The Healthy Pregnancy Summit is a collection of videos from a variety of specialists detailing how to have a healthy pregnancy and healthy child, based on the latest scientific and medical information. This project summarizes each presentation, and compares to the Healthy Child Guide, a document supplementary to the summit. Finally, this project analyzes the overall usefulness of the summit and each presentation, and suggests areas for improvement.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a psychiatric disorder that affects 2-3% of children. OCD causes anxiety, fear, upsetting thoughts, and obsessions/compulsions. These symptoms can manifest in different ways and kids can become stuck in a stressful cycle of anxiety and the need to act on compulsions. Currently on the children's book market, OCD is an underrepresented topic. I chose to design a children's book that tackles the stigma of OCD in a form that is easy for children to understand.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a psychiatric disorder that affects 2-3% of children. OCD causes anxiety, fear, upsetting thoughts, and obsessions/compulsions. These symptoms can manifest in different ways and kids can become stuck in a stressful cycle of anxiety and the need to act on compulsions. Currently on the children's book market, OCD is an underrepresented topic. I chose to design a children's book that tackles the stigma of OCD in a form that is easy for children to understand.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a psychiatric disorder that affects 2-3% of children. OCD causes anxiety, fear, upsetting thoughts, and obsessions/compulsions. These symptoms can manifest in different ways and kids can become stuck in a stressful cycle of anxiety and the need to act on compulsions. Currently on the children's book market, OCD is an underrepresented topic. I chose to design a children's book that tackles the stigma of OCD in a form that is easy for children to understand.

With the overall health of the environment rapidly declining \u2014 mostly due to human behaviors, solving the problem of nature deficit disorder and getting more children interested and aware of nature could be paramount to improving the environmental health of our planet. In this study, the relationship between children's learning and emotion is explored. Pre- and post-tests were given to children attending a week-long summer freshwater ecology camp; their knowledge of and emotional connection to different ecological concepts were measured. Two separate ecosystems were tested \u2014 a freshwater ecosystem that was taught over the course of the week, and a marine ecosystem for comparison. Increases in knowledge and emotion were seen in every freshwater ecosystem concept. Additionally, the knowledge and emotion scores were correlated, suggesting a positive relationship between them. The marine ecosystem did not show improvements in concrete knowledge, but showed increases in abstract learning, indicating that the abstract concepts learned about the freshwater ecosystem were able to transfer to the marine. Overall results show the ability of a hands-on learning experience to foster an emotional connection between a child and the subject matter. However, long-term studies are needed to track the relationship between children and their knowledge of and emotional connection to the subject matter.

Introspective awareness refers to direct access to one’s own internal and subjective thoughts and feelings (Wimmer & Hartl, 1991). Two theories, simulation theory and theory-theory, have been used to understand our access to our mental states. Simulation theory (Harris, 1991) involves imagining yourself in another person’s situation, reading off of your mental state, and attributing that state to the other person. Theory-theory (Gopnik, 1993) involves an interrelated body of knowledge, based on core mental-state constructs, including beliefs and desires, that may be applied to everyone—self and others (Gopnik & Wellman, 1994). Introspection is taken for granted by simulation theory, and explicitly denied by theory-theory. This study is designed to test for evidence of introspection in young children using simple perception and knowledge task. The current evidence is against introspective awareness in children because the data suggest that children cannot report their own false beliefs and they cannot report their on-going thoughts (Flavell, Green & Flavell, 1993; Gopnik & Astington, 1988). The hypothesis in this study states that children will perform better on Self tasks compared to Other tasks, which will be evidence for introspection. The Other-Perception tasks require children to calculate the other’s line of sight and determine if there is something obscuring his or her vision. The Other-Knowledge tasks require children to reason that the other’s previous looking inside a box means that he or she will know what is inside the box when it is closed. The corresponding Self tasks could be answered either by using the same reasoning for the self or by introspection to determine what it is they see and do not see, and know and do not know. Children performing better on Self tasks compared to Other tasks will be an indication of introspection. Tests included Yes/No and Forced Choice questions, which was initially to ensure that the results will not be caused by a feature of a single method of questioning. I realized belatedly, however, that Forced Choice was not a valid measure of introspection as children could introspect in both the Self and Other conditions. I also expect to replicate previous findings that reasoning about Perception is easier for children than reasoning about Knowledge.

As part of a group project, myself and four teammates created an interactive children's storybook based off of the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" in Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age. This electronic book is meant to be read aloud by a caregiver with their child, and is designed for reading over long distances through the use of real-time voice and video calling. While one part of the team focused on building the electronic book itself and writing the program, myself and two others wrote the story and I provided illustrations. Our Primer tells the story of a young princess named Charname (short for character name) who escapes from a tower and goes on a mission to save four companions to help her on her quest. The book is meant for reader-insertion, and teaches children problem-solving, teamwork, and critical thinking skills by presenting challenges for Princess Charname to solve. The Primer borrows techniques from modern video game design, focusing heavily on interactivity and feelings of agency through offering the child choices of how to proceed, similar to choose-your-own-adventure books. If brought to market, the medium lends itself well to expanded quests and storylines for the child to explore as they learn and grow. Additionally, resources are provided for the narrator to help create an engaging experience for the child, based off of research on parent-child cooperative reading and cooperative gameplay. The final version of the Primer included a website to run the program, a book-like computer to access the program online, and three complete story segments for the child and narrator to read together.

The rate of vaccinations has been consistently decreasing in the past years in children of ages 0-18. Multiple factors and barriers contribute to these low rates. This comparative case study investigated the accessibility of information regarding childhood vaccinations to parents in areas with differing poverty levels in the greater Phoenix region, specifically in the West Valley, Downtown Phoenix, and the East Valley. Pediatric clinics, public elementary schools, and public libraries were visited in each area to assess how much information was available where. The analysis produced unexpected results: the West Valley, which had the highest poverty level, contained the most amount of accessible information for parents in many languages, while the East Valley, with a low poverty level, had almost no information accessible to parents of these children. Implications for future research, policy, and practice are discussed. Based on these unexpected results, one recommendation is to develop a pamphlet that could be distributed to these public places to raise awareness of the importance of vaccinations in children to parents.

Previous research demonstrated the overall efficacy of an embodied language intervention (EMBRACE) that taught pre-school children how to simulate (imagine) language in a heard narrative. However, EMBRACE was not effective for every child. To try to explain this variable response to the intervention, the video recordings made during the four-day intervention sessions were assessed and emotion was coded. Each session was emotion-coded for child emotions and for child-researcher emotions. The child specific emotions were 1) engagement in the task, this included level of participation in the activity, 2) motivation/attention to persist and complete the task, as well as stay focused, and 3) positive affect throughout the session. The child-researcher specific emotions were 1) engagement with each other, this involved how the child interacted with the researcher and under what context, and 2) researcher’s positive affect, this incorporated how enthusiastic and encouraging the researcher was throughout the session. It was hypothesized that effectiveness of the intervention would be directly correlated with the degree that the child displayed positive emotions during the intervention. Thus, the analysis of these emotions should highlight differences between the control and EMBRACE group and help to explain variability in effectiveness of the intervention. The results did indicate that children in the EMBRACE group generally had a significantly higher positive affect compared to the control group, but these results did not influence the ability for the child to effectively recall or moderate the EEG variables in the post-test. The results also showed that children who interacted with the researcher more tended to be in the EMBRACE group, whereas children who did not interact with the researcher more frequently were in the control group, showing that the EMBRACE intervention ended up being a more collaborative task.

The goal of this study was to understand elementary school children’s perceptions of engineering. A total of 949 elementary school students were surveyed, individually or as a whole group, to examine gender and age differences in achievement-related beliefs (i.e., competency, interest, and importance) pertaining to engineering-related skills and activities. The results of this study found that specific skills and activities showed significant gender and age differences for each of the three measures. Significant findings showed that younger students (kindergarten through second grade) found many of the engineering-related skills and activities more interesting than the older students (third through fifth grade); however, the older students rated more of the skills and activities as being important. Gender differences showed that girls typically rated themselves as being more competent, more interested in, and valuing the skills and activities that pertained more to mindset ideas, such as learning from your mistakes and failures or not giving up, whereas boys rated themselves higher in more of the hands-on activities, such as building with things like legos, blocks, and k’nex.