Articles on the Web

Articles on the Web

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Steve Hamilton is co-PI on a project funded by the National Science Foundation called “Planning for a charter school-university-museum partnership to enhance diversity in the geosciences” with Robert Ross (PI) and others at the Museum of the Earth. The planning grant project will build a partnership to enhance participation of underrepresented minorities in the geosciences through working with large numbers of minority students in an environment where college enrollment is fostered and science pedagogy is valued. The four partner organizations are: KIPP NYC, a network of successful charter schools seeking improved science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education; Cornell Upward Bound, an organization dedicated to making college education attainable; Cornell University, a university focusing on administering partnerships for equity in STEM education; and the PRI and its Museum of the Earth, a museum specializing in inquiry-based Earth science education.

The project will seek to increase the amount and improve the quality of Earth science education across four KIPP middle schools and a high school. KIPP schools have an excellent record of increasing academic achievement in urban settings, but they have traditionally emphasized reading and math and lagged in inquiry-based science. The partnership seeks to increase awareness of the geosciences and to enhance the effectiveness of their middle and high school science preparation to provide a foundation for successful college science experiences. Partners will also work to foster maintenance of interest in sciences through high school and application to colleges where geoscience degrees might be pursued.

Human Development Outreach & Extension

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The release of Chaos and Its Influence on Children’s Development: An Ecological Perspective provides an important first step in exploring how, why, and at what level, chaos at the familial and societal level affects children. Chaos refers to physical and social settings characterized by crowding, noise, unpredictability or a lack of routines, and instability or unplanned changes. It uses Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory of human development as the means to understand the nature of relations between chaos and development. There is growing evidence that exposure to chaos can adversely impact children’s development and family functioning. The operation of chaos may explain why there are developmental consequences associated with poverty or living in high stress environments.

The book is the product of a conference in honor of Urie Bronfenbrenner held in November 2007, and edited by Gary Evans and Theodore Wachs. The contributors to the volume honor the work of Urie Bronfenbrenner, whose bioecological theory permits study at both the “microsystem” level (the family, school and daycare), as well as at higher-order levels that include parents’ work environments, the child’s local neighborhood, and his or her cultural milieu. The volume is part of an on-going biennial series supported financially by the American Psychological Association.

Human Development Outreach & Extension

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June Mead
Did you know that many of the answers to the social, educational, and health challenges faced by children, parents and teachers may be right At Your Doorstep? Did you know that families who spend time outside together with their children in natural environments can increase their physical activity, connect family members with one another, and connect children with nature?

Recently, the Children, Youth and Families Education and Research Network (CYFERnet) and the CYFERnet Parent/Family Editorial Board, June P. Mead, Editor, conducted a webinar entitled, At Your Doorstep: Creating Family Connections Outdoors. The training focused on At Your Doorstep, an exciting new resource developed by educators at North Carolina State University, aimed at increasing opportunities for parents and children to spend more time together outdoors. An archived version of the webinar is available through CYFERnet at
http://www1.cyfernet.org/onlinepd/09-09-createFamilyConnect.html

Presenters

Karen DeBord, Ph.D., Professor and Extension Specialist, Child Development has been with North Carolina Cooperative Extension at North Carolina State University since 1995.

Lucy Bradley, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Horticultural Science, North Carolina State University, is the Urban Horticulture Specialist for North Carolina Cooperative Extension.

Liz Driscoll, M.S., Extension Associate, Department of Horticultural Science, North Carolina State University has been working to connect 4-H youth and extension educators to issues in agriculture and the environment in meaningful ways.

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This presentation critiques the currently dominant models of criminal justice which focus on deterring wrongdoing by sanctions and punishment. Tyler suggests that a more effective and desirable model would focus on creating and maintaining the legitimacy of the law and legal authorities so that people would more voluntarily cooperate with the police and the courts. Research supporting this alternative perspective is presented.

Tom Tyler Tom R. Tyler is a University Professor at New York University. He teaches in the psychology department and the law school. His research explores the dynamics of authority in groups, organizations, and societies. In particular, he examines the role of judgments about the justice or injustice of group procedures in shaping legitimacy, compliance and cooperation. He is the author of several books, including The social psychology of procedural justice (1988); Social justice in a diverse society (1997); Cooperation in groups (2000); Trust in the law (2002); and Why people obey the law (2006).Sponsored by Law, Psychology & Human Development

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By Susan Lang
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle October 27, 2009

Almost half of all recent M.D.s and Ph.D.s in biology are women, and so are the majority of new psychologists (67 percent), veterinarians (75 percent) and dentists (70 percent). But why the lack of women mathematicians, engineers, chemists and physicists?

Book cover

In the top 100 U.S. universities, only 9-15 percent of tenure-track academic positions (and less than 10 percent of full professors) in math-intensive fields are held by women, report Cornell professors Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams.

Yet, more than one-third of the professors in the social sciences and humanities (except in economics with 16 percent) are women.

In their new book, "The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls" (Oxford University Press), Ceci and Williams examine evidence from around the world in endocrinology, economics, sociology, education, genetics and psychology about why such fields as mathematics, computer science, physics, engineering and chemistry are so lopsidedly male. They examine three classes of explanations: ability differences in mathematics and spatial ability, biases and barriers, and career/lifestyle preferences.

Their general conclusion: The imbalance in mathematically oriented careers is not due to the sex differences in mathematical and spatial ability that have been reported, or to current biases.

"Though past cohort discrepancies may be explained in such terms, because women are hired for tenure-track positions at rates roughly comparable to their proportions in the Ph.D. pools -- and more often than not, slightly above their proportions," said Ceci, the Helen L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology at Cornell.

Rather, he added, the single biggest reason why so few women work in these fields is because they opt out of such careers at a fairly young age.

"In surveys," Ceci said, "very few adolescent girls say they desire to be an engineer or physicist, preferring instead to be medical doctors, veterinarians and lawyers."

Although females earn a large portion of bachelor's degrees in all fields of science, including math-intensive fields (46 percent of mathematics majors are females), disproportionately fewer women enter graduate school in these fields, and fewer women who earn Ph.D.s apply for academic jobs.

Women want some job flexibility to raise children, and "the timing of child rearing coincides with the most demanding periods of their career, such as trying to get tenure or working exorbitant hours to get promoted," Ceci said.

For the same reasons, women drop out of scientific fields after entering them -- especially math and physical sciences -- at significantly higher rates than men, particularly as they advance, added co-author Williams, professor of human development.

Even in such fields as medicine, where women now make up half of graduating classes, those entering academic medicine drop out at higher rates than do their male counterparts.

"The tenure structure in academe demands that women who have children make their greatest intellectual achievements contemporaneously with their greatest physical and emotional achievements -- a feat fathers are never expected to accomplish," Williams said. "When women opt out of careers -- or segue to part-time work in them -- to have children, this is a choice men are not required to make."

The book builds on a study that Ceci, Williams and colleague Susan Barnett published earlier this year in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin (135:2), which analyzed more than 400 articles and book chapters published over 35 years on sex differences in math.

Ceci and Williams, a couple with three daughters, including one with a graduate degree in engineering, both teach in Cornell's College of Human Ecology.

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Robyn Fivush, Ph.D., Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology at Emory University, will present a lecture entitled "Family Stories and Adolescent Identity and Well-being." Dr. Fivush will examine narrative approaches to understanding self and well-being in adolescence, and examine the role of personal stories and intergenerational stories, stories about one's parents, and their parents before them, in helping adolescents to create a sense of self grounded in the past yet situated in the present that provides a core sense of well-being in the world.

Dr. Fivush's visit is co-sponsored by Group Disparities in Development (Human Development), Psychology, and the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center.

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Karene Booker

Charles Brainerd received a Faculty Innovation in Teaching Award for his Memory and Law Technology Enhancement Project. The Memory and the Law course he teaches, HD 3190/6190; LAW 7582, is currently offered in a traditional classroom setting. This project envisions adapting and developing course materials to: enrich the classroom experience of the current course through technology enhancements, create a distance education course in Memory and the Law offered to an expanded student population, and ultimately repurpose the modules and materials for continuing education for attorneys and other professionals. Specifically, the project will: 1) enhance the current course with online materials and activities suitable for both online and hybrid learners; 2) provide distance learning students with course content similar to the materials that those enrolled in the traditional course are provided and 3) make it possible for a self-guided lawyer/judge or other professional learner to choose and benefit from an individual module from the course.

The Faculty Innovation in Teaching (FIT) program is designed to allow faculty to develop innovative instructional technology projects that have the potential to improve the educational process. The program provides faculty with the technical staff and other resources necessary to plan and implement their projects, thus allowing faculty to focus on their pedagogical objectives.

The proposed course technology enhancements will make cutting edge research on memory and the law accessible to a wider student population including students in other universities as well as lawyers, judges, and other professionals. The topic is critical and timely. Most legal testimony and evidence is based on information from human memory, yet legal professionals and others who work with children and adults involved with the legal system are often unaware of the findings from the scientific study of memory. This course translates basic and applied research on memory into recommendations for preserving and evaluating the integrity of evidence in legal settings.

This interdisciplinary project represents collaboration between the Department of Human Development and the Law School and builds on the strength of Cornell’s Law, Psychology, and Human Development Program. Cornell is a leader in a major new pedagogical trend in law to bring empirical evidence into training. Cornell’s Law, Psychology, and Human Development (LPHD) program is at the forefront of the movement toward empirical law and has wide support.

The LPHD program is a trans-disciplinary program for the integration of research and outreach in the social sciences, legal studies, and public policy. It is unique in the country for its emphasis on research. Included are scholars from the fields of developmental psychology, social psychology, organizational behavior, cognitive psychology, anthropology, sociology, and law.

For Further Information

Karene Booker, ktb1@cornell.edu

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Wendy M. Williams and Jessica Zulawski

Starting last winter, second-graders in an Ithaca elementary school classroom have enjoyed riveting discussions about how to distinguish good from bad sources of information, the differences between causation and association, and the elements of sound experimental design. While this may sound like material targeted at high school students, the second graders were taught the underlying concepts using age-appropriate teaching modules as part of the ongoing Thinking Like a Scientist (TLAS) project.

TLAS is an ongoing Cornell educational outreach program developed by Human Development professor Wendy Williams. TLAS has many variants, each aimed at teaching critical thinking and reasoning skills to a different group of young people. The underlying goal of TLAS is to train students to use the scientific method to solve problems in their daily lives. One format of TLAS targets under-represented demographic and socioeconomic groups in science—such as African American, Latino, and economically-disadvantaged White students—at the high school level, with the goal of fostering both an interest in science and stronger critical thinking skills. For high school students, the TLAS curriculum includes in-depth classroom discussions focused on the scientific method and how it can be applied to everyday situations.

Elementary students, however, represented new territory for the program. Thus, Williams enlisted Cornell Human Development senior Jessica Zulawski to help design a new variant of TLAS for these younger students. For her honors thesis, Jessica (under the supervision of Williams), translated the high school TLAS lesson plans into a format appropriate for a second-grade classroom. Laurie Rubin, a twenty-year veteran Ithaca teacher who has taught at Beverly Martin as well as Cayuga Heights elementary schools, played a critical role in the development process by providing invaluable input and guidance, and by teaching the TLAS lessons to her class of second graders.

The lesson plans were taught once a week in forty-five minute segments, but Ms. Rubin also reinforced the knowledge gained during this time by reiterating the material during other class time. The six TLAS modules taught by Rubin were titled “What is Science?,” “Define the Problem,” “Know Fact vs. Opinion,” “Weigh Evidence and Make Decisions,” ”Move from Science to Society, ” and finally, an overarching module that tied together all previous material. Examples in these lessons focused on the central theme of the psychology of food and eating behavior. The curriculum involved discussions on the effects of visual cues on appetite, advertising and healthy eating, and how to find good sources of nutrition information.

Improvement in students’ critical thinking skills was measured by rating students’ verbal responses to open-ended questions. Students were tested individually by Jessica, who transcribed their answers. Testing was conducted two months before the program began, just before program inception, and then two months later, at the conclusion of the program, to provide baseline improvement data for the students as well as program-related improvement data. Questions posed to students involved hypothetical children in real-world scenarios common in the students’lives, and the students were asked if the individual in the scenario was exercising “Good thinking” or “Not-so-good thinking,” and why. The responses were scored by two independent raters on a scale of one to five, indicating the students’ level of ability to generalize the scientific method to solve real-world problems.

The results on the effectiveness of the elementary program showed a great deal of promise. On average, students improved in their scores on each question by one full point by the completion of the program, demonstrating a significant increase. This finding suggests that this curriculum could be useful in additional classrooms to improve the critical thinking abilities of other elementary school students, and warrants further exploration of TLAS for young students.

The hope motivating the expansion of TLAS to this younger group of students was that these students would use the critical thinking skills gained through TLAS to become responsible consumers and users of information. Growing up in the information age, these children are surrounded by a vast world of facts and figures, so it is important that they know what information they can and cannot deem reliable. Real-world problem solving means knowing how to sift relevant from irrelevant information and trustworthy from less-trusted sources, with the aim of building solid solutions responsive to multiple aspects of a problem (for example, how to create a healthy lifestyle). The knowledge and abilities these students gained from participating in the TLAS program are a start on their journey toward thinking like a scientist in everyday life.

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June Mead

Over 750 people attended the Children, Youth, and Families at Risk (CYFAR) Conference in Baltimore, Maryland May 18-21. CYFAR 2009 keynote speakers included Francesca Adler-Baeder, Associate Professor and Extension Specialist, Human Development and Family Studies, Auburn University. Her inspiring keynote was entitled What’s love got to do with it? Children’s development in the context of their parents’ relationships. Bonnie Braun, Director of the Center for Health Literacy, University of Maryland gave the 4-H Family Strengthening Distinguished Lecture, Stories from the By-ways of Life: Tales of Hopes, Dreams and Things In-between. Chandra Ghosh Ippen, Associate Research Director of the Child Trauma Research Program, University of California, San Francisco, presented Designing Systems that Match the Needs of Diverse Families: Focusing on Attachment, Culture, and Trauma.

This year’s featured research presentations included Gary Evans, Professor of Human Ecology speaking on The Environment of Childhood Poverty. His presentation examined the role of physical and social factors in the lives of children growing up in poverty, arguing that the confluence of risk factors plays a particularly critical role in children’s lives. Dr. Evans’ research was recently featured in the Washington Post.

The other research presentations at CYFAR 2009 featured Deborah Leong, Professor Emeritus, Director Center for Improving Early Learning, Metropolitan State College of Denver, Self-Regulation and School Readiness: What Neuroscience Tells Us and How to Support its Development in the Early Childhood Classroom; Marc A. Zimmerman, Professor and Chair in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education in the School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Empowerment Theory and Adolescent Resilience: Applications for Prevention; and Jane D. Brown, Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, From Video Games to Facebook: Teens’ Health and the Media.

In one of the conferences many successes, nearly 100 CYFAR Conference volunteers joined with the neighbors of the Academy of Success, a community center targeting the underserved in Baltimore City, to build a KaBOOM! playground in Baltimore in just one day. This playground will provide a safe, healthy place for children to play and families to gather for years to come. Events also included a tour to the afterschool program at nearby Fort Meade. The Teen Committee organized a special community service project in which conference attendees wrote letters of encouragement to deployed U.S. Military Service Members. Teen conference participants assisted with the Learning Arcade, helping teach adults about integrating technology into their programs.

Keynote and research presentations will be available for online viewing. These web-video talks can be used as a springboard for continuing dialogue about the important challenges being addressed by those working with children, youth and families. June P. Mead is the CYFAR 2009 Conference Program Coordinator and Steve Goggin chairs the CYFAR 2009 Keynote and Research Committee.

For More Information

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Lisa McCabe

A new report summarizes the results of a 3-year study of Universal Pre-kindergarten in rural areas of New York State. The report, Universal Pre-Kindergarten, Early Care, and Education in Rural New York: Research Findings and Policy Implications, was written by Lisa A. McCabe, John W. Sipple, Hope Casto, and Judith Ross-Bernstein. Based on in-depth case studies with rural school districts, as well as analyses of state-wide education and child care data, the report addressed four key issues: 1) Limited early care and education opportunities; 2) Coordination across early education systems and partners; 3) Transportation; and 4) Pre-kindergarten program implementation. Policy recommendations focus on flexibility in funding, technical assistance, transportation assistance, and sustained fiscal investment. This document is intended for parents, citizens and taxpayers; practitioners in both the schools and community-based organizations; and policymakers at the local, state and federal levels. Funding for this work was provided by the Rural Education Advisory Committee (REAC).

Download the Report

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