What if best practice is too expensive? Feedback on oral presentations and efficient use of resources

We evaluate feedback methods for oral presentations used in training non-quantitative research skills (literature review and various associated tasks). Training is provided through a credit-bearing module taught to MSc students of banking, economics and finance in the UK. Monitoring oral presentations and providing ‘best practice’ feedback is very resource-intensive. Do we withdraw oral presentations from the module, because best feedback practice is prohibitively expensive in a world of limited resources, or choose a second-best alternative? To what extent might the latter compromise intended learning outcomes? We used the same provision of video feedback for all students but used two verbal feedback regimes. For one regime, we decreased the amount of verbal feedback and increased the number of presentations. The impact was measured by academic outcome, rating scales and questionnaire. Overall satisfaction with the module was very high for both feedback regimes, and there were no statistically significant differences between regimes, suggesting that less resource-intensive methods need not compromise learning outcomes.     

Can Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders “Hear” a Speaking Face?

This study used eye-tracking methodology to assess audiovisual speech perception in 26 children ranging in age from 5 to 15 years, half with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and half with typical development. Given the characteristic reduction in gaze to the faces of others in children with ASD, it was hypothesized that they would show reduced influence of visual information on heard speech. Responses were compared on a set of auditory, visual, and audiovisual speech perception tasks. Even when fixated on the face of the speaker, children with ASD were less visually influenced than typical development controls. This indicates fundamental differences in the processing of audiovisual speech in children with ASD, which may contribute to their language and communication impairments.     

Re-bordering spaces of trauma: auto-ethnographic reflections on the immigrant and refugee experience in an inner-city high school in Toronto

The objective of this research study is to offer a glimpse into the lives of some newly-arrived students of different racial, linguistic and religious backgrounds as they confront the process of immigration and therefore personal and social displacement within the context of a Toronto inner-city high school. These students carry with them hidden but enduring scars that influence all aspects of their educational lives. In many cases their experience is steeped in trauma. Using auto-ethnographic methodology, this research is devoted to giving voice to these students who inhabit a space filled with suffering and loss but also resilience and cautious hope. If we really care about these vulnerable students in our classrooms, we must rethink and reshape our understanding of teaching and learning that is more fundamentally linked to the lived experiences of students coming from places of war and other oppressions. These issues are crucial for the future of nation-building and citizenship education in pluralistic Western societies such as Canada, both in and out of school.     

Internal and external focus of attention in a novice form sport

In the current experiment, we examined optimal focus for novices during a movement sequence in which performance was measured on accurate movement form/technique. A novel gymnastics routine was practiced under either an internal skill-relevant, internal skill-irrelevant, external, or no attention focus. Retention and transfer tests were then completed. During acquisition, adopting an internal irrelevant focus significantly improved performance, whereas an external focus degraded performance. There were no significant group differences in the retention and transfer tests. This suggests that learning of movement form/technique did not benefit from a specific focus of attention. The results are interpreted via an attentional capacity viewpoint and the notion that form tasks do not always contain obvious movement effects central to common coding and the constrained action hypothesis.