To talk about personal fable/optimistic bias, I like to show some data I collected from a large undergraduate class a few years ago. I asked them to compare their likelihood of a range of outcomes to the rest of the class (5 point scale ranging from more likely to less likely). If people were accurate, then the same percent of students should choose more likely as less likely (you can ignore the “equal” ratings). Instead, there is almost always optimistic bias. For instance, averaged across the negative events, 47% of students rate them as less likely to happen to themselves, and only 19% as more likely (biggest biases come from STDs, pregnancy, and alcohol poisoning; reverse, pessimistic bias comes from skin cancer). Averaged across positive events, 41% of students rate them as more likely to happen to themselves, 19% as less likely (biggest biases come from successful marriage and getting the job you want; reverse pessimistic bias from winning the lottery). It’s interesting for thinking about people’s ability to make these judgments, which we now know doesn’t disappear after adolescence.

We chatted about Moffitt’s adolescence limited and life course persistent antisocial behavior model, and the newer Loeber and Burke model of different developmental pathways to externalizing and internalizing outcomes. And recent work by Loeber and colleagues on how cognitive impulsivity and intelligence are associated with the age-crime curve.

We also discussed an article in which the authors predicted age 15 externalizing behavior from exposure to cocaine in utero.

And finally, we tried to think about how to intervene in the different types of externalizing behaviors.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Risk, externalizing behaviors & violence first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on March 31, 2014.”

A student presented on the Common Core standards and how they may impact adolescents’ learning and development more generally. He summarized some of the work by Eccles and colleagues on stage-environment fit, talked about No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, summarized the goals of Common Core, discussed potential benefits and risks of Common Core, brought up the risk of teacher blaming, and mentioned larger-scale issues beyond curricula that affect performance. I then asked students, who were mostly critical of Common Core, to propose solutions to the educational challenges in the US, and they came up with some interesting suggestions, including more vocational training for non-college bound adolescents, more flexibility to individualize curricula,  and structural changes.

I talked about some of my favorite cross-cultural studies, by Saxe (1982, 1988), on the importance of context for studying mathematical thinking.

And we talked about neuroscience work coming out of various research groups, including Casey and Steinberg (plus check out work by my colleague, Chuck Geier), that helps to explain increases in risk taking in adolescence.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Cognition and Schools first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on March 24, 2014.”

Caveat: I have never live tweeted at a conference. So I won’t be offended if you stop reading now (also: I won’t know). I have, however, read about live tweeting at conferences, and enjoyed reading tweets about a talk I gave at the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood last Fall. And I’m in Austin at SRA, and for the first time (at least that I’ve noticed), the #SRA2014 hashtag seems quite active and engaged, so I expect lots of live tweeting to happen. I want to be ready.

Profhacker has a great post about live tweeting conferences. The best tips I take from that post, and others I have read, are:

In the audience:

Be respectful. You may disagree with the presenter, and there are ways to do that politely. But the 140 character maximum is quite limiting, and subtlety can be lost with brevity. Err on the side of respect.

Consider people who are not attending the conference. You likely have more followers not attending than attending the conference, and that’s certainly true for the session. Make sure your tweets make sense for people not sitting in the room.

Don’t overtweet. When someone in my feed is at a conference and is tweeting minute-by-minute, I tend to get overwhelmed and wish I could turn them off.  It may be okay for one session you’re particularly excited about, but not 8 hours a day for 3 days.  

Clearly attribute. Maybe no one has been brought up on charges for plagiarism on twitter. But make sure that if you are directly quoting, you provide quotation marks, and that even if not quoting, you acknowledge the speaker either by username, or if not on twitter, by full name.

First character matters. It’s common for people to begin a tweet with someone else’s username, as in: “@ClaireKampDush explains her strategy for being a productive writer pre-tenure: https://u.osu.edu/adventuresinhdfs/2014/03/06/work-and-family-and-one-night-a-week/ “. Did you know when you start a tweet with a username, only people who follow you AND the other person will see it in their feed? Profhacker recommends starting the tweet with a period (.) beforehand, so all of your followers can see the tweet.

Hashtag. If you want people beyond your followers to read your tweets, use the conference hashtag.

Easily use the conference hashtag. Typing a hashtag each time is awkward. Profhacker recommends text expansion, which could work for you. If you’re lower tech, simply create text and copy it, so you can paste it straight in each time. You can create one simply for the conference (#SRA2014), or if live tweeting a particular talk, you can include the name of a presenter as well, including the . at the front (.@MimiArbeit #SRA2014). Then for each tweet, simply paste it in at the start.

Type quietly!

Think about your prior and subsequent tweets. Twitter is a very public forum (unless you have your account set to private). If you are live tweeting with a conference hashtag, other conference attendees are likely to check out your twitter account. Graduate students in particular need to think about impression management (though of course everyone should think about it). Don’t have your tweet right before the session read something like, “Didn’t think I could drink that many margaritas and still make it to an 8:30 talk! #multitasking”).  

As a presenter:

Provide your username on your slides. If someone live tweets your talk, s/he can attribute it to you easily if you tell them how.

Post a tweet right before you present, with, if you create one, a hashtag for your session.

Try to respond to tweets after you present.

“The post Live tweeting conferences first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on March 19, 2014.”

I love talking about peer relationships. An alum of our program used to say that if she wasn’t a grad student in HDFS, she should have become a race car driver. My very boring version of the, if I wasn’t… game is, I would be a peer researcher.

This week’s presentation was on what the Internet, cell phones, and other forms of social technology mean for adolescent relationships. Our student presenter, who is also a sexual health educator, freaked everyone out by discussing all of the newest forms of social media that adolescents use (Facebook had 3 million fewer 13-17 year old users in 2014 compared to 2011).  So she discussed a range of other social media that have become popular with adolescents: snapchat, tinder, blendr, kik messenger, whisper app, ask.fm, seeking arrangement. If you don’t know them all, look them up… or don’t; you may not be able to handle it. She also discussed work on cyberbullying, including work by Sinclair and colleagues (2012), and not yet published work by Diane Felmlee. 

We read some classics, including Brown, Mory, & Kinney (1994) and Kinney (1993) which led to good discussions about crowds and the shaping of social interactions and identity. This discussion requires me to share my very own yearbook photo due to a longstanding agreement with a high school classmate – always a hoot for everyone but me. And we spent a lot of time talking about peer influence, selection, and socialization.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Peers first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on March 4, 2014.”