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Alison Gibbons attends to the remarkable opening to House of Leaves using a unique and distinctive cognitive approach, arguing that the opening five words have a dramatic impact on how readers enter into their reading experience of the novel. She demonstrates the effects of the use of the second-person pronoun, negation, and visual presentation, introducing two cognitive psychological concepts which are a vital part of the reader’s experiential journey: cognitive dissonance and reactance. These, she argues, contribute to a sense of discomfort for the reader which is a key feature of the novel. Gibbons thus shows that Danielewski’s precise opening is crucial in initially unsettling readers as they enter the House of Leaves.

American students aspireto getgood grades and succeed in college (Rosenbaum, Deil-Amen, & Person 2006; Trusty, 2000). This is true across the socioeconomic spectrum (for a review, see Oyserman, 2013). American parents share these goals. They have high educational aspirations and expectations for their children even if their own educational and economic attainments are low (Entwisle et al., 2005; Kim, Sherraden, & Clancy, 2012; Madeira, 2009). Parental. In this paper I do not distinguish between aspirations and expectations. This is in contrast to other researchers who find it useful to make that distinction, with an aspiration involving hopes and dreams (e.g., “if you could be anything at all, what would you most hope and want to be?”) and an expectation involving subjective estimation of what is actually possible (e.g., “if you had to bet money on it, what will you be?”). Logically, the two are different. Hopes will be higher than expectations, since expectations imply that one could really do it and hopes imply only that one would want it to transpire. Researchers also assume that expectations are more likely to be linked to behavior than hopes, in part because expectations involve predictions of one’s own competence. An expectation is something one believes one has the skills and competence to attain; in that sense it is akin to how the term efficacy, or self-efficacy, is used. In education, expectancy-value theories (e.g., Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) predict that people will take action to attain valued school outcomes if they expect that they have the skills to attain these outcomes. Because aspirations are not defined as being linked to skills, within a value-expectancy framework, they are less central. Although all of these arguments are compelling, as I outline next, the parents and children who respond to surveys and are of interest to us here do not seem to be following this logic. The way that data on aspirations and expectations are collected in survey research is typically to ask children and their parents, first, how far they would ideally like to go in school and, second, how far they realistically expect to go in school.

In this chapter I describe the school-to-jobs intervention, a brief inter¬vention that translates the components of identity-based motivation (IBM) into a testable, usable, feasible, and scalable intervention for use in schools and other settings to improve academic outcomes. To develop the intervention, I took the core IBM principles and translated them into a framework and set of activities that have coherence and meaning. These core principles, as detailed in Chapter 1, are that identities, strategies, and interpretations of difficulty matter when they come to mind and seem relevant to the situation at hand. Because thinking is for doing, context matters, and identities, strategies, and interpretations of difficulty can be dynamically constructed given situational constraints and affordances. Therefore the framework and set of activities I developed were sensitive to the context in which education and educational success or failure occurs, the processes by which children succeed or fail to attain their school-success goals, and the action children need to take if they are to succeed. The intervention was fully tested twice (Oyserman, Bybee, & Terry, 2006; Oyserman, Terry, & Bybee, 2002), using random assignment to control (school as usual) and intervention conditions so that it would be possible to know whether the effects were due to the intervention and not to other differences in the children themselves. Importantly, the tested intervention was manualized and fidelity to both manual and underlying theorized process was also tested. In these ways, the intervention stands as a model for development. STJ is currently being used in England and in Singapore. Each country gives the intervention its own name to fit the context. This chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part, I outline the choices I made in developing the intervention. In the second part, I outline the sequenced activities that constitute the intervention (they are detailed in the manual that forms Chapter 4). In the third part, I describe the evidence that the intervention succeeded in changing academic outcomes and that changes occurred through the process predicted by IBM.