Publication Type: Short Research Paper
Abstract: A comparison of pre-service and in-service teachers' assessment of their preparation to teach mathematics lessons from six content areas is reported. In five content areas, pre-service teachers felt less well-prepared to teach than experienced teachers. In the area of algebraic reasoning, pre-service teachers felt more confident than experienced teachers in their preparation to teach algebra topics in elementary school.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study provides an examination of differences in students' perceptions of DARE officers across six metropolitan areas in the United States.

Publication Type: Individual Poster
Abstract: Background and Aims: A young child presented with two familiar objects and one novel object, can correctly pick the novel object when presented with a novel name (i.e. “get the blicket;” Carey, 1978; Carey & Bartlett, 1978). This “fast mapping” ability is often cited as evidence of children’s word learning proficiency. Our previous work, however, indicates that fast mapping and word learning represent distinct time scales of language acquisition. Twenty-four-month-old children were able to fast map as many as eight new words in a single session, but did not retain these words over a five minute delay (Horst & Samuelson, April, 2005). A connectionist model of this result suggested that fast mapping emerges in the moment, while word learning emerges over a longer time scale (Horst, McMurray & Samuelson, June 2005). The present research builds on these findings to further explore the processes that govern how an initial name-object mapping becomes a known name. We ask: what does it take for children to retain names taught in fast mapping tasks?

Methods and Key Results: Toddlers were randomly assigned to two conditions. On each fast mapping trial, children saw two familiar objects and one novel object, and were asked to either get a familiar object (e.g., car) or a novel object (e.g., blicket). Children in the Reinforced Condition (RC) received immediate feedback after their responses, while children in the Ostensive Naming Condition (OC) received immediate ostensive naming. Children in both conditions correctly fast mapped both the familiar (M(rc) = .78; M(oc) = .77) and the novel names (M(rc) = .70; M(oc) = .64). However, when tested for retention of these names five minutes later, only children in the Ostensive Naming Condition retained the novel mappings above chance levels, and only for the first four novel names presented (M = .67). Further analyses revealed that children in this condition also attended to the novel objects significantly more during the fast mapping trials than children in the reinforced condition (M(oc) = .98; M(rc) = .66).

Conclusions: These results suggest that the processes that enable children to find the referent of a novel name in the moment may be different from the processes that facilitate encoding of that name-object link in memory. As such, these results are an important first step towards a detailed, process-based account of how young children turn novel names into known names.

Publication Type: Poster
Abstract: This poster provides hard evidence that United States intelligence agencies received dozens of warnings from domestic and international sources that specified terrorists were planning to hijack and use airliners as weapons. The warnings came from numerous sources and were received over several years. Yet, many specifically mentioned targets in Washington, DC and New York City, including the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Further, the United States took steps on numerous occasions to defend against such an attack. Taken together, these findings suggest that the attacks of September 11th, 2001 were preventable and that claims by top government officials in the United States that no one ever imagined airplanes being used as weapons are false.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Migration historians have outlined the various kinds of migration shaping African American History in the early twentieth century. But the predominant migration narrative emphasized for African American southerners during the Jim Crow period has depicted a collective centrifugal experience, with black southerners fleeing deadly epicenters of racial violence, poverty, and discrimination as they headed northward or westward to freedom and economic opportunity. Their presumed unidirectional movement away from the south is generally described as constructive while the decisions of others to remain in the South are often associated with dearth or stasis. Lillian Bertha Jones Horace's many migrations and returns to, from, or within southern, western, northern, and eastern spaces—including Texas, Kentucky, Illinois, Colorado, and New York—affirm that migration was more nuanced than the predominant South-to-North paradigm suggests. Pushed and pulled by various life exigencies, including educational pursuits, professional opportunities, as well as family and personal matters, Horace never left the South "for good,” but departed and returned many times over the course of her life. Her nuanced migration experience, which began and ended in Texas, suggests the need for examining what I call "boomerang migration" and its implications for African American History in general and the history of African American southern women in particular.