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Researchers and practitioners need robust measurement tools for evaluating knowledge of child development to better support parents and their children during pregnancy and the transition to parenthood. We addressed this need by evaluating the psychometric properties of the Domains of Development Instrument (DoDI) for measuring knowledge of developmental milestones from birth to 3 years. We evaluated four types of validity evidence for the DoDI: test content, response processes, internal structure, and relations to other variables. We convened an expert panel to evaluate test content and conducted cognitive interviews with mothers to evaluate response processes. We also collected responses from a sample of 418 English-speaking pregnant women to evaluate internal structure and relations to other variables. We observed content validity and response process validity, as well as the predicted internal structure, internal consistency, test--retest reliability, and convergent validity. We conclude with recommendations for future research with the DoDI.

Because educator licensure is gained by passing licensure examinations in most states, scores on high stakes tests are determining factors as to who will be teaching in America's classrooms. Due to a focus on program graduation rates, state funding cuts, and production of quality teachers, it is vital that teacher preparation programs produce the quality and quantity of teachers needed to fill the educator deficit. The purpose of the study was to analyze various performance variables of pre-service teachers enrolled in a teacher preparation to identify predictors of performance on required licensure examinations. Findings of the study revealed there is a relationship between Praxis I: Reading scores and Praxis II scores, Praxis I: Writing scores and Praxis II scores, Praxis I: Mathematics scores and Praxis II scores, GPA and Praxis II scores, and CBASE scores and Praxis II scores. The strongest relationships that exist between variables and Praxis II scores are initial Praxis I: Reading scores and overall CBASE scores.

Many school districts provide one-time transition events to help students prepare for the rigors of kindergarten; yet, research shows families desire additional information and opportunities to help their children thrive once school begins. Researchers for this study interviewed 39 parents whose children participated in a three-week structured kindergarten transition program designed to promote parental involvement in school, reduce students' chronic absenteeism, and increase children's readiness for kindergarten. All interviewees expressed that participating in the program yielded benefits for themselves and their children. Respondents shared that meeting education staff members early during the summer, familiarizing themselves with the layout and routines of their schools, and building stronger social connections with other families were of particular value in helping them prepare for the start of kindergarten. Similarly, understanding kindergarten expectations more thoroughly and acquiring tools to support their children at home were deemed especially beneficial for those families who had not previously participated in preschool or other structured school opportunities. In addition to positive feedback, participants proposed various ways that adjusting the program could better meet the needs of all stakeholders. Suggestions included increasing the length of the student sessions, improving communication between district and families, re-structuring the parent information sessions to be more conducive to working families, and staffing the program with more individuals who would stay on as teachers during the transition from summer to fall. Parent suggestions from this study were synthesized into multiple implications for practice and substantiated by current relevant literature.

A between-group, repeated-measures study compared sections of a career counseling course. One course used a flipped classroom design, while the other used a lecture. The flipped classroom yielded higher ratings of career counseling self-efficacy and active engagement among students. There were no differences in helping skills self-efficacy between the courses.

Though composition studies has long sought to leverage new technologies of literacy to help students go public, we remain anxious about our ability to do so, as students commonly enter our classrooms already composing for diverse public audiences in a variety of digital contexts. Yet students, too, are often anxious about these new modes of composition, which circulate in a destabilized rhetorical environment where traditional understandings of authority, argument, and audience no longer hold. This article identifies five topoi of this new rhetorical landscape--"presence," "persistence," "permeability," "promiscuity," and "power"--describing the anxieties and affordances they present for student writers, the dispositions toward writing they foster, and the challenges and opportunities they pose for composition. This framework provides a critical vocabulary for compositionists seeking to help students negotiate emerging networked publics.

The challenges of breeding autotetraploid potato (Solanum tuberosum) have motivated the development of alternative breeding strategies. A common approach is to obtain uniparental dihaploids from a tetraploid of interest through pollination with S. tuberosum Andigenum Group (formerly S. phureja) cultivars. The mechanism underlying haploid formation of these crosses is unclear, and questions regarding the frequency of paternal DNA transmission remain. Previous reports have described aneuploid and euploid progeny that, in some cases, displayed genetic markers from the haploid inducer (HI). Here, we surveyed a population of 167 presumed dihaploids for large-scale structural variation that would underlie chromosomal addition from the HI, and for small-scale introgression of genetic markers. In 19 progeny, we detected 10 of the 12 possible trisomies and, in all cases, demonstrated the noninducer parent origin of the additional chromosome. Deep sequencing indicated that occasional, short-tract signals appearing to be of HI origin were better explained as technical artifacts. Leveraging recurring copy number variation patterns, we documented subchromosomal dosage variation indicating segregation of polymorphic maternal haplotypes. Collectively, 52% of the assayed chromosomal loci were classified as dosage variable. Our findings help elucidate the genomic consequences of potato haploid induction and suggest that most potato dihaploids will be free of residual pollinator DNA.

Within writing assessment scholarship, disciplinary discussions about the politics of pathways regularly question how reforms mediate education and affect education actors. This article complements and complicates these conversations by attending to the micropolitics of pathways: how local education actors mediate reform-related standards, and, in the process, pave what they believe to be locally-meaningful pathways. Taking the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) as our point of departure, our study centers on one important site for micropolitical work that has, to date, gone unstudied in CCSS-focused writing assessment research: teacher education, which involves coordination between secondary and postsecondary actors who might differently interpret and engage with externally-imposed reforms. Our findings suggest that while standards may be politically intended to mediate education and standardize pathways, teachers micropolitically interpret and repurpose those standards--strategically drawing on them as a means to communicate about local writing instruction and assessment. For this reason, we argue conversations about pathway-related reforms can benefit from adopting a micropolitical perspective, sensitive to the participation of teachers in locally constructing and maintaining educational pathways.Keywords: Micropolitics of pathways; Common Core State Standards; Teacher education; Writing assessment; Local interpretation

Interpretation of biological mechanisms underlying genetic risk associations for prostate cancer is complicated by the relatively large number of risk variants (n = 100) and the thousands of surrogate SNPs in linkage disequilibrium. Here, we combined three distinct approaches: multiethnic fine-mapping, putative functional annotation (based upon epigenetic data and genome-encoded features), and expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) analyses, in an attempt to reduce this complexity. We examined 67 risk regions using genotyping and imputation-based fine-mapping in populations of European (cases/controls: 8600/6946), African (cases/controls: 5327/5136), Japanese (cases/controls: 2563/4391) and Latino (cases/controls: 1034/1046) ancestry. Markers at 55 regions passed a region-specific significance threshold (P-value cutoff range: 3.9 × 10(-4)-5.6 × 10(-3)) and in 30 regions we identified markers that were more significantly associated with risk than the previously reported variants in the multiethnic sample. Novel secondary signals (P < 5.0 × 10(-6)) were also detected in two regions (rs13062436/3q21 and rs17181170/3p12). Among 666 variants in the 55 regions with P-values within one order of magnitude of the most-associated marker, 193 variants (29%) in 48 regions overlapped with epigenetic or other putative functional marks. In 11 of the 55 regions, cis-eQTLs were detected with nearby genes. For 12 of the 55 regions (22%), the most significant region-specific, prostate-cancer associated variant represented the strongest candidate functional variant based on our annotations; the number of regions increased to 20 (36%) and 27 (49%) when examining the 2 and 3 most significantly associated variants in each region, respectively. These results have prioritized subsets of candidate variants for downstream functional evaluation.

The BioMart Community Portal (www.biomart.org) is a community-driven effort to provide a unified interface to biomedical databases that are distributed worldwide. The portal provides access to numerous database projects supported by 30 scientific organizations. It includes over 800 different biological datasets spanning genomics, proteomics, model organisms, cancer data, ontology information and more. All resources available through the portal are independently administered and funded by their host organizations. The BioMart data federation technology provides a unified interface to all the available data. The latest version of the portal comes with many new databases that have been created by our ever-growing community. It also comes with better support and extensibility for data analysis and visualization tools. A new addition to our toolbox, the enrichment analysis tool is now accessible through graphical and web service interface. The BioMart community portal averages over one million requests per day. Building on this level of service and the wealth of information that has become available, the BioMart Community Portal has introduced a new, more scalable and cheaper alternative to the large data stores maintained by specialized organizations.

In the Lake Tahoe Basin, the retention of native ecosystems within urban areas may greatly enhance the landscape’s ability to maintain biotic diversity. Our study of plant, invertebrate and vertebrate species showed that many native species were present in remnant forest stands in developed areas; however, their richness and abundance declined in association with increasing development across all taxonomic groups. Species richness for land birds and mammalian carnivores declined with development, whereas ant richness and small mammal abundance peaked at intermediate levels of development. Vegetation structure simplified with increasing development and the exotic plant species increased. The results of this study, the first to consider the effects of urbanization and remnant forests on biotic diversity in the Lake Tahoe Basin, can be used to guide land-use planning in order to maintain and enhance biodiversity in the face of increasing urbanization.

Two experiments are reported that investigated the influence of linear spatial organization on transitive inference performance. RewardAio-reward relations between overlapping pairs of elements were presented in a context of linear spatial order or random spatial order. Participants in the linear arrangement condition showed evidence for visual reasoning: They systematically mapped spatial relations to conceptual relation and used the spatial relations to make inferences on a reasoning task in a new spatial context. We suggest that linear ordering may be a "good figure", by constituting a parsinuxiious representation for the integration of premises, as well as for the inferencing process. The late emergence of transitive inference in children may be the result of limited cognitive capacity, which -- unless an extemal spatial array is available -- constrains the construction of an internal spatial array.

Three experiments are reported that examine the impact of people's goals and conceptual understanding on graph interpretation, in order to determine how people use graphical representations to evaluate functional dependencies between continuous variables. Subjects made inferences about the relative rate of two continuous linear variables (altitude and temperature). We varied the assignments of variables to axes, the perceived cause effect relation between the variables, and the causal status of the variable being queried. The most striking finding was that accuracy was greater when the Slope-Mapping Constraint was honored, which requires that the variable being queried - usually the effect or dependent variable, but potentially the cause instead — is assigned to the vertical axis, so that steeper lines map to faster changes in the queried variable. This constraint dominates when it conflicts with others, such as preserving the low-level mapping of altitude onto the vertical axis. Our findings emphasize the basic conclusion that graphs are not pictures, but rather symbolic systems for representing higher-order relations. We propose that graphs provide external instantiations of intermediate mental representations, which enable people to move from pictorial representations to abstractions through the use of natural mappings between perceptual properties and conceptual relations.

Studies have found that low marital satisfaction, parenting stress, and child behavior problems are linked in families of children with developmental delays (DD). However, previous investigations examining the relationships between parenting stress, child behavior problems, and marital satisfaction rarely examine the interrelationships of these three variables simultaneously, and the samples used are often restricted in terms of age and ethnicity, limiting generalizability. The primary aim of the study was to examine the associations between marital satisfaction, child behavior problems, and parenting stress in a diverse sample of parents of young children with DD. The study included 44 parents of children ages 2.5 to 5 years with DD and high levels of behavior problems who participated in a larger study looking at the impact of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in reducing parenting stress and child behavior problems. Marital satisfaction was significantly related to both parenting stress and child behavior problems, where parents with lower marital satisfaction reported higher parenting stress and child behavior problems. Additionally, preliminary analyses indicated that marital quality significantly moderated changes in child behavior problems from pre- to posttreatment but did not moderate changes in parenting stress as a result of the MBSR intervention.

We investigated the influence of being imitated on children's subsequent trust. Five- to six-year-olds interacted with one experimenter who mimicked their choices and another experimenter who made different choices. Children were then presented with two tests. In a preference test, the experimenters offered conflicting preferences for the contents of two opaque boxes, and children were asked to choose a box. In a factual claims test, the experimenters offered conflicting claims about the referent for a novel word, and children were asked to state which object the word referred to. Children were significantly more likely to endorse both the preferences and the factual claims of the experimenter who had mimicked them. These results demonstrate that imitation is a powerful means of social influence in development. (Contains 1 figure.)

Almost 20 years ago, Pope and Golub (2000) published their seminal work on teaching with technology in English language arts (ELA) classrooms in "Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education Journal" ("CITE Journal"). The purpose of this systematic literature review was to learn how subsequent research about ELA teaching with technology has taken up (or not) Pope and Golub's ideas in "CITE Journal" since their initial publication. In addition, the authors were concerned with how articles about teaching and technology use have incorporated thinking about issues of access and equity to digital and online literacies in relationship to Pope and Golub's principles. Findings of the review are presented and implications are offered for supporting teachers and educational researchers as they enact and study ELA teaching with technology to promote socially just classrooms.

In this essay, three English educators who attended the National Technology Leadership Summit reflect on the benefits of using GenAI in English education while simultaneously considering the perils of its use. After posing many critical questions for consideration, they conclude with a call for teacher educators to develop a robust research agenda focused on GenAI in partnership with preservice teachers and students, as well as a push to engage in policy advocacy that can inform local and state policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has a rich history of demonstrating the importance of faculty studying their own teaching. One institution sought to better understand the impacts a SoTL seminar had on its campus since 2015. This qualitative research describes the lasting impact a SoTL seminar had on its participants and their institution. Thirty-three faculty who participated in SoTL were surveyed regarding their experiences as members of a university-supported SoTL seminar. The findings revealed a three-point faculty learning cycle that included: SoTL support, faculty experimentation and risk-taking, and assessment and feedback. Moreover, SoTL support had dimensions that included a sense of faculty connection, accountability, career development, and support for university-wide assessment. This article concludes with ideas for future research and a discussion of the importance of documenting university programs to support faculty and student learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies indicate that the acoustic features of speech discriminate between positive and negative communicative intentions, such as approval and prohibition. Two studies investigated whether acoustic features of speech can discriminate between two positive communicative intentions: humour and sweet-sincerity, where sweet-sincerity involved being sincere in a positive, warm-hearted way. In Study 1, 22 mothers read a book containing humorous, sweet-sincere, and neutral-sincere images to their 19-to-24-month-olds. In Study 2, 41 mothers read a book containing humorous or sweet-sincere sentences and images to their 18- to 24-month-olds. Mothers used a higher mean F0 to communicate visual humour as compared to visual sincerity. Mothers used greater F0 mean, range, and standard deviation; greater intensity mean, range, and standard deviation; and a slower speech rate to communicate verbal humour as compared to verbal sweet-sincerity. Mothers used a rising linear contour to communicate verbal humour, but used no specific contour to express verbal sweet-sincerity. We conclude that speakers provide acoustic cues enabling listeners to distinguish between positive communicative intentions. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

Building on the spillover and crossover literatures of work-family conflict and the theoretical framework of Conservation of Resources Theory (Hobfoll, 1989) we examine the effects of conflict on production deviance. Using a two-study constructive replication and extension design, we examine how partner work-to-family conflict contributes to job incumbent family-to-work conflict and subsequent engagement in production deviance. In addition, we examine the moderating role of gender on the incumbent family-to-work conflict to production deviance relationship. Study 1 of 344 job incumbents supported the positive relationship between incumbent family-to-work conflict and deviance. In addition, this was moderated by gender such that men engaged in more deviant behaviors in response to family-to-work conflict. Study 2 consisted of 190 matched job incumbents and their partners. These findings supported the mediation of partner work-to-family conflict to production deviance through incumbent family-to-work conflict. Again gender was supported using moderated mediation analysis such that men engaged in more deviant behaviors in response to family-to-work conflict. Implications for practice and future research are discussed. (Contains 3 figures and 5 tables.)

This study examines social support (from both coworkers and partners) and its path to satisfaction through work-family balance. This study fills a gap by explaining how support impacts satisfaction in the same domain, across domains, and how it crosses over to impact the partner's domain. Using a matched dataset of 270 job incumbents and their partners, the findings reveal that work-family balance plays a mediating role in assisting social support's contribution to both job and family satisfaction. Evidence indicates that employees experience heightened work-family balance due to social support from partners and coworkers and that support and balance impact satisfaction in both the work and family domains. Implications of these findings and avenues for future research are discussed. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)

Two studies were conducted to examine infants' ability to discern intentions from lexical and prosodic cues. Two groups of 14-18-month-olds participated in these studies. In both studies, infants watched an adult perform a sequence of two-step actions on novel toys that produced an end-result. In the first study actions were marked intentionally with both lexical and prosodic cues. In the second study, the lexical markers of intention were presented in Greek, thus providing infants with prosodic but not lexical cues. In both studies, infants reproduced more intentional than accidental actions, suggesting that infants can infer intentions from prosodic cues. (Contains 4 tables and 3 figures.)

This study examined organizational levers that impact work-family experiences, participant health, and subsequent turnover. Using a sample of 179 women returning to full-time work 4 months after childbirth, we examined the associations of 3 job resources (job security, skill discretion, and schedule control) with work-to-family enrichment and the associations of 2 job demands (psychological requirements and nonstandard work schedules) with work-to-family conflict. Further, we considered subsequent impact of work-to-family conflict and enrichment on women's health (physical and mental health) 8 months after women returned to work and the impact of health on voluntary turnover 12 months after women returned to work. Having a nonstandard work schedule was directly and positively related to conflict, whereas schedule control buffered the effect of psychological requirements on conflict. Skill discretion and job security, both job resources, directly and positively related to enrichment. Work-to-family conflict was negatively related to both physical and mental health, but work-to-family enrichment positively predicted only physical health. Physical health and mental health both negatively influenced turnover. We discuss implications and opportunities for future research. (Contains 1 footnote, 1 table, and 3 figures.)

The control of social attention during early infancy was investigated in two studies. In both studies, an adult turned towards one of two targets within the infant's immediate visual field. We tested: (a) whether infants were able to follow the direction of the adult's head turn; and (b) whether following a head turn was accompanied by further gaze shifts between experimenter and target. In the first study, 1-month-olds did not demonstrate attention following at the group level. In addition, those infants who turned towards the same target remained fixed on it and did not shift attention again. In Study 2, we tested infants longitudinally at 2-4 months. At the group level, infants followed the adult's head turn at 3 and 4 months but not at 2 months. Those infants who turned towards the same target at 3 and 4 months also shifted gaze back and forth between experimenter and target. By 3 months, infants seem able to capitalize on the social environment to disengage and distribute attention more flexibly. The results support the claim that the control of social attention begins in early infancy, and are consistent with the hypothesis that following the attention of other people is dependent on the development of disengagement skills.