Neuro‐linguistic programming and altered states: encouraging preparation for learning in the classroom for students with special educational needs

In seeking to identify the processes associated with the immediate engagement of learning for students with mild special educational needs, this study examined the responses of an extraction group (n = 7) of 11‐ to 13‐year‐old students who participated in a number of lessons in which the opening episode involved the use of visualisation techniques and language associated with representational systems as identified within neuro‐linguistic programming (NLP). Students endeavoured to alter their negative state to a positive state via this intervention. The study, by Voldis Kudliskis of South Dartmoor Community College, was of a naturalistic research design, and the students' experiences were explored by means of formal interviews, semi‐structured interviews, questionnaires and observations. The implications for altering state through techniques associated with NLP are described and evaluated in terms of student comments. The case is made for the process of altering state as a strategy to empower students to engage with their learning from the outset of the lesson.     

A Dangerous Benefit: Dialogue, Discourse, and Michel Foucault's Critique of Representation

Dialogue has been analyzed by educational theorists mainly from a perspective of representation. However, social theory on language has long questioned whether representation is the primary function of language. Thus, educational debates over the uses and abuses of dialogue entail a blind spot. What if dialogue works in ways that are not representational? What if dialogue is, rather, to be understood as both representation and discourse? In this article, the author argues that dialogue must be understood in both ways. As such, dialogue may be a representational benefit, but it is also a discursive danger.     

论教授分级的必要性与可行性

教授分级制是高校现有管理制度的必要补充和完善，实施教授分级制有利于深化高校人事分配制度的改革，调动高校教师的积极性，加强教授队伍建设，促进高质量学术成果的产生。同时，我国现存的社会风气，历史的和国外的相关经验教训，高校的内部环境等，均有利于教授分级制的推进。     

Representational Flexibility and Problem-Solving Ability in Fraction and Decimal Number Addition: A Structural Model

The aim of this study was to propose and validate a structural model in fraction and decimal number addition, which is founded primarily on a synthesis of major theoretical approaches in the field of representations in Mathematics and also on previous research on the learning of fractions and decimals. The study was conducted among 1701 primary and secondary school students. Eight components, which all involve representational transformations, were encompassed under the construct of representational flexibility in fraction and decimal number addition. This structure reveals that, for both concepts, the representational transformation competences of recognition and conversion, and therefore representational flexibility as well, were affected by the complexity of the concepts involved and the direction of the conversion, respectively. Results also showed that two first-order factors were needed to explain the problem-solving ability in fraction and decimal number addition, indicating the differential effect of the modes of representation that is diagrammatic and verbal form on problem-solving ability irrespective of the concepts involved, as in the case of the conversions. Representational flexibility and problem-solving ability were found to be major components of students’ representational thinking of fraction and decimal number addition. The proposed framework was invariant across the primary and secondary school students. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Applying ‘what works’ in psychology to enhancing examination success in schools: The potential contribution of NLP

The strengths and weaknesses of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) are described with reference to its origins, previous research and comments from critics and supporters. A case is made for this allegedly theoretical approach to provide the kind of outcomes focused intervention that psychology and psychologists can offer to schools. In particular, NLP includes a range of techniques that can be “given away” to teachers and students faced with examination pressures. The implication of such techniques with sixth form (Year 13) students in one secondary school in the South West of England is described and evaluated in terms of student comments on their helpfulness. The case is made for NLP as empowering some students to overcome exam anxiety and other related difficulties. A cyclical eight stage model is proposed for the application of NLP which is considered to offer the most likely effective learning outcomes.     

Representational Flexibility and Problem-Solving Ability in Fraction and Decimal Number Addition: A Structural Model

The aim of this study was to propose and validate a structural model in fraction and decimal number addition, which is founded primarily on a synthesis of major theoretical approaches in the field of representations in Mathematics and also on previous research on the learning of fractions and decimals. The study was conducted among 1701 primary and secondary school students. Eight components, which all involve representational transformations, were encompassed under the construct of representational flexibility in fraction and decimal number addition. This structure reveals that, for both concepts, the representational transformation competences of recognition and conversion, and therefore representational flexibility as well, were affected by the complexity of the concepts involved and the direction of the conversion, respectively. Results also showed that two first-order factors were needed to explain the problem-solving ability in fraction and decimal number addition, indicating the differential effect of the modes of representation that is diagrammatic and verbal form on problem-solving ability irrespective of the concepts involved, as in the case of the conversions. Representational flexibility and problem-solving ability were found to be major components of students’ representational thinking of fraction and decimal number addition. The proposed framework was invariant across the primary and secondary school students. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

     

从多模态话语分析理论解读《泰坦尼克号》(3D版)首款海报

电影海报是宣传影片、增加票房收入的重要手段之一,观众阅读海报的过程实际上是解码一种包括了图像、文字、色彩等元素的多模态语篇的过程。系统功能语言学和视觉语法分析框架为电影海报的多模态话语分析提供了理论基础。以《泰坦尼克号》(3D版)首款海报为例,从再现意义、互动意义和构图意义三个方面进行分析解读,旨在进一步探讨图像作为社会符号如何与语言共同作用,同时以期提高读者的多模态识读能力。     

Neuro-linguistic programming and learning theory: a response

In an earlier issue of this journal, Craft (2001) explored Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) in relation to a classification of learning theories. Craft also offered various observations on, and criticisms of, aspects of NLP such as its theoretical coherence, modelling, Dilts’s ‘logical levels’ and possible dissonance of NLP’s espousal of individuality in learning with its experiential emphasis. This article offers a response to Craft’s article. It describes the origins and nature of NLP, and explores its theoretical identity. NLP is portrayed here as based primarily on the cybernetic epistemology of Gregory Bateson (1972, 1979). The article offers a critique of many of the views put across in Craft’s article, and builds on her attempt to position NLP theoretically. The broad aims of this article are to offer an informed perspective on the nature of NLP; to extend the academic literature on NLP; and to develop debate about its relevance to the theory and practice of education.     

中文信息检索中的自然语言处理

信息检索是一种有效查询及获取相关资料的计算机技术 .一般来讲 ,被处理的对象可以是文本或者音像等任何形式的文件 ,本文将侧重于对文本资料的研究 .由于缺少预定的规范结构 ,文本文件的检索较之常规的数据库管理更为困难 .鉴于目前大多数检索系统所使用的关键词检索法存在很大的局限性 ,自然语言处理技术倍受重视 ,而中文处理的研究则更具价值 .本文旨在分析智能信息检索中应用中文自然语言处理的技术关键     

The Development of the Manchester Motor Skills Assessment (MMSA): An initial evaluation

This article is an initial evaluation of a motor skills assessment for primary aged children. The Manchester Motor Skills Assessment (MMSA) is designed to be quick and easy for teaching assistants to complete, with the dual purposes of informing group programme planning and demonstrating an individual child’s progress following a period of intervention. Inter‐rater reliability checks were conducted during initial assessments of 37 children in 11 schools. Focus groups discussed practical relevance of the tool. The evidence from this small‐scale study suggests that a range of assessors can reliably complete the MMSA. The tool also taps into functionally relevant motor skills for primary age children and informs programme planning. The MMSA appears to be a promising tool for supporting primary schools in identifying children with motor skills difficulties. The contribution of EPs to the MMSA’s development and implementation is discussed.     

Impact of simulator-based instruction on diagramming in geometrical optics by introductory physics students

We examine the conceptual development resulting from an instructional experiment with an interactive learning environment in geometrical optics for introductory high school physics. How did teaching-learning processes come to change the ways in which students depicted various everyday optical situations in paper and pencil graphical representations? We view conceptual development as a process resulting in part from increasingly aligning one's practices to a target community by means of participating in a community of practice that uses the target concepts. For formal science learning, this participation requires changes in concepts, epistemological attitude, and in the development and use of representational tools, including diagrams and technical language, as a means of communication. Results of our instructional experiment indicated that students went through major conceptual developments as reflected in the diagrams they constructed and supported by other representational tools and as judged in terms of several perspectives: in identifying the formation of shadows and images, in recognizing the eye as a participating factpr in the optical system, and in changing the types of justifications they provided in their optical reasoning from presuppositional to causal.     

Multiple Representation in Learning About Evaporation

There has been extensive research on children’s understanding of evaporation, but representational issues entailed in this understanding have not been investigated in depth. This study explored three students’ engagement with science concepts relating to evaporation through various representational modes, such as diagrams, verbal accounts, gestures, and captioned drawings. This engagement entailed students (a) clarifying their thinking through exploring representational resources; (b) developing understanding of what these representations signify; and (c) learning how to construct representational aspects of scientific explanation. The study involved a sequence of classroom lessons on evaporation and structured interviews with nine children, and found that a focus on representational challenges provided fresh insights into the conceptual task involved in learning science. The findings suggest that teacher‐mediated negotiation of representational issues as students construct different modal accounts can support enriched learning by enabling both (a) richer conceptual understanding by students; and (b) enhanced teacher insights into students’ thinking.     

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false-belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality. In false-belief tasks, children are asked to reason about the behavior of agents who have false beliefs about situations. Although a large body of evidence indicates that most children pass false-belief tasks by the end of the preschool years, the evidence we present in this monograph suggests that most children do not understand false beliefs or, surprisingly, even true beliefs until middle childhood. We argue that young children pass false-belief tasks without understanding false beliefs by using perceptual access reasoning (PAR). With PAR, children understand that seeing leads to knowing in the moment, but not that knowing also arises from thinking or persists as memory and belief after the situation changes. By the same token, PAR leads children to fail true-belief tasks. PAR theory can account for performance on other traditional tests of representational ToM and related tasks, and can account for the factors that have been found to correlate with or affect both true- and false-belief performance. The theory provides a new laboratory measure which we label the belief understanding scale (BUS). This scale can distinguish between a child who is operating with PAR versus a child who is understanding beliefs. This scale provides a method needed to allow the study of the development of representational ToM. In this monograph, we report the outcome of the tests that we have conducted of predictions generated by PAR theory. The findings demonstrated signature PAR limitations in reasoning about the mind during the ages when children are hypothesized to be using PAR. In Chapter II, secondary analyses of the published true-belief literature revealed that children failed several types of true-belief tasks. Chapters III through IX describe new empirical data collected across multiple studies between 2003 and 2014 from 580 children aged 4–7 years, as well as from a small sample of 14 adults. Participants were recruited from the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. All participants were native English-speakers. Children were recruited from university-sponsored and community preschools and daycare centers, and from hospital maternity wards. Adults were university students who participated to partially fulfill course requirements for research participation. Sociometric data were collected only in Chapter IX, and are fully reported there. In Chapter III, minor alterations in task procedures produced wide variations in children's performance in 3-option false-belief tasks. In Chapter IV, we report findings which show that the developmental lag between children's understanding ignorance and understanding false belief is longer than the lag reported in previous studies. In Chapter V, children did not distinguish between agents who have false beliefs versus agents who have no beliefs. In Chapter VI, findings showed that children found it no easier to reason about true beliefs than to reason about false beliefs. In Chapter VII, when children were asked to justify their correct answers in false-belief tasks, they did not reference agents’ false beliefs. Similarly, in Chapter VIII, when children were asked to explain agents’ actions in false-belief tasks, they did not reference agents’ false beliefs. In Chapter IX, children who were identified as using PAR differed from children who understood beliefs along three dimensions—in levels of social development, inhibitory control, and kindergarten adjustment. Although the findings need replication and additional studies of alternative interpretations, the collection of results reported in this monograph challenges the prevailing view that representational ToM is in place by the end of the preschool years. Furthermore, the pattern of findings is consistent with the proposal that PAR is the developmental precursor of representational ToM. The current findings also raise questions about claims that infants and toddlers demonstrate ToM-related abilities, and that representational ToM is innate.     

Competition between ethanol-induced reward and aversion in place conditioning

Previous place conditioning studies in mice have shown that injection of ethanol immediately before a conditioned stimulus (CS+) produces conditioned preference, whereas injection of ethanol immediately after CS+ produces conditioned aversion. In the present experiments, we examined the learning that occurs when ethanol is injected in “ambiguous“ procedures that provide the opportunity for both types of conditioning. When ethanol was given midway through the CS (Experiments 1 and 2) or both before and after the CS (Experiment 3), the direction of place conditioning was the same as when mice were exposed only to whichever contingency occurred first (a primacy effect). That is, injection of ethanol in the middle of the CS conditioned aversion, whereas injection both before and after the CS conditioned preference. Because these results support the idea that ethanol elicits both aversive and rewarding effects, they are most consistent with conditioning theories that conceptualize unconditioned stimuli (USs) as events that can activate multiple representational components.     

Effects of representational guidance during computer-supported collaborative learning

This research investigates the role of representational guidance by comparing the effects of two different representational tools. We used a design with two different groups defined by the type of argumentative diagram students co-constructed while working in a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment. The Graphical Debate-tool offered different representational guidance than the Textual Debate-tool. The results show that groups that worked with the Graphical Debate-tool constructed representations of higher quality and wrote essays that were better in terms of grounds quality. Furthermore, working with the Graphical Debate-tool was found to have a positive effect on students’ learning as measured by a knowledge post-test. In contrast to our expectations however, there was little difference between the two conditions regarding the online collaboration process. It can be concluded that representational guidance has an impact on group and individual performance and should therefore be taken into account during instructional design.     

Natural language processing techniques in computer-assisted language learning: Status and instructional issues

The role of natural language processing (NLP) techniques, such as parsing and semantic analysis, is described within current language tutoring systems. Significant trends are distinguished in the exploitation of these techniques, design issues and tradeoffs are examined, and current and potential contributions of NLP technology are discussed with respect to instructional theory and educational practice. Limitations and problems are addressed in using NLP tools for teaching, and approaches to assessment are considered.     

Children's drawing and painting from a cognitive perspective: a longitudinal study

This paper describes a longitudinal study undertaken with 40 pre‐schoolers during their last six months in an early childhood centre and their first six months at school. The study presents an investigation of the pathways that child drawers and painters make towards representational depictions. As such its primary focus is on cognitive processes. Monthly samples of 40 children's drawings and paintings were collected over a 12‐month period that included the children's transition into formal schooling. CrossTabs analysis showed that the relevant cognitive abilities tended to present in clusters and that patterning may be a serious component both in its own right, as well as in facilitating representational depictions, as previously claimed by Booth.     

神经语言程序学视野中的语言模式

NLP是关于大脑运作、语言模式、人类认知程序以及它们之间的相互作用而产生主观认识和行为的一套学问。NLP中对语言的研究,不是研究语言本身,而是研究语言的应用技巧。NLP认为,人们存在于潜意识中的思想,经过删减、扭曲和一般化,转变成有意识的语言表达出来。语言沟通中的话语转换方法包括上调、下调和平调。提示语言模式是上调的技巧,目的是与对方的潜意识沟通,从而增加说服力。检定语言模式是下调的技巧,可以发掘对方话语中的深层意思,从而了解其真正想法。这些语言技巧,多被应用于心理治疗、演讲、人事管理和销售培训等需要与人沟通的场合。     

学习能力障碍筛查量表在蒙古族小学生中试用研究

本研究将国内新近翻译修订的“学习能力障碍儿童筛查量表（ＰＲＳ）”试用于呼和浩特市蒙古族小学生。结果表明，该量表各项得分均值分布与原量表结果基本相符；呼和浩特市区蒙古族小学生中学习障碍儿童筛出率为１６．５％，高于日本，接近欧美，且高于广州市；男高于女，与国内外有关报道一致。研究表明，ＰＲＳ量表在筛查和甄别ＬＤ儿童方面确实效价很高