This thesis explores several issues in the adaptation process of immigrants and their children in Canada. Chapter 2 investigates why second-generation immigrants are better educated than the remaining population. Using a standard human capital framework where individuals choose how much to invest in both their children's and their own human capital, I show that a gap in education can arise in the absence of differences in unobservable characteristics between immigrants and the native born. Rather, it can arise due to institutional factors such as imperfect transferability of foreign human capital and credit constraints. The model's key implication is a negative relationship between parental human capital investments and children's educational attainment, particularly in families with uneducated parents. I find strong empirical evidence of such tradeoffs in human capital investments occurring within immigrant families. Chapter 3 re-assesses the effect of living in an ethnic enclave on labour market outcomes of immigrants. I find evidence of cohort effects in the relationship between mean earnings and the proportion of co-ethnics in the CMA which vary by education level. Next, using information on the proportion of one's friends who share one's ethnicity, I test a common assumption that the enclave effect is a network effect. I find that traditional, geography-based measures of the ethnic enclave effect capture the impact of factor(s) other than social networks. In fact, the two effects generally offset each other to some degree in determining immigrant employment outcomes. Neither measure has a statistically significant effect on average immigrant earnings, at least in cross-sectional data. Chapter 4, co-authored with David Green and Craig Riddell, tests two alternative theories about why immigrants earn less than native-born workers with similar educational attainment and experience - discrimination versus lower skills (measured by literacy test scores). We find that immigrant workers educated abroad have lower cognitive skill levels (assessed in English or French) than similar native-born workers. This skills gap can explain much of the earnings gap. At the same time, foreign-educated immigrants receive no lower returns to skills than the native born. These results offer strong evidence against the discrimination hypothesis.

For many school psychologists the constraints of time create a need to identify an instrument that can be used to screen students referred for comprehensive psychoeducational evaluations. This study examined the relationship between scores students obtained on the group-administered Test of Cognitive Skills (TCS) and those they obtained on the individually administered Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: Fourth Edition (SB:FE). Comparisons were made between the Cognitive Skills Index (CSI) and Sattler's Factor scores from the SB:FE, and between the CSI and the SB:FE Composite score.The subjects were 75 elementary public school students who were enrolled in regular education classes at least 50% of their school day. The students were referred for comprehensive evaluations because of concern about their academic progress. Archival data from tests administered during the 1987-1988 school year were gathered from the students' cumulative school files.Pearson product moment correlations indicate that (in the sample studied) there was a significant positive correlation between the CSI scores and each of the Factor scores and the Composite scores. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) procedures were used to test mean differences. The data indicate that there was no statistically significant difference between the mean score of the CSI and the Verbal Comprehension Factor score, nor between the CSI and Memory Factor. However, the Nonverbal Reasoning/Visualization and Composite means differed significantly from the CSI mean.The results of this study suggest that the CSI can make a worthwhile contribution to referral information. Correlational and mean difference data derived from this study demonstrate the need for caution when interpreting and applying statistical findings. Additional research is needed to clarify further the relationship among group-administered and individually administered intelligence tests, and between the SB:FE and other individually administered intelligence tests. / Department of Educational Psychology

This thesis explores several issues in the adaptation process of immigrants and their children in Canada. Chapter 2 investigates why second-generation immigrants are better educated than the remaining population. Using a standard human capital framework where individuals choose how much to invest in both their children's and their own human capital, I show that a gap in education can arise in the absence of differences in unobservable characteristics between immigrants and the native born. Rather, it can arise due to institutional factors such as imperfect transferability of foreign human capital and credit constraints. The model's key implication is a negative relationship between parental human capital investments and children's educational attainment, particularly in families with uneducated parents. I find strong empirical evidence of such tradeoffs in human capital investments occurring within immigrant families. Chapter 3 re-assesses the effect of living in an ethnic enclave on labour market outcomes of immigrants. I find evidence of cohort effects in the relationship between mean earnings and the proportion of co-ethnics in the CMA which vary by education level. Next, using information on the proportion of one's friends who share one's ethnicity, I test a common assumption that the enclave effect is a network effect. I find that traditional, geography-based measures of the ethnic enclave effect capture the impact of factor(s) other than social networks. In fact, the two effects generally offset each other to some degree in determining immigrant employment outcomes. Neither measure has a statistically significant effect on average immigrant earnings, at least in cross-sectional data. Chapter 4, co-authored with David Green and Craig Riddell, tests two alternative theories about why immigrants earn less than native-born workers with similar educational attainment and experience - discrimination versus lower skills (measured by literacy test scores). We find that immigrant workers educated abroad have lower cognitive skill levels (assessed in English or French) than similar native-born workers. This skills gap can explain much of the earnings gap. At the same time, foreign-educated immigrants receive no lower returns to skills than the native born. These results offer strong evidence against the discrimination hypothesis.

This thesis examined relations between preschoolers's oppositional strategies and their social cognitive skills and behavioral competence. There is a gap between theoretical formulation and empirical investigation regarding children's oppositional behaviors in the literature. Although positive functions of oppositional behavior have been proposed by theorists, research has focused primarily on its negative nature. The present study intended to show that opposition was not a homogeneous construct and that certain noncompliant strategies were not destructive but rather healthy and desirable. Forty-nine mothers and their preschool children (age 3 to 5) participated. Mother-child interaction data were collected using naturalistic observation in a structured setting. Children's oppositional strategies were classified into four categories: aversive opposition (e.g., temper tantrums), passive noncompliance (e.g., ignoring), simple refusal, and negotiation. While social cognitive skills (perspective-taking and social problem-solving) were measured through experiments, behavioral competence was indexed using a questionnaire filled by day-care teachers. The data were analyzed using correlation and regression procedures. Results showed that aversive opposition was more likely to be seen in the children who were less able to see other's feelings and to generate problem-solving solutions, and who were less competent in a day-care setting. Passive noncompliance was more likely employed by the children who did poorly at a day-care setting, however, they were not necessarily deficient in social cognitive skills. Negotiators were more likely to be the children who were better at affective role-taking and social problem-solving and were more competent in a day-care setting. Finally, simple refusal had a weak and ambiguous relation to social cognition and competence. These results and their implications were discussed in the light of the existing literature on children's opposition. / Graduate

Resumo: A educação sempre será motivo de preocupação em nossa sociedade. Com relação à Educação em Ciências, a preocupação engloba a necessidade de, por meio desse ensino, promover habilidades cognitivas que permitam aprendizagens mais duradouras. A nossa investigação faz parte de um projeto mais amplo, que tem como meta a melhoria da qualidade do ensino oferecida por uma escola estadual de ensino médio e, consequentement, uma mais significativa e integral formação de seus alunos. Durante a pesquisa, propusemos e conduzimos uma sequencia didática para a aplicação do tema Energia na disciplina de biologia em um grupo de 21 alunos do 1º ano do ensino médio. O nosso objetivo foi, a partir dessa sequencia didática, baseada em atividades práticas e contextualizadas, verificar quais habilidades cognitivas, ou do pensamento, foram desenvolvidas pelos alunos durante o processo de ensino aprendizagem. Diante dos resultados obtidos, podemos concluir que as atividades práticas e contextualizadas contribuíram para a melhoria das habilidades cognitivas dos alunos, assim como para o desenvolvimento de novas linguagens e formalização de conceitos. Partindo das potencialidades dessas atividades e dos obstáculos que o professor enfrenta para realizá-las, em busca por melhores condições para os trabalhos práticos e contextualizados, este deve ultrapassar várias barreiras, que vão desde a organização física de um laboratório e a compra de material necessário à realização das atividades, até o envolvimento de colegas de outras áreas e a luta por conquistas políticas que lhe permitam trabalhar melhor. / Abstract: Education is always a concern in our society. Regarding Science education, concern includes the need to promote Science cognitive skills that allow more durable learnings. Our research is part is part of a larger project, which aims to improve the quality of education offered by a Brazilian public high school and consequently a more significant and integral formation of students. During research, we propose and conduct a didactic sequence for implementing the Energy theme in the discipline of Biology in a group of 21 students from 1st year of high school. From that didactic sequence, based on practical and contextualized activities, our goal was to verify which cognitive or thought skills the students developed during the processes of teaching/learning. According to the research results, we can conclude that the practice and contextualized activities contributed to the improvement of cognitive skills of students as well as for developing new languages and formalization of concepts. Using the potential of these activities and the obstacles faced to teach them, teacher must in his search for better conditions for the practical and contextualized work to overcome several obstacles, rangig from the physical organization of a laboratory, the purchase of equipment necessary to perform activities, until the involvement of colleagues from other areas and the struggle for political victories, enabling him to work better. / Orientador: Jehud Bortollozi / Coorientador: Ana Maria de Andrade Caldeira / Banca: Alvaro Lorencini Junior / Banca: Fernando Bastos / Mestre

This thesis explores several issues in the adaptation process of immigrants and their children in Canada. Chapter 2 investigates why second-generation immigrants are better educated than the remaining population. Using a standard human capital framework where individuals choose how much to invest in both their children's and their own human capital, I show that a gap in education can arise in the absence of differences in unobservable characteristics between immigrants and the native born. Rather, it can arise due to institutional factors such as imperfect transferability of foreign human capital and credit constraints. The model's key implication is a negative relationship between parental human capital investments and children's educational attainment, particularly in families with uneducated parents. I find strong empirical evidence of such tradeoffs in human capital investments occurring within immigrant families. Chapter 3 re-assesses the effect of living in an ethnic enclave on labour market outcomes of immigrants. I find evidence of cohort effects in the relationship between mean earnings and the proportion of co-ethnics in the CMA which vary by education level. Next, using information on the proportion of one's friends who share one's ethnicity, I test a common assumption that the enclave effect is a network effect. I find that traditional, geography-based measures of the ethnic enclave effect capture the impact of factor(s) other than social networks. In fact, the two effects generally offset each other to some degree in determining immigrant employment outcomes. Neither measure has a statistically significant effect on average immigrant earnings, at least in cross-sectional data. Chapter 4, co-authored with David Green and Craig Riddell, tests two alternative theories about why immigrants earn less than native-born workers with similar educational attainment and experience - discrimination versus lower skills (measured by literacy test scores). We find that immigrant workers educated abroad have lower cognitive skill levels (assessed in English or French) than similar native-born workers. This skills gap can explain much of the earnings gap. At the same time, foreign-educated immigrants receive no lower returns to skills than the native born. These results offer strong evidence against the discrimination hypothesis. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

Law enforcement officers can come into conflict with suspects when they need to act fast under time pressure. Improving such a decision¬-making skill is a challenge in a police academy. Academies can train future officers in correct psychomotor responses to attacks by a suspect. However, the ability to anticipate such attacks, and thereby make more appropriate defensive and control responses, is often assumed to come only with experience. The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceptual–cognitive sub-skill of attack recognition, which contributes to the anticipation that police officers should have in order to handle potentially violent situations appropriately, and thus take the situation under control without using extreme or lethal force. This study examines the feasibility of using the temporal video-occlusion method as a training tool to accelerate the law enforcement officer’s performance by de-coupling the perception–action link and concentrating on the perceptual–cognitive aspect of the full defensive and control performance. Once the video-occlusion task is calibrated and validated to differentiate expert from non-expert performers, then instructional designers and trainers can be confident is repurposing video-occlusion research method by employing instructional strategies such as deliberate practice and progressive difficulty to train law enforcement trainees and officers.

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This research empirically investigated the Video Game Experience Measure (VGEM), which captures general aspects of video game experience in a five-factor model, tapping factors such as frequency and intensity of gameplay, and self-reported confidence in specific game-related skills as well as more general self-efficacy. The VGEM captures facets of video game experience that have been represented in prior research, and which have individually been found to relate to players’ gameplay performance. These factors of individuals’ video game experience have been found to introduce notable variance in game-based experimentation, but the extent to which each aspect impacts performance has been sparsely researched. This study used well-established basic cognitive research tasks to investigate whether the VGEM is able to discriminate between individuals’ prior experience along different factors or dimensions of video gameplay, and whether the measure is able to account for variance in cognitive task performance on three cognitive tasks, including Fitts’ Law task, a measure of hand-eye coordination and reaction time, Task-Switching and Mixing task, a measure of cognitive flexibility, and Stroop task, a measure of attention and cognitive inhibition. Additionally, demographic factors such as sex and age are investigated as they relate to cognitive task performance. This study’s participants were undergraduate students at the University of Central Florida who volunteered to participate through the UCF Psychology SONA system recruitment system in exchange for course credit, the final dataset contained 295 participants. Results showed that the Video Game Experience Measure factors explained a significant proportion of the variance in cognitive task performance in this sample and were generally more predictive of performance than demographic factors. Findings from this research demonstrate that the Video Game Experience Measure may be used to more accurately account for variance in novel game-based task performance in experimental study samples, provide insight into factors related to aspects of video game experience, and elucidate differences between, in addition to non-players, types of players that emerge from combinations of demographic, motivational, and experiential factors.

Organizational Change and Productivity Growth − Evidence from Sweden This paper uses two different firm level surveys matched with employer-employee data to investigate both determinants and effects of different types of organizational change. The results support the competition hypothesis for inducing organizational change. Among the four measures of organizational change investigated in this paper, only delayering shows significant effects on subsequent productivity growth. Firms and Skills: The Evolution of Worker Sorting We document a significant increase in sorting by both cognitive and non-cognitive skill from 1986 to 2008 using data for 28 cohorts of Swedish men. The skill differences within firms have fallen in all major industries while differences in skill between firms have increased. Two main factors drive the increase in sorting. First, workers in high-skilled occupations, such as engineers, have moved to the IT and telecom industries. Second, assortative matching of workers by skill has become more positive. Trading Off or Having it All? Completed Fertility and Mid-career Earnings of Swedish Men and Women Earnings in mid-career and children are two fundamental outcomes of the life-choices of men and women. This paper explores how these outcomes have changed for Swedish men and women born 1945−1962 by documenting changes in education, assortative mating patterns, completed fertility and mid-career earnings and also how the association between children and earnings has changed over time. Solving the Puzzle − Hours Constraints, Technical Change and Female Labor Supply This paper extends the standard theory of labor supply to incorporate an important ingredient in the labor supply decision of today's women: the role of flexibility and time constraints. Using a life-cycle model, I formalize the notion that as technology allows jobs to become more flexible, time constrained individuals can supply more hours and may therefore find it attractive to opt for a more demanding career.