Maximizing Learning From Engaging Across Difference: The Role of Anxiety and Meaning Making

This study explores college students’ reactions to engaging in experiences with diverse others that students found uncomfortable, interactions that disrupted students’ current beliefs or values. Our examination of these experiences was grounded in theory and research on intergroup contact and anxiety and developmental models of self-authorship leading to intercultural maturity. We found three types of reactions to these experiences: Some students were “stuck,” unsure of how to respond; some were prone to continue exploring; and some reframed their perspectives to reflect capacities associated with advanced intercultural maturity. We offer recommendations for managing intergroup anxiety and scaffolding learning to support reframing one's perspectives to maximize learning from engaging in difference.     

IMPACTS OF 2‐YEAR AND 4‐YEAR COLLEGES ON LEARNING ORIENTATIONS: A PRELIMINARY STUDY

This investigation compared the impacts of 2‐year and 4‐year colleges on learning orientations. Controlling for precollege learning orientations, academic aptitude, age, work, place of residence, and enrollment status, this study found no significant differences between 2‐ and 4‐year students in freshman‐year effects on enjoyment of diversity and intellectual challenge, learning for self‐understanding, internal locus of attribution for academic success, and preference for higher order cognitive activities. The findings are consistent with other recent evidence casting doubt on major differences in the net educational effects of 2‐ and 4‐year colleges.     

How the instructional and learning environments of liberal arts colleges enhance cognitive development

This study analyzes longitudinal data from 17 four-year institutions in the United States to determine how the distinctive instructional and learning environment of American liberal arts colleges accounts for the positive impact of liberal arts college attendance on four-year growth in critical thinking skills and need for cognition. We find that, net of important confounding influences, attending an American liberal arts college (vs. a research university or a regional institution in the United States) increases one’s overall exposure to clear and organized classroom instruction and enhances one’s use of deep approaches to learning. In turn, clear and organized classroom instruction and deep approaches to learning tend to facilitate growth in both critical thinking and need for cognition—thus indirectly transmitting the impact of attending a liberal arts college.     

An Analysis of the New York State Regents Examinations in Chemistry from 1927 to 1934

Gibbons and Chakraborti's (1991) interpretation of recent simulation results and their recommendations to researchers are misleading in some respects. The present note emphasizes that the Mann-Whitney test is not a suitable replacement of the Student t test when variances and sample sizes are unequal, irrespective of whether the assumption of normality is satisfied or violated. When both normality and homogeneity of variance are violated together, an effective procedure, not widely known to researchers in education and psychology, is the Fligner-Policello test or, alternatively, the Welch t' test in conjunction with transformation of the original scores to ranks.     

Stammering is outgrown

This essay demonstrates that a speech of accusation motivates a response in a speech of defense and that both should be treated as a rhetorical speech set. The author uses Fisher's motives of affirmation and purification, Bitzer's conception of the rhetorical situation, and the Classical schema of stasis to explicate the speech set. He offers Pope Leo X vs. Martin Luther as an illustrative example.     

Perception of stammering

ANTON CHEKHOV: THE CHERRY ORCHARD. Translated by Tyrone Guthrie and Leonid Kipnis. (Minnesota Drama Editions.) Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1965; pp. 126. Paper $1.00.

ANTON CHEKHOV: THE CHERRY ORCHARD. Translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. Critical material selected and introduced by Henry Popkin. (The Avon Theater Library.) New York: Avon Books, 1965; pp. 191+unpaged Bibliography. Paper $0.50.

ANTON CHEKHOV: PLATONOV, A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS AND FIVE SCENES. Translated by David Magarshack. (A Mermaid Dramabook.) New York: Hill &; Wang, 1966: pp. 195. $4.50.

ANTON CHEKHOV: THE THREE SISTERS. Translated by Tyrone Guthrie and Leonid Kipnis. Critical material selected and introduced by Henry Popkin. (The Avon Theater Library.) New York: Avon Books, 1965; pp. 175+unpaged Bibliography. Paper $0.50.

CHEKHOV: THE MAJOR PLAYS; IVANOV, THE SEA GULL, UNCLE VANYA, THE THREE SISTERS, THE CHERRY ORCHARD. Translated by Ann Dunnigan. Foreword by Robert Brustein. (A Signet Classic.) New York: The New American Library of World Literature, 1964; pp. xxii+380+un‐paged Bibliography. Paper §0.60.

THE OXFORD CHEKHOV, VOLUME III: UNCLE VANYA, THREE SISTERS, THE CHERRY ORCHARD, THE WOOD‐DEMON. Translated and edited by Ronald Hingley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964; pp. xix+343. $10.00.

TEN EARLY PLAYS BY CHEKHOV. Translated with an Introduction by Alex Szogyi. (A Bantam Classic.) New York: Bantam Books, 1965; pp. 314. Paper $0.95.     

Speech and occupational needs

DEMOCRACY AND DISAGREEMENT. By Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996; pp. viii + 422. $27.95; paper $16.95.

THE MILD VOICE OF REASON: DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY AND AMERICAN NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. By Joseph M. Bessette. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994; pp. xvi + 289. $32.50; paper $15.95.

NORMS OF RHETORICAL CULTURE. By Thomas B. Farrell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993; pp. x + 374. Paper $18.00.

PUBLIC DELIBERATION: PLURALISM, COMPLEXITY, AND DEMOCRACY. By James Bohman. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996; xi + 303. $30.00.     

A Comparison of Dome and Computer Planetaria in the Teaching of Astronomy

The learning of pupils from Years 5 and 6 (9-and 10-year-olds) when taught with the aid of dome and computer planetaria was investigated. The two kinds of planetarium were found to be equally effective, although the learning was confined to female pupils. It is suggested that the use of planetaria might enable females to catch up with males in areas of astronomy which make heavy demands on spatial ability. Substantial learning also took place in the pre-service education students who led the planetaria sessions.     

Teaching Students to Infer Meaning Through Material Culture

Social studies students can learn to glean historical information from the study of material culture through active engagement as curators. Teachers can guide students through a pre-survey of helpful reading materials and then through selecting items of personal significance to them: creating labels that objectively describe the chosen items as to origin, composition, background, and provenance; exchanging the created sets of file cards; examining the cards received in the exchange; inferring factual information about the owner of the selected items; and sharing deductions with the class. From this exercise, students will have a chance to learn how historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists use critical thinking in their work, how much can be learned from material culture, and how missteps can result from overtheorizing.     

Significant Evidence

The purpose of this column is to keep religious educators abreast of the relevant significant research in the general field of psychology. Its implications for methods and materials in religious education are clear. Religious educators may well take advantage of every new finding in scientific research.

Each abstract or group is preceded by an evaluation and interpretative comment, which aims to guide the reader in understanding the research reported.

All of these abstracts are from PSYCHOLOGICAL ABSTRACTS, and used by permission of that periodical, the abstract number is Volume 28, Nos. 1‐2, January‐February, 1954.