Advice on a rough draft: The Pickwick papers' ‘Mr. Weller the Elder delivers some critical sentiments respecting literary composition’1

The author discusses a scene from Dickens's The Pickwick papers wherein the novelist describes and dramatises an inexperienced but earnest and determined young man writing a Valentine's letter under the tutelage of a confident yet incompetent tutor, his father. The author, presenting Dickens's marvellous comic scene, compares Sam Weller's difficulties and satisfactions, as well as his weary trailing off, to those of the author's students at a community college in Brooklyn, New York.     

Pigeon and human performance in a multi-armed bandit task in response to changes in variable interval schedules

The tension between exploitation of the best options and exploration of alternatives is a ubiquitous problem that all organisms face. To examine this trade-off across species, pigeons and people were trained on an eight-armed bandit task in which the options were rewarded on a variable interval (VI) schedule. At regular intervals, each option’s VI changed, thus encouraging dynamic increases in exploration in response to these anticipated changes. Both species showed sensitivity to the payoffs that was often well modeled by Luce’s (1963) decision rule. For pigeons, exploration of alternative options was driven by experienced changes in the payoff schedules, not the beginning of a new session, even though each session signaled a new schedule. In contrast, people quickly learned to explore in response to signaled changes in the payoffs.     

Recovery from blocking achieved by extinguishing the blocking CS

Extinction-induced attenuation of single-phase and two-phase blocking was examined with rats in a conditioned lick-suppression task. In Experiment 1, which compared the effectiveness of single- and two-phase blocking, it was found that single-phase blocking was facilitated by the initiation of training with an A-US trial rather than an AX-US trial. Single-phase (but not two-phase) blocking was attenuated as a result of 200 extinction trials with the blocking stimulus (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 revealed recovery from two-phase blocking after 800 extinction trials with the blocking stimulus. Recovery from both types of blocking was specific to the blocked CS trained in compound with the extinguished stimulus (Experiment 4). This is the first article to report that the blocking deficit can be reversed by extinguishing the blocking stimulus. These results are discussed in light of acquisition models (i.e., retrospective revaluation) and expression models (i.e., the comparator hypothesis).     

Temporal coding affects transfer of serial and simultaneous inhibitors

In three experiments with rats, the temporal relationships under which a conditioned inhibitor would transfer its inhibitory potential to an independently trained excitor in a summation test were investigated. Each experiment varied the temporal relationship between the inhibitor and the transfer excitor at test (serial or simultaneous) and, in addition, manipulated either the inhibitor-training excitor (serial or simultaneous), training excitor-unconditioned stimulus (US) (trace or delay), or the transfer excitor-US (trace or delay) temporal relationships. Conditioned inhibition was found only when the no-US expectation evoked by the conditioned inhibitor was temporally aligned with the US expectation evoked by the transfer excitor, independent of whether the inhibitor was trained as a serial or simultaneous signal for US omission. Results are discussed in terms of the temporal coding hypothesis and the comparator hypothesis.     

The new one-drop rule: challenging the persistence of white supremacy with in-service teachers

ABSTRACT

The one-drop rule refers to the process of being racialized Black when someone contains any amount of Black ancestry, i.e. one drop of Black blood. In this article, I use what I call ‘the new one-drop rule’ to explain how even the smallest presence of white discourse can disrupt racial equity work in schools. Based on a critical race study in a racially desegregated elementary school, I illustrate how one drop of white discourse from even one less racially literate white teacher can cause usually more racially literate white teachers to support white supremacy. I also share how collaborative research utilizing critical race theory (CRT) can help schools build greater racial literacy and resist white discourse. I argue that critical research on race with in-service teachers should not forefront the consciousness-raising of resistant white teachers but rather center the wants, needs, and racial knowledge of racially literate teachers and especially teachers of color.     

Seryozha’s Education

This is discussion of one of Leo Tolstoy’s fictional dramatisations of aggressive but dull-witted pedagogy. In Anna Karenina, two adults badger a lively, deep-souled, active-minded boy, Anna’s son Seryozha, to learn his rote-lessons.