14 June, 2011: Food for Thought lunch
- Invitation
- Michiel Westenberg: Social anxiety in adolescence: Some findings from the SAND-study
- Christine Espin: Measuring the "academic health" of adolescents with learning disabilities: Developing a tool for educators.
- Practical details
Invitation
The Dean of the Graduate School Of Behavioural Sciences invites you to attend the 14th Food for Thought lunch. Speakers will be prof. Michiel Westenberg (Psychology) and prof. Christine Espin (Education and Child Studies).
Michiel Westenberg: Social anxiety in adolescence: Some findings from the SAND-study
About SAND
The Social Anxiety and Normal Development study (SAND) aims to understand the course and development of social-evaluative anxiety during adolescence -- the global, or 'common', developmental pathway of social anxiety and the pathways diverging from the global pathway. A community sample of 331 youths (age 9 to 21 years) was assessed four times across a 4 year period, according to a cross-sequential design. Intra-personal variables (sexual, cognitive, and psychosocial maturation; cognitive and emotional functioning; temperament) and inter-personal variables (parenting, peer relationships) were assessed so as to determine the relationship between these variables and the emergent pathways of social anxiety.
Key ingredient
A key ingredient in the proposed research is the public speaking task. This task affords physiological and behavioural assessments of the fear of negative social evaluation (in addition to subjective, self-report measures of social-evaluative anxiety), and enables the assessment of cognitive and emotional functioning while participants are aroused by the prospect of a public performance.
Findings
Two sets of findings will be presented:
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data concerning the global developmental pathway of self-reported social anxiety and stress response to a public speaking protocol (does fear of negative social evaluation increase during adolescence?) and
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data concerning divergent pathways related to various factors including perceived social support, cognitive variables, and temperament (which factors predict divergent pathways of social anxiety during adolescence?).
Special attention will be given to preliminary findings about gene-environment interactions in the development of social anxiety during adolescence.
Christine Espin: Measuring the "academic health" of adolescents with learning disabilities: Developing a tool for educators.
The “academic health” of students with learning and behaviour disabilities (e.g., dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD) often suffers because of severe reading, writing, or behavioural difficulties. Educators struggle to meet the needs of such students, especially at the secondary-school level where students are expected to learn independently and employ basic reading and writing skills to access content-area (e.g., chemistry, history, etc.) material.
One tool that could potentially help secondary-school educators to meet the needs of adolescents with learning and behavioural disabilities is continuous progress monitoring. Practically speaking, such a system should be easy to implement, easy to interpret, time-efficient, inexpensive, and should allow for repeated measurement of student performance. Technically speaking, such a system should be reliable and valid, and should produce data that, when used, lead to improved teacher instruction and student performance.
In this presentation, I provide a brief overview of a programme of research focused on the development a practitioner-based, technically adequate progress monitoring system for adolescents with learning and behavioural disabilities.
Practical details
Tuesday 14 June, 2011 in room 1A01, from 12.15pm.
We kindly request you to register for this Food for Thought lunch with Jose Tieken.