Bridgewater State University

About: Bridgewater State University is a education organization based out in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 625 authors who have published 1223 publications receiving 21820 citations. The organization is also known as: BSU & Bridgewater State.

Media Coverage of Agency-Related Child Maltreatment Fatalities: Does It Result in State Legislative Change Intended to Prevent Future Fatalities?

Abstract: This study investigates whether child maltreatment fatalities among children receiving services from state child welfare agencies spur substantive, as opposed to symbolic, legislative change to direct child welfare policy and practice. Using existing state-level data from three years, this study examined the influence of news stories, state characteristics, and child welfare policy practice factors on the passage of new child welfare legislations. The results suggest that high levels of media attention are indeed associated with new child welfare policy that is preventative in nature. Furthermore, state child welfare policy practice characteristics are also significantly related to the passage of new child maltreatment fatality-related legislation. The author makes recommendations for future research concerning the effectiveness of policy and practice change that results from child maltreatment fatalities.

WAC: Closing Doors or Opening Doors for Second Language Writers?.

Abstract: Written by a WAC program director and second language writing studies scholar, this article raises questions about how second language writers are faring in WAC programs and the extent to which the fields of second language writing and WAC are informed by each other's scholarship. In this article, Cox draws from her review of 26 journal articles and book chapters on L2 writers to first share how WAC programs look and work from the vantage point of L2 writing scholars and the L2 students impacted by WAC curricula, and then share representations of L2 writers and writing in WAC literature. She concludes by recommending that WAC scholars and administrators advocate for second language students, offering concrete suggestions for WAC scholarship to become more inclusive of L2 writing scholarship and WAC program administration to become more linguistically and culturally inclusive. By all accounts, the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement is, as Christopher Thaiss and Tara Porter (2010) argue, \"alive and well.\" Reporting on their 2008 survey investigating the health of the WAC movement, which replicated a survey conducted by Susan McLeod and Susan Shirley in 1987, Thaiss and Porter state that 64% of the responding U.S. institutions of higher education reported either having or planning to begin a WAC or Writing in the Disciplines (WID) program (p. 541). These survey results revealed significant growth in the number of WAC programs in the 22 years since McLeod and Shirley's survey. Referring to the results of the 1987 survey, Russell (1991) commented, \"The WAC movement far surpasses any previous movements to improve writing across the curriculum, both in the number of programs and in the breadth of their influence\" (p. 291), a statement that is even truer today given the Thaiss and Porter findings. Indeed, proponents of WAC have much to be proud of; writing-intensive courses, faculty workshops, writing fellows programs, and other WAC-related programming have proliferated in colleges and universities across the US. As Terry Myers Zawacki and Paul M. Rogers attest in their introduction to Writing Across the Curriculum: A Critical Sourcebook (2012), over 40 years of WAC/WID research has demonstrated that WAC has been \"successful in improving teaching and learning in the challenging environment of higher education\" (p. 1) — opening doors to knowledge-making, active learning, and communication for students across the curriculum. However, it isn't clear that the same holds true for second language (L2)[2] students. Literature emerging from second language writing studies, I will argue, reveals WAC as a program that can close doors for L2 students. In this article, I draw from my review of 26 journal articles and book chapters on L2 writers and WAC to share first how WAC programs look and work

Bingo! Externally supported performance intervention for deficient visual search in normal aging, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer's disease.

Abstract: External support may improve task performance regardless of an individual's ability to compensate for cognitive deficits through internally generated mechanisms. We investigated if performance of a complex, familiar visual search task (the game of bingo) could be enhanced in groups with suboptimal vision by providing external support through manipulation of task stimuli. Participants were 19 younger adults, 14 individuals with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD), 13 AD-matched healthy adults, 17 non-demented individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD), and 20 PD-matched healthy adults. We varied stimulus contrast, size, and visual complexity during game play. The externally supported performance interventions of increased stimulus size and decreased complexity resulted in improvements in performance by all groups. AD also obtained benefit from increasing contrast, presumably by compensating for their contrast sensitivity deficit. The general finding of improved performance across healthy and afflicted groups suggests the value of visual support as an easy-to-apply intervention to enhance cognitive performance.