Progressive drawing: A novel “lid–opener” and “monotony–breaker”

An innovative strategy called “progressive drawing” was used at the beginning (lid‐opener) and later (monotony‐breaker) during gross anatomy lectures. Diagrams were drawn on the classroom blackboard with anatomic structures added one by one. Students identified and labeled the diagrams and predicted the next structures to be drawn. Students felt that the strategy helped to activate prior knowledge, created interest in the current lecture, and made lecture sessions more interactive. The strategy has appeal for visual, auditory, read/write, and kinesthetic learners. Anat Sci Educ, 2010. © 2010 American Association of Anatomists.     

“How Come Nobody Told Me?” Fostering Self‐Realization Through a High School English Curriculum

Through collaboratively designed qualitative inquiry, we investigated the responses of high school students with learning disabilities to a teacher’s intervention intended to promote self‐realization, a fundamental component of self‐determination. Activities were embedded within the general English curriculum and delivered in a special education classroom over the course of an academic year. Several themes emerged from analysis of student interviews, student responses to writing prompts and surveys, a teacher journal, and student portfolio pieces. Silence and misconceptions were prevalent in student experiences. However, through the intervention students acquired information that helped them make sense of their school experiences, redefine themselves in positive ways, and take small steps toward greater self‐advocacy within their current school setting. The mediating influence of positive adult voices and concerns about social stigma were evident in students’ responses, which prompted us to question teachers’ and families’ responsibilities for engaging young people in dialogue about special education and disability.     

Keep the “H”

This commentary advocates “keeping the H” in “human performance technology” to help make it clear to nonpractitioners what human performance consultants do. There are different types of performance (e.g., financial performance) and different means of achieving performance (e.g., engineering) that are outside the average human performance technologist's repertoire. Though the human performance technologist should target business results and intervene at more than just the individual level, ultimately, their emphasis is improving human work.     

“UNIFIED”: Bridging the Researcher–Practitioner Divide in Mind,Brain, and Education

Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) science is by definition transdisciplinary. However, the communication and collaboration between constituent disciplines needed for true transdisciplinarity remains relatively rare. Consequently, many of the potential benefits of MBE science remain unrealized for parties on all sides of the discipline. The present commentary first conducts an analysis of the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of transdisciplinary partnerships in MBE. A new, free, and international web platform (“UNIFIED”) is then proposed to broker relationships between researchers and teachers within schools. This website would allow users to form collaborations based on a system of tags indexing their research interests as well as practicalities such as their location. Such a website appears well placed to realize many of the opportunities, and mitigate the threats and weaknesses, of transdisciplinary MBE research. The article concludes with an appeal to interested researchers and schools to contribute to the development of the project.     

“Helping” Versus “Being a Helper”: Invoking the Self to Increase Helping in Young Children

Can a subtle linguistic cue that invokes the self motivate children to help? In two experiments, 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children (N = 149) were exposed to the idea of “being a helper” (noun condition) or “helping” (verb condition). Noun wording fosters the perception that a behavior reflects an identity—the kind of person one is. Both when children interacted with an adult who referenced “being a helper” or “helping” ( 2 ) and with a new adult ( 3 ), children in the noun condition helped significantly more across four tasks than children in the verb condition or a baseline control condition. The results demonstrate that children are motivated to pursue a positive identity. Moreover, this motivation can be leveraged to encourage prosocial behavior.