False memories and the source monitoring framework: Reply to Reyna and Lloyd (1997)

Reyna and Lloyd [Learn Individ Differ 9 (1997) 95.] reviewed a wide range of studies on false-memory effects, and argued that all of the findings supported fuzzy trace theory (FTT) and that many of them challenge the source monitoring framework (SMF). The present paper provides a brief overview of the SMF and corrects a number of misconceptions in Reyna and Lloyd's review, with the aim of providing a more complete understanding of how the SMF can be used to understand false-memory phenomena.     

Analyzing false memories in children with associative lists specific for their age

Two experiments attempted to resolve previous contradictory findings concerning developmental trends in false memories within the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm by using an improved methodology--constructing age-appropriate associative lists. The research also extended the DRM paradigm to preschoolers. Experiment 1 (N=320) included children in three age groups (preschoolers of 3-4 years, second-graders of 7-8 years, and preadolescents of 11-12 years) and adults, and Experiment 2 (N=64) examined preschoolers and preadolescents. Age-appropriate lists increased false recall. Although preschoolers had fewer false memories than the other age groups, they showed considerable levels of false recall when tested with age-appropriate materials. Results were discussed in terms of fuzzy-trace, source-monitoring, and activation frameworks.     

Too Much Familiarity! The Developmental Path of the Fluency Heuristic in Children

We tested whether changes in attribution processes could account for the developmental differences observed in how children’s use fluency to guide their memory decisions. Children ranging in age from 4 to 9 years studied a list of familiar or unfamiliar cartoon characters. In Experiment 1 (n = 84), participants completed a recognition test during which the perceptual fluency of some items was enhanced using a prime. In Experiment 2 (n = 96), participants completed a source recollection judgment on their recognition decisions. Primed items were recognized at a higher rate than unprimed items. However, while young children rely on fluency for all items, older children use fluency only for unfamiliar items. This pattern came together with a reduction in familiarity-based—but not recollection-based—memory responses.     

Developmentally invariant dissociations in children's true and false memories: not all relatedness is created equal

The role of categorical versus associative relations in 5-, 7-, and 11-year-old children's true and false memories was examined using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm and categorized lists of pictures or words with or without category labels as primes. For true items, recall increased with age and categorized lists were better recalled than DRM lists. For false items, recall increased with age except for picture lists, there were no differences between categorized and DRM lists and no effect of priming, and there were fewer false memories for pictures than words. Like adults, children's false memories are based on associative not thematic relations, whereas their veridical memories depend on both. This new, developmentally invariant dissociation is consistent with knowledge- and resource-based models of memory development.     

Development and validation of the Self-Regulated Translation Learning Strategy Scale (SRTLSS)

Self-regulated learning (SRL) has been highlighted as a critical aspect of translation learning. However, past work in translation learning has rarely sought to synthesize translation learning strategies under a self-regulated learning paradigm. Further research would be confined by the paucity of a psychometrically sound instrument to measure learners' self-regulated translation learning strategies. This study aimed to develop a reliable and valid self-regulated translation learning strategy scale (SRTLSS). Based on relevant literature, we hypothesized a hierarchical model and generated items for the SRTLSS. Drawing on the response from 873 Chinese English majors, the validated SRTLSS had 25 items addressing five dimensions: self-control, meaning fulfillment, value and interest, text processing, and retrieving strategies. Results demonstrated the SRTLSS has good measurement validity and reliability with strong invariance across undergraduate and graduate students. The SRTLSS can be used as a complementary tool to diagnose learners' weaknesses and strengths in translation teaching and learning.     

Comparative Structural Models of Similarities and Differences between Vehicle and Target in Order to Teach Darwinian Evolution

Our objective is to contribute to the teaching of Classical Darwinian Evolution by means of a study of analogies and metaphors. Throughout the history of knowledge about Evolution and in Science teaching, tree structures have been used an analogs to refer to Evolution, such as by Darwin in the Tree of Life passage contained in On The Origin of Species (1859). We analyze the analogies and metaphors found in the Darwinian text the Tree of Life and propose Comparative Structural Models of Similarities and Differences between the vehicle and target, considering the viability of their use in teaching Sciences. Our foundation is the Theory of Conceptual Metaphor by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and the Methodology of Teaching with Analogies—–MECA—by Nagem et al. (2001). The analogies and metaphors were classified and analyzed and the similarities and differences were highlighted. We found conceptual metaphors in the text. The analogies and metaphors in the Tree of Life are complex and appropriate for didactic use, but require an adequate methodological approach.     

Visual distinctiveness and the development of children's false memories

Distinctiveness effects in children's (5-, 7-, and 11-year-olds) false memory illusions were examined using visual materials. In Experiment 1, developmental trends (increasing false memories with age) were obtained using Deese-Roediger-McDermott lists presented as words and color photographs but not line drawings. In Experiment 2, when items were photographed with heterogeneous colored backgrounds, developmental trends were eliminated relative to words and homogeneous backgrounds. Experiments 3 and 4 examined whether the conceptual nature of the background mattered and presented items in neutral (color only), theme-congruent, or theme-incongruent contexts. The results showed that the nature of the context did not matter, only whether the backgrounds were homogeneous or heterogeneous. Apparently, children use distinctive perceptual, but not conceptual, features to attenuate false memory illusions.     

LIST FORMATS IMPROVE MEDICATION INSTRUCTIONS FOR OLDER ADULTS

We conducted a survey to compare a group of older adults’ and a group of younger adults’ beliefs regarding their own and each other's memory abilities. We also asked both age groups to identify items they believed older adults remember well. The survey was returned by 185 older (ages 60‐92) and 184 younger (ages 17‐39) participants. Of the 30 items we generated older adults reported that they would remember 23 better than younger adults would and 7 worse than younger adults would, and younger adults reported that they would remember 12 of the items better and 18 of them worse than older adults. Both age groups also generated many items that they believed older adults remember better than younger adults do. Finally, respondents generated items that they believed adults in their own age group had to remember routinely that adults in the other age group did not. The two groups agreed that older adults would spend more time and have more difficulty learning lines for presentation to an audience than would younger adults. Most of the older adults reported that their memories had changed; most of the younger adults reported that their memories had not changed. The belief that although older adults’ memory is worse than young adults’ they still remember some things better than the young is viewed as a realistic assessment, and implications for future research are discussed.     

Understanding metacognition through the use of pupil views templates: Pupil views of Learning to Learn

As part of the Learning to Learn Phase 3 Evaluation [for full detail see Higgins, S., Wall, K., Baumfield, V., Hall, E., Leat, D., Moseley, D., et al. (2007). Learning to Learn in Schools Phase 3 Evaluation: Final Report. London: Campaign for Learning. Available at: www.campaignforlearning.org.uk; Higgins, S., Wall, K., Falzon, C., Hall, E., Leat, D., Baumfield, V., et al. (2005). Learning to Learn in Schools Phase 3 Evaluation Year One Final Report. London: Campaign for Learning. Available at: http://www.campaignforlearning.org.uk; Higgins, S., Wall, K., Baumfield, V., Hall, E., Leat, D., Woolner, P. et al. (2006). Learning to Learn in Schools Phase 3 Evaluation: Year Two Report. London: Campaign for Learning. Available at: http://www.campaignforlearning.org.uk] teachers across three Local Authorities in England were supported in using an approach fitting ideas of professional enquiry through action research [Baumfield, V., Hall, E., & Wall, K. (2008). Action research in the classroom. London: Sage]. In this complex project, teachers have explored different innovations that they believe to fit under the umbrella term of Learning to Learn, implementing and investigating approaches ranging from cooperative learning [Kagan, S. (2001). Cooperative learning. Kagan Publishing. www.Kaganonline.com] to Assessment for Learning [Black, P. J. & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education, 5, 7–73] to Thinking Skills [Baumfield, V. & Higgins, S. (1997). ‘But no one has maths at a party: Pupils’ reasoning strategies in a thinking skills programme. Curriculum, 18(3), 140–148]. As part of these enquiries teachers have increasingly involved pupils and their perspective for providing critical insight to processes associated with Learning to Learn. This corresponds to debates around pupil voice [for example, Flutter, J. & Ruddock, J. (2004). Consulting pupils: What's in it for schools? London: Routledge Falmer], and also the fact that teachers in the project see pupils as having characteristics that can support the development of a Learning to Learn philosophy [Hall, E., Leat, D., Wall, K., Higgins, S., & Edwards, G. (2006) Learning to Learn: Teacher research in the zone of proximal development. Teacher Development, 10(2)] This paper will use the method of pupil views templates [Wall, K. & Higgins, S. (2006). Facilitating and supporting talk with pupils about metacognition: A research and learning tool. International Journal of Research and Methods in Education, 29(1), 39–53] used by teachers as a pragmatic tool [Baumfield, V., Hall, E., Higgins, S., & Wall, K. (2007). Tools for enquiry and the role of feedback in teachers’ learning. Paper presented at the European Association for Research in Learning and Instruction Conference] to research pupils’ perspectives of Learning to Learn and the processes they perceive to be involved. It will use an analysis frame to examine and explore data about pupils’ declarative knowledge of the process of learning and therefore aspects of their metacognitive knowledge and skilfulness [Veenman, M. V. J. & Spaans, M. A. (2005). Relation between intellectual and metacognitive skills: Age and task difference. Learning and Individual Differences, 15, 159–176].     

In Search of Unicorns and Effective Teacher Education

This article examines the merits of WebQuests in facilitating students’ in-depth understanding of science concepts using the four principles of learning gathered from the National Research Council reports How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (1999) and the How Students Learn: Science in the Classroom (2005) as an analytic framework. Modifications needed to make a well-constructed WebQuests for science teaching aligned to the four principles include (1) integrating student science interests and cultural and social backgrounds to curricular goals and then using this as means to design WebQuests, (2) providing students opportunities to examine science-related Internet websites to discriminate credible and false information and then giving them the opportunity to include and use the websites for the task step in WebQuests, and (3) providing cognitive tools and guidance within the process step so that students are engaged in argumentation and negotiation akin to a community of scientists.     

Individual differences in children''s and adults'' suggestibility and false event memory

In this article, we provide an overview of the emerging area of research concerning individual differences in children's memory, suggestibility, and false event reports. We begin with a discussion of recent research on children's false event memories. We then review research and theory concerning sources of individual differences in children's memory and suggestibility, including both cognitive (e.g., understanding of dual representations, source monitoring, imaginativeness, and event knowledge), and social-personality (e.g., attachment styles and temperament, parent-child communication, and sequelae of maltreatment) influences, and we highlight implications of these sources for children's false event reports. Finally, we examine how individual-difference factors proposed to mediate adults' false memories relate to those that may mediate children's false memories.     

Using a false biofeedback methodology to explore relationships between learners’ affect,metacognition, and performance

We used a false-biofeedback methodology to manipulate physiological arousal in order to induce affective states that would influence learners’ metacognitive judgments and learning performance. False-biofeedback is a method used to induce physiological arousal (and resultant affective states) by presenting learners with audio stimuli of false heart beats. Learners were presented with accelerated, baseline, or no heart beat (control) while they completed a challenging learning task. We tested four hypotheses about the effect of false-biofeedback. The alarm vs. alert hypothesis predicted that false biofeedback would be appraised as either a signal of distress and would impair learning (alarm), or as a signal of engagement and would facilitate learning (alert). The differential biofeedback hypothesis predicted that the alarm and alert effects would be dependent on the type of biofeedback (accelerated vs. baseline). The question depth hypothesis predicted that these effects would be more pronounced for challenging inference questions. Lastly, the self vs. recording hypothesis predicted that effects would only occur if participants believed that false biofeedback was indicative of their own physiological arousal. In general, learners experienced more positive/activating affective states, made more confident metacognitive judgments, and achieved higher learning when they received accelerated or baseline biofeedback while answering a challenging inference question, irrespective of the perceived source of the biofeedback. Thus, our findings supported the alert and question depth hypotheses, but not the differential biofeedback or self vs. recording hypotheses. Implications of the findings for the integration of affective processes into models of cognitive and metacognitive processes during learning are discussed.     

Graphic symbols as "the mind on paper": links between children's interpretive theory of mind and symbol understanding

Children gradually develop interpretive theory of mind (iToM)—the understanding that different people may interpret identical events or stimuli differently. The present study tested whether more advanced iToM underlies children’s recognition that map symbols’ meanings must be communicated to others when symbols are iconic (resemble their referents). Children (6–9 years; N = 80) made maps using either iconic or abstract symbols. After accounting for age, intelligence, vocabulary, and memory, iToM predicted children’s success in communicating symbols’ meaning to a naïve map‐user when mapping tasks involved iconic (but not abstract) symbols. Findings suggest children’s growing appreciation of alternative representations and of the intentional assignment of meaning, and support the contention that ToM progresses beyond mastery of false belief.     

True-False Testing on Trial: Guilty as Charged or Falsely Accused?

Although widely used, the true-false test is often regarded as a superficial or even harmful test, one that lacks the pedagogical efficacy of more substantive tests (e.g., cued-recall or short-answer tests). Such charges, however, lack conclusive evidence and may, in some cases, be false. Across four experiments, we investigated how true-false testing of studied passages (e.g., on Yellowstone National Park) might enhance—or be optimized to enhance—performance on subsequent cued-recall tests. In Experiments 1–2, relative to control performance that did not benefit from any additional exposure, we found that (a) the evaluation of true statements enhanced the recall of tested (but not related) content and that (b) the evaluation of false statements enhanced the recall of related (but not tested) content, a differential pattern of benefits that did not depend on the syntactic structure of the test items. Moreover, when competitive clauses were embedded within the true-false items of Experiment 3 (e.g., True or false? Castle Geyser (not Steamboat Geyser) is the tallest geyser), we found that the evaluation of both types of statements enhanced the recall of both types of content. Finally, in Experiment 4, these holistic benefits proved robust to a retention interval of 48 h and were comparable with the benefits of a restudy condition in which learners restudied all of the propositions that could have been retrieved in the evaluation of the true-false items. Accordingly, although it was not uncommon for participants to misremember information as a consequence of true-false practice, our findings broadly indicate that, especially when carefully constructed, true-false tests can elicit beneficial, not superficial, processes that belie their poor reputation.

     

Mapping the Contours of Neoliberal Educational Restructuring: A Review of Recent Neo‐Marxist Studies of Education and Racial Capitalist Considerations

In this article Clayton Pierce reviews three books representative of the recent neo‐Marxist literature on education: David Blacker's The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, John Marsh's Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way out of Inequality, and Pauline Lipman's The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City. His analysis of these books focuses on how each author remains consistent or advances traditional Marxist interpretations of the role of education in capitalist society. In addition, he puts the arguments of each author into conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois's analysis of schooling in a racial capitalist society — what he called caste education — as a way to generate discussion around some of the inherent limitations of Marxist studies of education. Here, Pierce is particularly concerned with the ability of neo‐Marxist analyses of the neoliberal restructuring of education to articulate how white supremacy is preserved even in revolutionary critiques of capitalist schooling.     

Differential Effects of Salient Visual Events on Memory-Guided Attention in Adults and Children

Both salient visual events and scene-based memories can influence attention, but it is unclear how they interact in children and adults. In Experiment 1, children (N = 27; ages 7–12) were faster to discriminate targets when they appeared at the same versus different location as they had previously learned or as a salient visual event. In contrast, adults (N = 30; ages 18–31) responded faster only when cued by visual events. While Experiment 2 confirmed that adults (N = 27) can use memories to orient attention, Experiment 3 showed that, even in the absence of visual events, the effects of memories on attention were larger in children (N = 27) versus adults (N = 28). These findings suggest that memories may be a robust source of influence on children's attention.