New perspectives in gaze sensitivity research

Attending to where others are looking is thought to be of great adaptive benefit for animals when avoiding predators and interacting with group members. Many animals have been reported to respond to the gaze of others, by co-orienting their gaze with group members (gaze following) and/or responding fearfully to the gaze of predators or competitors (i.e., gaze aversion). Much of the literature has focused on the cognitive underpinnings of gaze sensitivity, namely whether animals have an understanding of the attention and visual perspectives in others. Yet there remain several unanswered questions regarding how animals learn to follow or avoid gaze and how experience may influence their behavioral responses. Many studies on the ontogeny of gaze sensitivity have shed light on how and when gaze abilities emerge and change across development, indicating the necessity to explore gaze sensitivity when animals are exposed to additional information from their environment as adults. Gaze aversion may be dependent upon experience and proximity to different predator types, other cues of predation risk, and the salience of gaze cues. Gaze following in the context of information transfer within social groups may also be dependent upon experience with group-members; therefore we propose novel means to explore the degree to which animals respond to gaze in a flexible manner, namely by inhibiting or enhancing gaze following responses. We hope this review will stimulate gaze sensitivity research to expand beyond the narrow scope of investigating underlying cognitive mechanisms, and to explore how gaze cues may function to communicate information other than attention.     

Innocent Victims, Fighter Cells, and White Uncles: A Discourse Analysis of Children’s Books about AIDS

In this article, we examine a set of 26 children’s books on HIV/AIDS published between 1989–1999 to identify the ways in which these texts construct HIV/AIDS and people living with HIV/AIDS. We explore how this marginalized group is depicted in these books, and how well-meaning teachers may in fact be reproducing dominant discourses about HIV/AIDS in their curricula. In this article we focus, in particular, on how the discourses connected to public health, medicine, and secrecy (as a discourse across many institutions) are filtered to children and take part in constructing their beliefs and assumptions about HIV/AIDS. We illustrate our argument with examples from the books and show why teachers need to know how to analyze texts they select for their curricula so as to read books about HIV/AIDS critically in the classroom. Megan Blumenreich is Assistant Professor of Childhood Education at The City College of New York, City University of New York. Her research interests focus on urban schooling, poststructuralist approaches to qualitative research, and teacher education. She is the coauthor of The Power of Questions: A Guide to Teacher and Student Research (Heineman, 2005). Marjorie Siegel is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests include transmediation and multimodality in literacy education, content area literacies, and literacies and technologies. She is the coauthor of Reading Counts: Expanding the role of reading in mathematics classrooms (Teachers College, 2000). M. Himley, “Teaching the rhetoric of AIDS: Blurring the boundaries.”     

Why the timing deficit hypothesis does not explain reading disability in adults

It has been proposed that the phonological coredeficit that is linked to reading failure hasas its underlying cause a deficit in temporalprocessing. In a multivariate investigationdesigned to examine the temporal processingdeficit hypothesis, thirty reading-disabled(RD) adults, thirty-two normally achievingadults and thirty-one normally achievingchildren (reading-level controls) wereadministered a comprehensive battery thatincluded a wide range of timing tasks, inaddition to reading and phonological measures. Although adults with RD displayed overallperformance that was below that of normallyachieving adults on most of the timing tasks,their performance was not differentiallyinfluenced by rate of stimulus presentation. Although the RD adults displayed the typicalpattern of impaired phonological awareness andpseudoword reading relative to reading-levelmatched children, the reading-disabled adultsoutperformed the children on the timing tasks. Finally, with the exception of continuousnaming, the timing tasks shared little variancewith phonological sensitivity and contributedlittle unique variance to word reading. Although these findings undermine the timingdeficit hypothesis, they do provide evidencefor the involvement of naming deficits inreading disability.     

Teaching instructional design in a computer literacy course

Knowledge of instructional design principles can help teachers integrate technology such as computers into their classroom instruction. This article describes a required computer literacy course for preservice teachers which was redesigned to include substantial components to teach instructional design. Also described are the results of a study conducted to examine the effectiveness of the instructional design training. End-of-course measures indicated that the preservice teachers learned the essential principles of instructional design and believed that the instruction would help them develop better lesson plans for effective use of computers in their classroom instruction.     

Gender ratio and cognitive profiles in dyslexia: a cross-national study

The purpose of this study was to analyze possible gender-related differences in the prevalence of dyslexia. A cross-national comparison of Spain and Guatemala was conducted. Both countries speak the same language but have a different standard of living and educational level. A second purpose of this study was to analyze the cognitive profile of Guatemalan and Spanish males and females children with dyslexia. The log-linear analysis indicated that the number of dyslexics detected was different across the countries but there were no differences as a function of gender. Similarly, there were no significant or meaningful differences between dyslexic males and females in the cognitive processes involved in reading. Therefore, gender differences do not appear to be characteristic of developmental dyslexia.     

Hypothesis Testing Using the Films of The Three Stooges

The use of The Three Stooges' films as a source of data in an introductory statistics class is described. The Stooges' films are separated into three populations. Using these populations, students may conduct hypothesis tests with data they collect.