Child Psychology Commons^™

It's All Happening At The Zoo: Children's Environmental Learning After School, Jason A. Douglas, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

Pairing dynamic out-of-school-time (OST) programs with zoos can encourage young people's relationships with and sense of responsibility for animals and the environment. The project presented in this article, Animal Rescuers, gave the authors the opportunity to examine how such a pairing can work. OST programs enable learning in settings that are generally unavailable during school time (Honig & McDonald, 2005). They provide space for collaboration among students, teachers, and others such as program visitors or outside educators. Taking advantage of the flexibility, location, and educational playfulness of an OST setting, the authors worked intensively with a small number of 10-12-year-old …

School-Based Screening To Identify At-Risk Students Not Already Known To School Professionals: The Columbia Suicide Screen, Michelle A. Scott, Holly C. Wilcox, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Mark Davies, Roger C. Hicks, J. Blake Turner, David Shaffer

Publications and Research

Objectives.Wesought todeterminethedegreeofoverlapbetweenstudents identified through school-based suicide screening and those thought to be at risk by school administrative and clinical professionals. Methods. Students from7 high schools in theNewYorkmetropolitan area completed the Columbia Suicide Screen; 489 of the 1729 students screened had positive results. The clinical status of 641 students (73% of those who had screened positive and 23%of thosewho had screened negative) was assessedwithmodules from the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children. School professionals nominated by their principal and unaware of students’ screening and diagnostic status were asked to indicate whether they were concerned about the emotional well-being of each participating student. …

Cookie Monsters: Seeing Young People’S Hacking As Creative Practice, Gregory T. Donovan, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

This paper examines the benefits and obstacles to young people’s open-ended and unrestricted access to technological environments. While children and youth are frequently seen as threatened or threatening in this realm, their playful engagements suggest that they are self-possessed social actors, able to negotiate most of its challenges effectively. Whether it is proprietary software, the business practices of some technology providers, or the separation of play, work, and learning in most classrooms, the spatial-temporality of young people’s access to and use of technology is often configured to restrict their freedom of choice and behavior. We focus on these issues through …

Reconfiguring Childhood Boys And Girls Growing Up Global, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

Children are a spur, a commitment, a way of imaging the future—but all too often these sorts of phrases just rattle around a vacuum, their utterance the beginning and end of the commitment. We emphasize “the best interests of the child,”but this gloss provides a moral imperative to all manner of uncompleted projects and unfulfilled policies. Likewise, the use of children’s images or presence in public forums of all types gives a patina of honorableness to practices and plans that never actually make good on the promissory note of childhood. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit is a notable example. Such …

Harmful To Whom? Panelists Consider The Conservative Backlash Against Judith Levine's New Book, Patrick Mccreery

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Judith Levine jokingly says that at least she's in good company: Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, and Jocelyn Elders all were vilified for allegedly promoting sex between adults and children (though of course none of them did any such thing). Levine, a journalist and founder of the National Writers Union, has been vilified and worse because of her new book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (University of Minnesota Press). In it, she argues that sex is not inherently harmful to teenagers, but can be healthy and empowering. Furthermore, she claims that society's responses to fears of …

Neurological Soft Signs And School Achievement: The Mediating Effects Of Sustained Attention, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, David Shaffer, Joseph E. Barmack

Publications and Research

Citation:

Schonfeld, I. S., Shaffer, D., & Barmack, J.E. (1989). Neurological soft signs and school achievement: The mediating effects of sustained attention. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 17, 575-596. doi:10.1007/BF00917723

A Methodology For The Study Of Children's Environmental Knowledge In Other Cultures, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

This paper presents a methodology which I used to study the content and acquisition of children's environmental knowledge as central to the social reproduction of a rural agricultural economy in the Sudan. My approach was forged drawing on methods of geography, linguistics and anthropology to provide information on (1) how children learn to interact productively with their environment, (2) the nature of their interactions and (3) their knowledge of environmental processes and resources. In this paper I will describe first the methodology adopted including participant observation, ethnosemantic interviews, child-led walks, environmental modeling and "geo-dramas". I will then discuss its use …