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The Importance of Reading with Children
Get PDFThis project looks at how many people are actually reading with their children outside of school and deeply assesses the benefits that reading brings to a child’s life that carry into adulthood. Durham’s Partnership for Children (2016) conducted a study that shows only 46% of parents are reading with their child every day at home. More than half of families are not receiving the benefits of reading with their child that include decreases in behavioral outbursts, increases in fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Researchers have done many in depth studies that isolate and look for specific variables that show the benefits of reading, such as brain scans while viewing books or animations, or measuring the amount of words children know by the time they get to kindergarten, or analysing how intervention with good reading and parenting practices helps children thrive in the aforementioned areas. This project synthesized information from multiple sources and research projects into a brochure for parents to gain a more holistic view of the benefits of reading at home with their children. Taking multiple research papers and translating them from scientific language into everyday language helps parents to quickly read and understand the plethora of benefits their child would receive from being read to and with throughout their adolescence
The Effects of Mentoring and Sex Differences on Perceptions of Academic Success in At-Risk Minority Youth
No full textPrevious research on academic success shows a difference in achievement level between students who participated in school-based mentoring and those who did not receive mentoring. The purpose of the current study was to explore the effect that mentoring, and sex differences had on the perceptions of academic success in at-risk minority youth. It was predicted that participants would rate students with mentors as more likely to succeed academically in their future. It was also predicted that participants would rate female at-risk minority students higher in terms of future academic success compared to males if they had a mentor, as well as if they did not have a mentor. Participants (N = 29) were college students recruited at Western Oregon University through SONA. They were randomly assigned to read one of four scenarios of an at-risk minority youth’s life and rate their future academic success based on the resources that were provided to them. Results confirmed the prediction that at-risk minority students with a mentor would be perceived as significantly more likely to succeed academically in their future, but there was no significant difference in rating within the sex of the student. The implementation of the results in this study could positively influence parents, teachers, principals, representatives in school boards, etc., by giving them a message that all students can significantly benefit from mentoring independent of their sex. The finding that students who have a mentor are perceived as more successful is meaningful because research indicates that other’s expectations of individuals influences actual outcomes and behaviors. Past research suggests that youth may act as is expected for them to act. If at-risk minority youth are expected to be successful with a mentor, this indicates that the more mentoring provided for youth could be beneficial. Future research on the structure of mentoring programs that best fits the needs of at-risk minority youth, longer-term mentoring programs, and recruitment for more mentor volunteers is warranted
Keeping Unsheltered Families Together in Polk County
Get PDFThis project’s aim was to increase family shelter capacity in Polk County by expanding shelter services to Monmouth, Independence, and Dallas. There are no family shelters in Polk County. A modified version of the SOAR and logic model was used to guide research and recommendations. The former builds on the strengths of current practices. The latter provides a visual diagram that illustrates how the intervention will meet the community’s needs. Family Promise provides homeless prevention services, transportation, life skills, food, shelter, and case management to all types of families in Marion County. Based on research, there was a total of 46 homeless students between the Dallas and Central school districts. Data also indicated there were at least 79 homeless families in Polk County. The research found a secure location that promotes family well-being, provides stability, a sense of normalcy, and improves family outcomes. Recommendations are to continue collaboration with Polk County Family and Community Outreach (FCO), Family Promise, Polk County Congregations, and host a community forum with community members, church leaders, Family Promise and FCO to obtain congregation support
Reaching Toward an Understanding of Implicit Racial Bias
Get PDFReaching toward an understanding of implicit racial bias
Darian Demarce*, Yasmine Robles* & J. Daniel McCarthy
*Authors contributed equally
Despite social progress, racial prejudice continues to be a pervasive issue. Self-reported (explicit) prejudice often underestimates the degree of negative racial biases due to the confound of social desirability. The Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz) is a popular measure in social-cognitive research to infer implicit biases that may otherwise be masked by self-reports. A criticism of the IAT, however, is that it fails to capture the contribution of multiple interacting cognitive subprocesses, including cognitive conflict and motor response inhibition. This study aims to examine implicit racial biases using a modified IAT: Participants will view photographs of African American and Caucasian faces and categorize them by race. Importantly, response boxes will be labeled congruent (e.g., Caucasian or Good) or incongruent (e.g., Caucasian or Bad) stereotypes. The time to initiate movements (latency) and deviation toward competing response options (reach curvature) will be calculated to delineate the contribution of response threshold adjustment processes and conflict monitoring, respectively. We expect that early stages of the racial categorization process will be impaired by stereotype-incongruent response categories for both ingroup and outgroup members, whereas this conflict will persist for outgroup members only during the later stage of reach execution (ongoing social conflict monitoring). These predictions are consistent with a neuroanatomical model implicating distinct contributions of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) – a region implicated in a diverse set of cognitive control processes (Shenhav, Botvinick & Cohen, 2013) – in the controlled guidance of reaching movements. These data will add to a growing body of literature using continuous reach tracking to investigate how these neural subprocesses contribute to cognitive control of behavior in across a wide variety of cognitive tasks