To understand and assess how early adolescents use their social perspective taking (SPT) skills in their consideration of social problems, we conducted two studies. In study 1, we administered a hypothetical SPT scenario to 359 fourth to eighth graders. Modeled on the linguistic pragmatics of speech acts, we used grounded theory to develop a functional approach that identified three types of SPT acts: (1) the acknowledgment of different actors, (2) the articulation of their thoughts and feelings, and (3) the positioning of the roles, experiences, or circumstances that influence how they resolve problems. Study 2 tested the validity of an expanded instrument, the Social Perspective Taking Acts Measure, with 459 fourth to eighth graders. We confirmed the structure of the construct with a fully saturated confirmatory factor analysis, with factor loadings in the range of .62 and .71, and a factor determinacy of .90. We obtained evidence of criterion-related validity by successfully predicting that girls and older participants would exhibit better performance than boys and younger students, and that SPT would exhibit a negative association with aggressive interpersonal strategies, a positive but moderate association with writing, and non-significant associations with academic language, complex reasoning, and reading skills.
La idea de que "los maestros de Bogotá se están enloqueciendo" debido a las difíciles condiciones en las que ejercen su labor educativa ha aparecido en las noticias recientemente con mucha frecuencia. Con el propósito de determinar 1) los contextos del quehacer docente que afectan el bienestar psicosocial de los maestros, 2) la percepción que tienen de su salud física, emocional, psicológica y su desempeño laboral, 3) los saberes y habilidades que han desarrollado para enfrentar exitosamente sus problemáticas y 4) los relatos dominantes que usan para describir su trabajo, que cotribuyen o no a su bienestar psicosocial, se condujeron entrevistas y grupos focales con 54 maestros, rectores y orientadores, y se creó una encuesta a partir de las categorías que emergieron de la información cualitativa, la cual fue tramitada por 562 docentes de 25 Instituciones Educativas Distritales (IED). En este trabajo se identificaron las características contextuales que perturban el bienestar de los maestros, y se encontraron diferencias entre la salud física, emocional y psicológica de los docentes según la evaluación promedio que obtuvo la institución educativa en que laboran. Sin embargo, no se encontraron niveles de perturbación significativos y, por el contrario, se identificó una tendencia hacia el bienestar y un alto uso de estrategias para enfrentar dificultades de forma exitosa. El presente artículo discute el desfase que existe entre el panorama negativo que presentan los relatos dominantes que circulan sobre la salud mental de los docentes y los resultados positivos de sus autorreportes, además de presentar recomendaciones al respecto.
In Colombia, reducing levels of interpersonal and community violence is a key component of the country's approach to citizenship education. In this study, we use data collected during the 2005 Saber test of Citizenship Competencies to examine the relationship of school environments and individual students' supportive attitudes toward violence among 97,971 students in 1649 schools. Using multi-level Tobit analysis with school random intercepts and regional fixed effects, we find that children taught in safe and participatory climates endorse attitudes less supportive of violence, with the effect of participatory climates almost double that of safe climates. Constructing a typology of four classroom environments, by crossing the two dimensions of safety and participation, we conclude that school environments that are safe and participatory lead to the least supportive attitudes toward violence, more than 1 standard deviation lower than unsafe and non-participatory school environments. Implications, limitations, and areas for future research are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.