Early-life exposures are critical for later child cognitive development. McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities (MSCA) were used to assess cognitive development of 700 preschoolers (M[subscript age] = 4.2 years), derived from the "Rhea" birth cohort, in Greece. Principal component analysis (PCA) was applied on prospectively collected…

Teach For America (TFA) corps members in reflecting on their experiences, have described their motivations to join the program as idealistic, ambitious, and "profound drives to effect educational change" (Crawford-Garrett, 2012, p. 27) that eventually had to be reconciled with unexpected, harsh realities--both in their placement schools…

Journalists identify with a medium because it aligns with their interests and talents, and they may resist tasks incongruent with their perceived creative strengths. Occupational conflict arises when one's personality does not align with expected work tasks within a role according to Holland's theory of vocational choice. We carried out a…

This project explores racial tokenism in the Japanese academy. It grows out of concerns regarding the low status of foreign university faculty in Japan along with a need to evaluate recent government initiatives aimed at fostering "internationalization" of Japanese higher education. In this three-year case study, I investigated the work…

This article investigates the ways in which children from immigrant backgrounds view the place of "other" languages in primary schools in France and England. This article draws on findings from a cross-national ethnographic study, which investigated the experiences of 10- and 11-year-old children of immigrants in two primary schools, one…

This paper discusses the interrelations among accent-based biases, social identity and ethnocentrism. Construction of social identity creates a set of ethnocentric values within a person, which indirectly or directly plays a pivotal role in generating accent related biases. Starting with Tajfel's (1959) social identity theory and then the…

This article complicates dominant instrumentalist understandings of international student motivation by focusing on Chinese female tertiary students in Australia. Based on longitudinal fieldwork with 56 such students, it analyses motivations described by students and their parents in interviews, showing that these far exceed instrumentalism and…

Over the past three decades, piano learning has witnessed an upsurge in popularity in China. To examine why, between 2016 and 2018 ethnographic fieldwork was conducted among piano teachers, students, and parents of students. Employing the concept of piano pathway, this article tracks the relationship between piano learning and formal schooling and…

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the ways in which experts in foreign affairs project their scholarly identities on panel presentations. While previous research has focused on the ways in which researchers in various disciplines assert their scholarly identities in written discourse and in conference presentations, no study has…

In this study of 227 students enrolled on 30-day backpacking courses, we examined how certain demographic factors relate to status within the task (goal-related) and social (interpersonal) domains of group functioning. Of particular interest were socioeconomic status (SES) and gender. Using a mixed methods approach, we found that female students…

This study investigates how universities can increase the effectiveness of the search process by featuring in their advertisements expert and celebrity endorsers who attended the institution. How can universities gain the attention of prospective students using the star power of experts and celebrities? Experts and celebrities promoting a…

Courses: Intercultural Communication, Communication and Identity, Interpersonal Communication. Objectives: After completing this semester-long activity, students should be able to (1) discuss and apply the concepts of social identities; (2) analyze the influence of self-identities on online communication practices of self to others and others to…

In recent times, international research students from China have become a substantial demographic because aside from the revenue they bring to host countries, they are valued for their research contributions. To understand how to attract and support them, this article investigated the influences on the educational and post-graduation occupational…

Despite adolescence being a period marked by significant social changes, research on social status focuses largely on adults. This study examined whether school and societal subjective social status (SSS) are differentially associated with adolescent health above and beyond objective socioeconomic status (SES), and explored pathways linking SSS to…

This article assesses the chances of entering the top 5% of earners for a British cohort currently in their 40s. We assess the difference made by a university degree from an elite (Russell Group) or non-elite university, and from different undergraduate fields of study. Our study uses rich longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study…