages 16-21) make meaning of self-identified negative life experiences. The school serves youth who have previously dropped out or have been expelled from high school. Additionally, the youth at this school reported a high level of risk factors by most objective standards. Using a mix of narrative writing and interviews, I explored (1) what events the youth self-reported as being detrimental, (2) what themes emerged in the youth’s discussion of the impact of these experiences, and (3) what discourses the youth used in discussing the impact of a particularly persistent experience: the loss of a biological parent. My analysis revealed that the youth framed their meaning around three questions: why have I been affected, how do I make sense of it, and what has changed in my life? In doing this they tried to create new meaning of negative life events, sometimes by internalizing or redefining life experiences. I discuss how meaning-making could be a constructivist mechanism that helps engender resilience; resilience could be explained by the ease with which the discrepancy between global meaning (i.e., schema that orients our understanding of the world) and situational meaning (of a stressful event) is resolved. I discuss the implications of this theory-generating work for future research and school-based practice., Human Development and Education