Planning middle school schedules for improved attention and achievement

The literature describes research comparing scholastic success in the morning and afternoon in elementary and high schools. The present study examines the relationship between time of day and scholastic performance in middle school. The progress of 850 seventh and eighth grade students in academic subjects taught at different hours of the day was studied. Mean achievement, as expressed in final grades, rose moderately from morning lessons to those conducted at later hours. Significant but temporary declines in achievement were observed immediately after the 10:00 recess and again during the 13:00 lesson. Variance within classes increased sharply during the day. Previous studies attributed such changes to biological rhythms. This paper indicates that many diurnal changes in scholastic performance may be clarified by integration of concepts of biological rhythms with current theories with respect to attention level. Implications of these findings for planning daily school schedules are discussed.     

Why process-product research cannot explain process-product findings and a proposed remedy: The cognitive mediational paradigm

Research on teaching primarily adopts the process-product paradigm. Within this paradigm, researchers often speculate about cognitive operations that students engage in during instruction as a means to explain how teacher behaviors (processes) correlate with or cause student achievement (products). This paper argues that the methodology of process-product research is (1) ill-suited to generating theories of teaching effectiveness that use students' cognition to explain process-product relations and (2) invalid for testing such explanations. The cognitive mediational paradigm, which explicitly interposes students' cognition between teaching processes and student products, is proposed as a remedy to these problems. Methodology consistent with the cognitive mediational paradigm is described.     

Circadian rhythms

Living organisms ranging from bacteria to human beings exhibit 24-h rhythms in various behaviours and physiological processes. Matching of the period of such rhythms with that of the daily environmental cycles gives an impression that they are mere passive responses to environmental changes. Here, we discuss the change in our perception about daily biological rhythms, from their identity as rhythmic phenomena occurring as passive response to environmental changes, to the biological clocks. This is the first article in a series of articles on circadian rhythms which will cover discussion on the genetic and molecular basis, circadian organization and its adaptive significance.     

Internal and External Time Conflicts in Adolescents: Sleep Characteristics and Interventions

ABSTRACT— Daytime fatigue and lack of sleep seem to increase throughout adolescent years. Several environmental, psychological, and biological factors have been associated with the development of sleep across adolescence. The aim of the present article is to summarize these factors and to give examples of various outcomes in sleep patterns among adolescents studied in different cultural settings. It is obvious from earlier work that many adolescents have displaced circadian rhythms and lack of adaptation to school hours due to an early school start or additional burdens for work. Several interventions have aimed to help the adaptation process by supporting sleep processes and changing scheduling, in this way promoting classroom alertness. In summary, adolescents worldwide shorten their sleep due to schoolwork hours and additional work, especially by disturbing their sleep due to circadian misalignment.     

Exploring problem conceptualization and performance in STEM problem solving contexts

Problem solving abilities are critical components of contemporary Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. Research in the area of problem solving has uncovered much about the representation, processes and heuristic approaches to problem solving. However, critics claim this overemphasis on the process of solving problems has led to a dearth in understanding of the earlier stages such as problem conceptualization. This paper aims to address some of these concerns by exploring the area of problem conceptualization and the underlying cognitive mechanisms that may play a supporting role in reasoning success. Participants (N?=?12) were prescribed a series of convergent problem-solving tasks representative of those used for developmental purposes in STEM education. During the problem-solving episodes, cognitive data were gathered by means of an electroencephalographic headset and used to investigate students’ cognitive approaches to conceptualizing the tasks. In addition, interpretive qualitative data in the form of post-task interviews and problem solutions were collected and analyzed. Overall findings indicated a significant reliance on memory during the conceptualization of the convergent problem-solving tasks. In addition, visuospatial cognitive processes were found to support the conceptualization of convergent problem-solving tasks. Visuospatial cognitive processes facilitated students during the conceptualization of convergent problems by allowing access to differential semantic content in long-term memory.

     

Is the ‘Idiot's Box’ raising idiocy? Early and middle childhood television watching and child cognitive outcome

There is widespread belief that exposure to television has harmful effects on children's cognitive development. Most studies that point to a negative correlation between hours of television watching and cognitive outcomes, fail to establish causality. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) we study young children between 5 and 10 years of age during late 1990s and early 2000s. We find strong evidence of negative correlations between hours of television watched and cognitive test scores. However, once parent's characteristics and unobserved child characteristics are taken into account these correlations go away. We find that hours of television viewed per se do not have any measurable impact on children's test scores. Our results are robust to different model specifications and instrumental variable estimates. We conclude that despite the conventional wisdom and the ongoing populist movement, proactive policies to reduce children's television exposure are not likely to improve children's cognitive development and academic performance.     

Disabled readers' processing of prose: Do any processes change because of intervention?

A multiple baseline design was implemented to address the questions, “Do qualitative changes in reported strategies occur during treatment and does strategy instruction concurrently influence a conceptually related task?” The dependent measure for the prose recall task was the number of idea units recalled, while the number of facts comprehended during silent reading sessions assessed transfer effects. “Thinking aloud protocols” were used to identify cognitive processes during prose recall. The results suggested that a qualitative shift in verbal strategy reports occurred across training sessions. The introduction of cognitive training (visual and verbal mapping of idea units) increased the recall of prose compared to the baseline conditions, although concurrent effects on reading comprehension tasks were minimal. It was assumed that unstable cognitive processes during prose recall, as well as nonequivalent mental processes between the two tasks, accounted for the poor transfer of training effects.     

Team-based complex problem solving: a collective cognition perspective

Today, much problem solving is performed by teams, rather than individuals. The complexity of these problems has exceeded the cognitive capacity of any individual and requires a team of members to solve them. The success of solving these complex problems not only relies on individual team members who possess different but complementary expertise, but more importantly, their collective problem solving ability. To better conceptualize large scale complex problem solving, an understanding of collective cognitive components and processes during team-based complex problem solving is necessary. This paper offers a conceptual discussion about complex problem solving from a collective cognition perspective. The types of cognitive processing and cognitive components of team-based problem solving (TBPS) as well as the cognitive states of collective emergent cognitive states and the interactive mechanisms will be discussed. Also, implications from the model for assessing TBPS performance and suggestions for future research will be offered.     

Instruction and Cognitive Change in Mathematics

A methodology for studying change during instruction in content-specific cognitive processes is presented. The methodology borrows both from the cognitive mediational approach in instructional effectiveness research and the instructional approach in cognitive psychology research. It is argued that learning from instruction must be understood in terms of the way in which instruction changes the cognitive processes used to solve tasks. The methodology is illustrated by summarizing a project on instructing middle-school students in semantic processes for solving decimal-fraction problems. The benefits of the methodology, such as tracing the effects of instruction on performance change, are discussed.     

Self-efficacy and performance feedback: Impacts on cognitive load during creative thinking

Creative thinking is the ability to produce responses that are both original and useful. Like other complex thinking processes, creative thinking draws on higher-order cognitive resources. The impacts of feedback, cognitive load, and self-efficacy on traditional complex thinking activities are well documented; however, little is known about how these factors influence creative thinking, which is unique in its requirement of originality. We investigated the impacts of social comparison performance feedback and creative self-efficacy on cognitive load during two creative thinking (divergent thinking) tasks. Higher creative self-efficacy was associated with lower cognitive load during creative thinking. Positive feedback was associated with lower cognitive load compared to negative feedback. Higher cognitive load negatively impacted creative thinking performance, and the impacts of creative self-efficacy and performance feedback on creative thinking were partially mediated by cognitive load. Implications for providing feedback to students during creative thinking tasks are discussed.     

Flexibly scheduled early childhood education and care: experiences of Finnish parents and educators

Abstract

This study focuses on flexibly scheduled early childhood education and care (ECEC), an institutional childcare service for Finnish families where both parents, or a single parent, work non-standard hours. Although many countries nowadays offer extended hours day care, only Finland has a publicly provided, law-based system guaranteeing ECEC during non-standard as well as standard hours. We explore, drawing on parental survey data, what kinds of families use such services and when. Furthermore, we utilise web-survey data obtained from early educators to find out what they report as the main challenges involved in implementing flexibly scheduled ECEC. The results showed that single-parent families and lower educated parents were over-represented among the families using flexibly scheduled ECEC. The unpredictability of working-life tends to spill over to ECEC. Due to varying parental work schedules, children have unique daily and weekly rhythms, which in turn impact on administration, pedagogical issues and meeting children’s needs.     

Natural language as a tool for analyzing the proving process: the case of plane geometry proof

In the field of human cognition, language plays a special role that is connected directly to thinking and mental development (e.g., Vygotsky, 1938). Thanks to “verbal thought”, language allows humans to go beyond the limits of immediately perceived information, to form concepts and solve complex problems (Luria, 1975). So, it appears language can be studied as a cognitive process (Chomsky, 1975). In this investigation, I study language as a means for making the cognitive process explicit. In particular, I analyze the role of the verbalization produced by pairs of students solving a plane geometry problem. The basic idea of my research is that, during the resolution process of a plane geometry problem, natural language can play roles beyond that of communication: Natural language can be seen as a tool for supporting students’ cognitive processes (Robotti, 2008), and, at the same time, it can also be seen as a researchers’ tool which allows us to shed light on the evolution of students’ cognitive processes. With regard to language as researchers’ tool, I show how natural language (in our case, students’ verbalization during resolution of a plane geometry problem) can be used by the researcher to make explicit, to study, and to describe the development of the students’ cognitive processes during the resolution process. To this end, I present a model I have developed that allows us to identify, in students’ verbalization, different phases of their cognitive processes.     

An Activity Analysis of Secretarial Duties as a Basis for an Office Practice Course

The cognitive processes used by children during problem solving have received considerable attention in recent years. The identification of the processes used by both successful and unsuccessful problem solvers has been hampered by the difficulties involved in making accurate observations of mental processes which may or may not have physical manifestations during problem solving. In addition, problem solvers themselves often are unaware of many of the thought processes they use while attempting to solve problems. The most popularly used methods for studying problem solving processes are not sufficiently reliable or valid. This study explored the potential effectiveness of a new procedure for identifying and studying certain of the cognitive processes used during problem solving. In addition, the procedure was used to categorize the types of conceptual thinking problem solvers employ, to study the use of trial and error behavior, and to investigate problem solvers’ abilities to coordinate multiple bits of information. It appears that the procedure has application for generating hypotheses about cognitive processes problem solvers use.     

Do cognitive and metacognitive processes set the stage for each other?

Cognitive and metacognitive learning processes might not only functionally complement but also set the stage for each other. To address potential stage-setting effects between these processes, we conducted two experiments in which we varied whether students were prompted to engage in the cognitive processes of organization and elaboration prior to using the metacognitive processes of comprehension monitoring and remediation planning as well as implementing their remediation plans (cognitive-first sequence), or vice versa (metacognitive-first sequence). As the medium for engaging in these processes we used learning protocols, which were performed as follow-up activity to a lecture or regular lessons. We consistently found that the learners in the metacognitive-first groups outperformed their counterparts regarding the quality of the executed organization and metacognitive processes. We conclude that cognitive and metacognitive processes can influence each other's quality; however, they do not necessarily set the stage but can also damage the stage for each other.     

From Cognitive Modeling to Self-Regulation: A Social Cognitive Career Path

My career path to understanding the source and nature of human learning started with an interest in social processes, especially cognitive modeling, and has led to the exploration of self-regulatory processes. My investigation of these processes has prompted the development of several social cognitive models: a triadic model that synthesized covert, behavioral, and environmental sources of personal feedback, a multilevel model of training that begins with observational learning and proceeds sequentially to self-regulation, and a cyclical phase model that depicts the interaction of metacognitive and motivational processes during efforts to learn. Empirical support for each of these models is discussed, including its implications for formal and informal forms of instruction. This self-regulation research has revealed that students who set superior goals proactively, monitor their learning intentionally, use strategies effectively, and respond to personal feedback adaptively not only attain mastery more quickly, but also are more motivated to sustain their efforts to learn. Recommendations for future research are made.     

Situated Learning: Conceptualization and Measurement

A focus on the interaction between cognitive schemas and context in situ has been suggested as fundamental in organizational decision making and information interpretation. Past research suggests that the situation and the social interaction that occur during learning at the cognitive level consist of factors that affect the process, but the research lacks a coherent explanation for how those factors affect it. We propose a conceptualization of learning, termed situated learning, which accounts for these factors. By drawing on situated cognition theory, social learning theory, and the theory of mental models, we identify and measure four components of situated learning, that is, thematic focus, cognitive absorption, social structure, and participation. Among the most important lessons for researchers and practitioners is the need to consider learning as a constellation of the four components instead of an indivisible phenomenon. This perspective can enhance our understanding of cognitive processes, such as information interpretation and decision making.     

Do psychology researchers tell it like it is? A microgenetic analysis of research strategies and self-report accuracy along a continuum of expertise

Acquiring research skills is considered to be a highly challenging aspect of developing expertise in the social sciences. Because instruction and mentoring in these skills are typically grounded in the self-report of researchers, difficulties in learning the material may be due to the content and accuracy of these explanations. Using a mixed-method, microgenetic design, this study examines the explanations of problem-solving processes by researchers along a continuum of expertise during simulated experiment design and subsequent data analysis. Findings indicate that participants’ self-explanations are largely inaccurate. Further, frequency of inaccurate statements is positively associated with the frequency of abstract cognitive processes, such as mental modeling and situation assessment. Implications of these findings for instruction and future research directions are discussed.