Young Children''s Understanding of Other People''s Feelings and Beliefs: Individual Differences and Their Antecedents

Individual differences in young children's understanding of others' feelings and in their ability to explain human action in terms of beliefs, and the earlier correlates of these differences, were studied with 50 children observed at home with mother and sibling at 33 months, then tested at 40 months on affective-labeling, perspective-taking, and false-belief tasks. Individual differences in social understanding were marked; a third of the children offered explanations of actions in terms of false belief, though few predicted actions on the basis of beliefs. These differences were associated with participation in family discourse about feelings and causality 7 months earlier, verbal fluency of mother and child, and cooperative interaction with the sibling. Differences in understanding feelings were also associated with the discourse measures, the quality of mother-sibling interaction, SES, and gender, with girls more successful than boys. The results support the view that discourse about the social world may in part mediate the key conceptual advances reflected in the social cognition tasks; interaction between child and sibling and the relationships between other family members are also implicated in the growth of social understanding.     

Learning safely from error? Reconsidering the ethics of simulation-based medical education through ethnography

‘Human factors’ is an influential rationale in the UK national health service to understand mistakes, risk and safety. Although there have been studies examining its implications in workplaces, there has been little investigation of how it is taught, as a form of professional morality. This article draws on an observational study of human factors teaching in four hospital simulation centres in London, UK. Its main argument is that the teaching of human factors is realised through an identification and positive evaluation of ‘non-technical skills’ and the espousal of ‘non-judgemental’ pedagogy, both of which mean that mistakes cannot be made. Professional solidarity is then maintained on the absence of mistakes. We raise questions about the ethics of this teaching. The study is situated within a history of ethnographic accounts of medical mistakes, to explore the relationship between claims to professional knowledge and claims about failure.     

Designing effective,contemporary assessment on a flipped educational sciences course

ABSTRACT

Evidence shows flipped learning increases academic performance and student satisfaction. Yet, often practitioners flip instruction but keep traditional curricula and assessment. Assessment in higher education is often via written exams. But these provide limited feedback and do not ask students to put knowledge into practice. This does not support the tenets of flipped learning. For two years, the author flipped instruction but retained traditional curricula and assessment. However, on the author’s current course, all three aspects were redesigned to better support flipped learning. The aim of this research is to test the effectiveness of this redesign regarding student engagement and satisfaction. Thus, it is asked: How, on this course, can meaningful, continuous assessment be provided as well as effective, personalized feedback, while staying in line with the philosophy of flipped learning? Action research took place from September 2016 to June 2017. Quantitative data from a student survey, and qualitative data from a research diary and student focus group were gathered. What emerged is: a little-and-often assessment approach is effective for learning and engagement; tasks must be authentic and test demonstration of knowledge, not memory; quality, not quantity, is key for student learning; and students desire individualized feedback.     

Course Factors that Motivate Students to Submit End-of-Course Evaluations

We surveyed students (N = 152) in several sections of an undergraduate educational psychology course to determine what course factors would most motivate them to submit course evaluations. The survey directed students to choose among several pairs of course characteristics as to their relative impact on their decision to submit a course evaluation. After tabulating their choices, we ranked the course characteristics for the total sample and then for various demographic and performance subgroups. In general, students indicated that positive aspects of a course would motivate them to submit course evaluations more than would negative aspects.     

Motivations and influences in Chinese international doctoral students’ decision for STEM study abroad

Despite China’s recent remarkable performance in high-quality research, the number of students going abroad to pursue doctoral degrees in STEM fields has been rising rapidly. This study investigates the motivations of Chinese international doctoral students (CIDS) in STEM fields for undertaking a PhD abroad, and the external factors influencing this major life decision. Based on in-depth interviews with 35 CIDS from seven universities in four Australian states, the findings show that for the current generation, enriching life experiences and self-cultivation emerged as most prominent personal motivations. The choice to study abroad, though ultimately a personal decision, was influenced by a range of factors and particularly long-term cooperation between host and home institutions. Both academic and personal reputation of supervisors played important roles in the selection of host institutions. This study may be of value to supervisors and higher education policy-makers, at institutional and government levels in all countries, whether “home” or “host”, invested in sustainable international doctoral education.     

Effectiveness of computerised spelling training in children with language impairments: a comparison of modified and unmodified speech input

This study evaluated a computerised program for training spelling in 8‐ to 13‐year‐olds with receptive language impairments. The training program involved children typing words corresponding to pictured items whose names were spoken. If the child made an error or requested help, the program gave phonological and orthographic cues to build up the word's spelling. Eleven children received this training with ordinary speech, and eleven had the same program but with speech modified to lengthen and amplify dynamic portions of the signal. Nine children were in an untrained control group. Trained children completed between 6 and 29 training sessions each of 15 minutes, at a rate of 3 to 5 sessions per week, with an average of over 1000 trials. Children were assessed before and after training. Trained children learned an average of 1.4 novel spellings per session. The trend was for children presented with modified speech to do less well than those trained with ordinary speech, regardless of whether they had auditory temporal processing impairments. Trained groups did not differ from the untrained control group in terms of gains made on standardised tests of spelling or word and nonword reading. This study confirms the difficulty of training literacy skills in children with severe language impairments. Individual words may be learned, but more general knowledge of rule‐based phonological skills is harder to acquire.     

Moral reasoning about school bullying in involved adolescents

The aim of the present study was to investigate how bullying incident participant roles and moral reasoning relate to each other in adolescents. To do so, we examined sociomoral judgments about hypothetical bullying incidents and moral disengagement in adolescents identified as bullies, defenders of the victim and passive bystanders. Six-hundred and twenty-six high school students (13- to 15-years-old) took part in this study and 131 were assigned a specific bullying incident participant role through peer nomination. Findings reveal that defenders of the victim show greater and more uniform moral sensibility than did both bullies and passive bystanders. Sociomoral reasoning helped differentiate between both bully subtypes (bully-leaders and bully-followers) and passive bystander beyond displaying greater moral disengagement than defenders did.     

Reimagining student employability: a case study of policy and practice transformation

ABSTRACT

Within Australian higher education, there has been an evolving of employability policy, realised in curriculum, at an intersection of the constructs of employment, work-readiness, life-long learning, and career development. The enactment of employability policy has driven an evolution in the practices of higher education in both curriculum and student support. This paper presents a case study of an Australian university which has reimagined the delivery of career and student support services through a framework that envisions preparing students for future worlds of work. The emergent policy framework has transformed organisational structures, human resources, and connections between student support practices and curriculum design. This transformation has generated new intersections of practice and is challenging institutional constructs of expertise. This case study provides transferrable learnings for broader considerations of higher education policy and practice as employability becomes the core driver of student success, and explores layered discourses of policymaking across an institution.     

The development of intruder attack in colonies of laboratory rats

Most attacks by rat colony members on strange intruders are made by a single dominant male. Such dominance, and the attack behaviors themselves, develop in a relatively fixed sequence over sessions with strange intruders. The entire sequence of attack on intruders occurs earlier in the intruder sessions for older rat colonies than in those for newly established colonies: conversely, more attack is seen in colonies with prior intruder experience than for intruder-naive colonies of equivalent age. Thus both experience within the colony and specific experience with strange intruders influence the rate of development of attack on intruders by dominant colony rats.