Zhu, Gaoxia

Knowledge Building is a pedagogical approach emphasizing students' collective responsibility to continuously improve their community knowledge. Various emotions may arise during Knowledge Building activities because of students’ diverse ideas, theory-building and cognitive disequilibrium and equilibrium. These emotions may differ in inquiry threads at different discourse development levels. An inquiry thread is a sequence of notes addressing the same problem or topic. This study examines the frequency and sequential patterns between undergraduate students’ productive and improvable Knowledge Building inquiry threads recorded in Knowledge Forum. We found that emotions reflected in inquiry threads tend to be self-repeated. A series of positive and negative activating emotions were reflected in productive collaborative inquiry threads, suggesting students engaged in the discussion despite conflicting ideas and various emotions. On the other hand, improvable collaborative inquiry threads displayed activating to deactivating emotion transitions, such as joy to boredom, which shows that students might disengage from the discussion.

Introduction Supportive adults are a critical component of effective out-of-school time (OST) youth programs, yet the short-term dynamics that underlie their role are poorly understood. Within GripTape, a US-wide self-driven learning program, we examined if interactions with program-assigned adults (i.e., Champions) correspond with youths' daily psychosocial functioning (i.e., sense of purpose, self-concept clarity, and self-esteem).

Method Participants were 204 North American adolescents (M [SD] = 16.42 [1.18] years; female = 70.1%, male = 25.0%) enrolled in GripTape, a remote OST program that empowers under-resourced teens to pursue their passions for ~10 weeks. During enrollment, youth are given autonomy to structure their learning goals and methods to best match their needs; a stipend of up to 500 USD; and an adult Champion to act as a touchpoint. Data collection consisted of a baseline survey before the program launch and a 5-min survey on each day of enrollment.

Results Across ~70 days, we found that youth reported greater psychosocial functioning on days they reported interacting with their Champion. After controlling for same-day psychosocial functioning, we failed to find evidence that Champion interactions predicted youths' next-day psychosocial functioning.

Conclusion In addition to being among the first studies to investigate the daily benefits of youth-adult interactions within OST programming, this study documents the short-term incremental change that may underlie previous work on OST program outcomes.

Derailment is the sense of being “off-course” in life. But what could this mean for adolescents, who are often establishing identity and self-direction for the first time? We examined the structure and correlates of the Derailment Scale and its short form, the Derailment Scale-6 (DS-6), among middle-to-late adolescents (N = 452). Both scales exhibited unidimensionality, but the DS-6 demonstrated superior fit and correlated with cross-sectional distress markers (e.g., greater depression, lower life satisfaction, strained sense of purpose). Breaking from adult-based research, we failed to find evidence that derailment related to adolescent identity exploration and commitment. In extending assessment of derailment to adolescence, this study invites exploration of this experience during a time characterized by substantial transition and the emergence of stable self-views.