Gender differences in motivation and strategy use in science: Are girls rote learners?

This study explored Ridley and Novak's (1983) hypothesis that gender differences in science achievement are due to differences in rote and meaningful learning modes. To test this hypothesis, we examined gender differences in fifth- and sixth-grade students' (N = 213) self-reports of confidence, motivation goals (task mastery, ego, and work avoidance), and learning strategies (active and superficial) in whole-class and small-group science lessons. Overall, the results revealed few gender differences. Compared with girls, boys reported greater confidence in their science abilities. Average-achieving girls reported greater use of meaningful learning strategies than did their male counterparts, whereas low-ability boys reported a stronger mastery orientation than did low-ability girls. The results further showed that students report greater confidence and mastery motivation in small-group than whole-class lessons. In contrast, students reported greater work avoidance in whole-class than small-group lessons. In general, the findings provide little support for Ridley and Novak's hypothesis that girls tend to engage in rote-level learning in science classes. Differences in self-reports of motivation and strategy-use patterns were more strongly related to the student's ability level and to the structure of learning activities (small group vs. whole class) than to gender. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Violence and the changing universe of disabilities

The field of special education has primary responsibility for providing specialized services to young children with disabilities in the schools. Increasingly, it is recognized that many disabilities identified among young children may be attributable to environmental variables, such as violence, poverty, toxic materials exposure, and family dysfunction. Issues of violence hold particular relevance for special education professionals. Recent studies report that young children with disabilities are 1.7 times more likely to be victims of maltreatment than children without disabilities. For children with disabilities living with the effects of violence, the infrastructure of special education as it is now developing may be the most promising approach to individual and systems intervention. Comprehensive community-based initiatives are replacing fragmented practices. The new collaborations can multiply the results of intervention or support programs beyond those attainable through any single approach. Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect policies of the U.S. Department of Education.     

Two-choice conditional discrimination performance of pigeons as a function of reward expectancy,prechoice delay,and domesticity

In a discrete-trial two-choice conditional discrimination task, pigeons which received food for a correct choice following the presentation of one cue and water for a correct choice following another cue performed better than pigeons which received food and water equally often in both cases when delays of several seconds intervened between the conditional cue and choice stimuli presentations. These results suggest that feedback properties of reinforcer-specific expectancies can be important in conditional discrimination learning in pigeons. An additional finding was that wild-caught pigeons regularly exhibited a higher percentage of correct choices than domestic subjects.     

The origin and development of a concept: the information society

The constructs that underlie a discipline are complex and often times uncertain. It is argued that the ways in which we perceive and conceptualize are influenced by our habits of mind and our view of the world. This paper traces the concept of the "Information Society" from its inception in the discipline of economics through its development and its subsequent diffusion to the field of information science.     

Centralization vs. decentralization in medical school libraries

Does the medical school library in the United States operate more commonly under the university library or the medical school administration? University-connected medical school libraries were asked to indicate (a) the source of their budgets, whether from the central library or the medical school, and (b) the responsibility for their acquisitions and cataloging. Returns received from sixtyeight of the seventy eligible institutions showed decentralization to be much the most common: 71 percent of the libraries are funded by their medical schools; 79 percent are responsible for their own acquisitions and processing. The factor most often associated with centralization of both budget and operation is public ownership. Decentralization is associated with service to one or two rather than three or more professional schools. Location of the medical school in a different city from the university is highly favorable to autonomy. Other factors associated with these trends are discussed.