A Binomial Test of Group Differences With Correlated Outcome Measures

The purpose of this study was to determine whether female subjects demonstrate learned helplessness in their attribution patterns to a greater extent than male subjects when they describe failures they actually have experienced. Subjects were 1,462 ninth- and twelfth-grade students (697 boys, 765 girls) from representative rural, urban, and inner-city high schools in the Midwest. The subjects recalled failure experiences from a wide range of achievement domains: school, sports, aesthetics, family, social, and work. The dependent variables were four failure attributions: lack of ability, lack of effort, lack of luck, and lack of cooperation. Sex and achievement domain differences accounted, respectively, for 2% and 18% of the variance in attribution responses. Both boys and girls recalled a substantial and comparable proportion of school-related failures. The strongest differences between boys and girls was in their choice of salient achievement domains outside of school; girls recalled more family and aesthetics failures and fewer sports failures than boys. Little evidence was obtained supporting the learned helplessness model for adolescent female achievement motivation. There was also considerable variability in the relative importance of the four failure attributions both within and across achievement domains. Internal attributions were most characteristic of school and least characteristic of work failures. Cooperation attributions were endorsed more in the social and family domains than in the other domains.     

A Glimpse into the Minds of Mothers: The Default Mode Network and Responsiveness to Infant Cries

SYNOPSIS

The authors comment on a paper reporting differences between mothers and non-mothers in neural responses to infant cries and other emotive sounds while engaging in self- or goal-oriented tasks. The value of examining deactivation of the default mode network (DMN) as a means of understanding differential attention patterns in both typical and atypical populations is discussed, as is the generalizability of the experimental paradigm to ecologically relevant contexts. The role of an individual’s age, parental status, and experience in shaping responses to infant crying is considered, and future avenues of research are suggested. An argument is made for coupling neuroimaging techniques with behavioral assays to better understand the determinants of maternal behavior.     

The learning and study strategies of college students with ADHD

This study compared learning and study strategies of students with attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to two groups: college students with learning disabilities (LD) and college students without disabilities. In addition, strengths and weaknesses within the ADHD group were examined on the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory, 2nd edition (LASSI; C.E. Weinstein & D.R. Palmer, 2002). The LASSI was also evaluated as a predictive measure for academic achievement for college students with ADHD compared to other students. Results indicate that several important differences may exist in the learning and study strategies of students with ADHD versus students with LD and students without disabilities. However, the LASSI may not be a useful tool for predicting academic achievement for college students with ADHD. Interventions for working with students with ADHD are given. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Henry Dale's Nobel Prize Winning `Discovery'

A particular model of scientific achievement is embedded within the Nobel Prize, one that privileges the scientific `loner', whoachieves a distinct discovery at a particularmoment in time. A common criticism of this`individualistic' story of achievement is thatit obscures the social and cultural factors inscientific discovery. A collective story,highlighting the role of social relations andscientific milieux, may offer more explanatorypower in accounting for scientific discoveriesand inventions. This paper explores the processby which Henry Dale became recognized as thediscoverer of the chemical transmission ofnerve impulses. It compares the explanatorypower of the story of individual creativitywith a story that highlights the interactionbetween a scientist and his environment.     

The resources of the Russian national retrospective bibliography: The nontraditional segments

The paper considers the limits and structure of the Russian national retrospective bibliography, a document as an object of the national retrospective bibliography, the kinds of resources held by the national retrospective bibliography of Russia and the centers of their creation, and the conditions of the records for nontraditional kinds of documents (printed, unpublished, and electronic).     

Individual differences in young children's recall and clustering of pictures

Children's incidental recall of pictures was examined in two related experiments. Extrapolating from adult research, it was predicted that categorizing pictures with respect to their semantic properties would yield greater recall than categorizing them according to their physical properties. In Experiment 1, second-grade children were exposed to 16 line drawings cross-classified to represent four taxonomic categories and four shape categories, with four instances per category. Control subjects simply looked at pictures. Semantic subjects identified each picture's semantic category, and Physical subjects identified each physical category. In Experiment 2, first graders freely sorted the pictures and were classified as Semantic or Physical sorters based on their predominant bases for sorting. Following exposure (Experiment 1) or sorting (Experiment 2), all subjects were asked to recall the picture names. Results of both experiments show that semantic classification yields greater recall than physical classification. Experiment 2 also shows that semantic sorting yields greater semantic clustering in recall and that sorting by physical category yields greater physical clustering. It was suggested that children's preferences for a mode of processing (Experiment 2) may constitute an individual difference dimension with fairly clear-cut instructional implications.