Cognitive ability,thinking dispositions,and instructional set as predictors of critical thinking

This study examined the predictors of belief bias in a formal reasoning paradigm (a syllogistic reasoning task) and myside bias in two informal reasoning paradigms (an argument generation task and an experiment evaluation task). Neither cognitive ability nor thinking dispositions predicted myside bias, but both cognitive ability and thinking dispositions were significant predictors of the ability to overcome belief bias in the syllogistic reasoning task. However, instructional set (either decontextualizing or non-directive instructions) had a significant effect on myside bias in the argument generation task, as well as a marginal effect on the syllogistic reasoning task. On the latter, and to some extent on the former task, instructional set interacted with cognitive ability. The debiasing effect of decontextualizing instructions was particularly large for those participants in the lowest quartile of cognitive ability.     

‘You feel ashamed that you are not in the higher group’—Children’s psychosocial response to ability grouping in primary school

The impact of performative focused agendas on how teachers ‘do’ teaching and how children ‘do’ learning cannot be understated. While research continues to highlight the negative impact of ability grouping on children’s academic and social learning experiences in the classroom, policy imperatives (both global and local) continue to promote ability grouping as an ‘effective’ pedagogic tool for meeting the diverse needs of children, especially in the areas of numeracy and literacy. We argue that this is a symbolically violent process that negatively impacts the psychosocial positioning of children as they negotiate their identities within the figured world of the primary school classroom. This in turn influences their learner identities, as well as their perceptions of their ability to learn. Drawing on data collected with 100 children in three case study schools, we show how ability grouping evoked strong emotional and psychosocial responses characterised by feelings of ‘shame’, ‘upset’ and ‘inferiority’ for those in the low-ability groups. In contrast, children placed in higher-ability groups felt a sense of ‘pride’, ‘happiness’ and ‘confidence’. Ability grouping maps a geography of affect within the classroom demarcating not only how children ‘do’ learning, but also how they embody learning through a particular feeling of ‘being’ a learner in the classroom.     

The Moving Window Technique: A Window Into Developmental Changes in Attention During Facial Emotion Recognition

The strategies children employ to selectively attend to different parts of the face may reflect important developmental changes in facial emotion recognition. Using the Moving Window Technique (MWT), children aged 5–12 years and adults (N = 129) explored faces with a mouse‐controlled window in an emotion recognition task. An age‐related increase in attention to the left eye emerged at age 11–12 years and reached significance in adulthood. This left‐eye bias is consistent with previous eye tracking research and findings of a perceptual bias for the left side of faces. These results suggest that a strategic attentional bias to the left eye begins to emerge at age 11–12 years and is likely established sometime in adolescence.     

A study of field independent biased mental ability tests in community college science classes

Many schools use mental ability test scores as a basis for grouping students and planning their educational needs. The widespread use of these test scores throughout public and private schools demands that test items be unbiased. One way in which tests could be biased, that has not been thoroughly investigated, is the inadvertent use of analytical skill items favoring one perceptual orientation over another. This study investigated analytical skill items on the Otis-Lennon Mental Ability Test for field independent bias. Using as analysis of variance and discriminant analysis, the results indicated that the Otis-Lennon Mental Ability Test was biased in favor of individuals with a field of independent perceptual orientation.     

Margarita glasses and high heels: How attention to shape,age, and vocabulary impacts children's recognition of typical and atypical exemplars

Children's ability to recognize object shape is foundational for successful early word learning. However, the prototypical shape of objects may not be easily accessible—take margarita glasses, for instance. The current study examined 304 U.S. children 17- to 42-month-old (152 females) from 2017 to 2020, asking how shape, age, and vocabulary abilities predict recognition of everyday objects. Children's ability to recognize objects increases with age and vocabulary, replicating prior work. Moreover, performance was partially moderated by object's typicality and shape features, and children's own attention to shape (shape bias) may mediate the effect, especially with prototypically shaped objects. The current study highlights how both child-specific variables and context features interact to shape language abilities, underscoring the emergent and multi-causal nature of word learning.     

Children's knowledge of thematic and taxonomic relations at two years of age

An interesting conflict exists in the developmental literature concerning the strength of thematic versus taxonomic associations. "Dog-doghouse" is a thematic match, while "dog-horse" is a taxonomic match. This study compared the ability of children to identify both types of associations at 2 points during the third year of life: 26 months (N = 15) and 34 months (N = 24). A reinforced match-to-sample technique was used in which half of the matches were thematic and the other half were taxonomic. Both age groups were able to identify thematic matches, although children near 3 years of age were able to recognize a wider range of thematic associations than children near 2 years of age. The 26-month-olds were unable to identify taxonomic matches that had no perceptual basis, but the 34-month-olds were successful at this task; the 34-month-olds appeared to have a more general understanding of categories that was less tied to perceptual features.     

Mode of acquisition as a factor in deaf children's reading comprehension

This article examines the role of mode of acquisition (MoA) of word meanings in reading comprehension: children acquire word meanings using perceptual information (e.g., hearing, seeing, or smelling the referent) and/or linguistic information (e.g., verbal explanations). A total of 72 deaf and 99 hearing children between 7 and 15 years of age performed a self-paced reading task. Comprehension scores increased with age in both groups, but reading speed increased over age only for the hearing participants. For both groups, reading times on linguistically acquired words were longer than on perceptually acquired words. Although deaf children scored lower than hearing children in both conditions, comprehension scores for both groups were lower on linguistic items than on perceptual items. Thus, MoA influences reading comprehension, but the deaf show difficulty on both the perceptual and the linguistic items.     

The Role of Stimulus Novelty on Children's Inflexible Dimensional Switching

Children's ability to flexibly shift attention between different representational schemes was investigated using the dimensional change card sorting task. Across three experiments (N = 56 three‐year‐olds and N = 40 four‐year‐olds in 2 ; N = 14 three‐year‐olds in 3 ; and N = 14 three‐year‐olds in 4 ) the role of perceptual information on children's cognitive flexibility was investigated by manipulating different aspects of the task materials between pre‐ and postswitch phases. Better performance was observed when either task‐relevant (the color or shape of the images on the cards) or task‐irrelevant information (the background color or shape of the actual cards) was changed, with this improvement occurring when the changes were salient enough to induce a stimulus novelty effect.     

Measuring Beliefs in Centimeters: Private Knowledge Biases Preschoolers' and Adults' Representation of Others' Beliefs

A novel task, using a continuous spatial layout, was created to investigate the degree to which (in centimeters) 3‐year‐old children's (N = 63), 5‐year‐old children's (N = 60), and adults' (N = 60) own privileged knowledge of the location of an object biased their representation of a protagonist's false belief about the object's location. At all ages, participants' knowledge of the object's actual location biased their search estimates, independent of the attentional or memory demands of the task. Children's degree of bias correlated with their performance on a classic change‐of‐location false belief task, controlling for age. This task is a novel tool for providing a quantitative measurement of the degree to which self‐knowledge can bias estimates of others' beliefs.     

The Effects of Within-Class Ability Grouping on Academic Achievement in Early Elementary Years

Abstract

By incorporating two theoretical frameworks this study examines how school characteristics shape first-grade reading ability-grouping practices, and how this, in turn, affects students’ reading achievement. The author uses the data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and applies the propensity-score method to examine whether first-grade ability grouping improves student achievement, whether ability grouping increases achievement inequalities, and whether its effects vary by student initial abilities and/or school contexts. Findings support an argument that ability grouping is an organizational response to problems of diversity in the student body. Schools that use ability grouping are likely to have heterogeneous ability compositions. They are also public, low-performing, low socioeconomic status, and high-minority schools. In these schools, ability grouping has no effects or negative effects, particularly for low-ability students. In contrast, ability grouping may improve achievement for all students in schools with advantageous characteristics, mostly private schools, and may reduce achievement inequalities, because low-ability students benefit the most from this practice.     

工业设计专业产品形态设计课程的教学改革——以太原理工大学工程设计专业为例

为了培养工业设计专业学生的形态造型能力和相关艺术素质,工业设计专业产品形态设计课程应进行教学内容的改革,摆脱模式化训练,注重学生对点、线、面、体等设计元素的认知;通过对感性思维的表达,训练学生的感性思维能力;通过对产品形态符号的运用,加强学生对产品形态的感知。     

The heterogeneous effects of ability grouping on national college entrance exam performance – evidence from a large city in China

This study attempts to evaluate the achievement effect of ability grouping on student performance on the National College Entrance Exam in China. The context of this study is the ongoing school reform movement occurring in many Chinese municipalities. The current reform movement is striving to achieve educational equity and quality by integrating initial low achievers into high-performing schools. The propensity score matching method is employed as the identification strategy. After controlling for self-selection bias in high school assignment, this study finds that while there is no effect of high ability grouping at the school level on academic achievement, initial low achievers’ academic performances can be significantly improved when integrated with high performing students at the school level. In addition, between-class grouping significantly improves student performance in a heterogeneous school-level grouping. Upon analyzing the results, rich information on school level input is reported.     

Intermanual transfer of shapes in preterm human infants from 33 to 34 + 6 weeks postconceptional age

This study investigated the ability of preterm infants to learn an object shape with one hand and discriminate a new shape in the opposite hand (without visual control). Twenty-four preterm infants between 33 and 34 + 6 gestational weeks received a tactile habituation task with either their right or left hand followed by a tactile discrimination task in the opposite hand. The results confirmed that habituation occurred for both shapes and both hands. Infants subsequently held the novel shape longer in the opposite hand. The results reveal that preterm infants are capable of intermanual transfer of shape information. In spite of the immaturity of the corpus callosum in preterm infants, its development seems to be sufficient to allow some transfer of information between both hands.     

As Time Goes By: Children''s Early Understanding of Growth in Animals

Beliefs about naturally occurring transformations were examined in children aged 3 to 6 years in 4 experiments. Experiment 1 tested children's understanding that animals (but not artifacts) predictably get larger over time. Experiment 1a examined whether the results obtained in the first experiment could be attributed to an added memory component on the artifact task. Experiment 2 further examined beliefs about the aging of artifacts. In Experiment 3, color and shape (metamorphosis) changes of animals were investigated. At all ages, children appeared to understand that animals get larger and not smaller with age. While older children and adults allowed for rather dramatic changes in the size and shape of animals over the life span if the alternative involved decreasing in size with age, preschool children were less willing to accept these changes. Taken together, the results of these studies suggest that even young preschool children have 2 conceptual insights about natural transformations: that they are lawful and nonrandom, and that they are domain and mechanism specific. Further, children as young as age 3 are able to go beyond the perceptual appearance of animals in making judgments about transformations caused by growth. Implications for children's understanding of personal and species identity are discussed.     

Object Properties and Knowledge in Early Lexical Learning

The ease with which young children learn object nouns suggests that they possess strategies to identify properties critical to lexical category membership. In previous work, young children used a same-shape criterion to extend new count nouns. The present research tested the generality of this shape bias. 2- and 3-year-olds were asked either to extend a novel count noun to new instances, or to choose unnamed objects to go together. The objects varied in shape, size, and texture. For half of the subjects, the objects had eyes--a property strongly associated with certain material kinds. If young children know this association, they should attend to texture as well as shape in classifying objects with eyes. With named objects only, both 2- and 3-year-old children classified eyeless objects by shape and objects with eyes by both shape and texture. The results suggest that very young children possess considerable knowledge about conditional relations between kinds of perceptual properties. Knowledge of such conditional relations may aid children in forming new categories and thus in discovering new word meanings.     

Preliminary evidence for color stimuli discrimination in the Asian small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea)

Color discrimination ability can be determined through anatomy or perceptual ability. In this study we tested perceptual ability. Three Asian small-clawed otters (Aonyx cinerea), one male and two females, were trained via operant conditioning to discriminate stimuli within a training task. If they passed criteria for this task, they were tested on as many as six delayed matching-to-sample experimental tasks. These experimental tasks involved comparing varying saturations of the colors blue, green, and red against varying shades of gray, as well as against each other. The male reached criterion on five of the experimental tasks, indicating an ability to discriminate the stimuli. One female participated in only two tasks and did not achieve the criteria as set. The second female did not pass the training task, and thus was not experimentally tested. This study overall showed some early evidence that Asian small-clawed otters may have the ability to learn to discriminate different stimuli on the basis of color cues. Sensory studies conducted on two other otter species and the results of this study indicate that color vision may be a common trait across Lutrinae species.     

Children's conception of changes in the state of matter: From liquid (or solid) to gas

This research examines children's (ages 9–15) conception of changes in the state of matter from liquid or solid to gas, as well as their understanding of the reversibility of this process. Children were tested for their ability to conserve matter, its identity, and its weight in tasks using evaporation of acetone and sublimation of iodine. It was found that children who recognized weight conservation in one of the tasks did not necessarily recognize the same in the second task. Students believed that gas has no weight, or that gas is lighter than the same material in its liquid or solid state. In addition, students who recognized weight conservation were not always aware of the reversibility of the process. Until the age of 12 specific perceptual input from the task (e.g., color) dramatically influenced students' responses to the conservation of weight task. The relationship between children's intuitive ideas about matter, as observed in this study, and their logical ability to conserve weight, as observed in this study, is discussed.     

Ability Grouping Practices in the Primary School: A survey

In 1997, the DfEE suggested that schools should consider 'setting' pupils by ability as it was believed that this would contribute to raising standards. This survey of primary schools aimed to establish the extent to which primary schools, with same and mixed age classes, implement different grouping practices including setting, streaming, within class ability and mixed ability groupings for different curriculum subjects. Schools were asked to complete a questionnaire indicating their grouping practices for each subject in each year group. The findings showed that schools predominantly adopted within class ability groupings, either mixed or ability grouped, for most subjects. Ability grouping (within class and setting) was most common in mathematics, followed by English and science. Its implementation increased as pupils progressed through school. The type of setting adopted, same or cross-age, tended to reflect the nature of the class structures within the school.     

Role of perceptual and conceptual similarity in category matching at age two years

Perceptual and categorical similarity were varied independently in a concept-matching task administered to 26-month-old children (N = 25). 44 test sets were assembled. Each set included a 3-dimensional standard and an array of 4 pictures, one of which was a member of the same basic or superordinate category as the standard. On each trial, placing the standard on the matching picture resulted in activation of 1 of 12 mechanical displays. The test sets varied in the perceptual and categorical resemblance of the standard to the match and to the nonmatches, as determined by adults' ratings. Perceptual similarity proved to be the primary determinant of difficulty level. When perceptual resemblance of the standard and the match were equated, superordinate and basic matches were equally difficult. When perceptual resemblance was minimal, most children were unable to recognize matches at either the basic or superordinate level.