Returning to the Mainstream

Grahame Smith, now deputy head, English Faculty, Barstable School, Basildon, Essex, and Rod Goldthorpe, deputy head, Lankhills School for pupils with moderate learning difficulties, Winchester, Hampshire, prepared the following discussion paper during a weekly teaching exchange designed to give each an insight into the challenges of the other's work.     

Effects of Feedback on the Academic Engaged Time of Behaviour Disordered Learners

Abstract This study investigated the relative effects of different combinations of feedback on the behaviours of two subjects labelled ‘behaviour disordered’. In addition, the relationship between academic engaged behaviour and performance (assessed by measures of amount completed and accuracy) was also analysed. The results revealed that there was a positive relationship between the amount of time a subject spends on task and the number of tasks completed. In addition, the results showed that there was not a positive relationship between the amount of time a student spends on a task and accuracy on that task. The relative effectiveness of the feedback procedures was substantiated. The implications of these results were that the provision of feedback when a subject is off‐task will be most effective in terms of increasing the subject's on‐task behaviour and the amount of tasks that the subject completed. This research demonstrated that increased on‐task behaviour has positive effects on productivity.     

Trial spacing effects in pavlovian conditioning: A role for local context

Two conditioned lick-suppression experiments with rats were conducted in order to replicate and extend findings by Ewing, Larew, and Wagner (1985). Ewing et al. observed that excitatory responding to a CS paired with a footshock US was attenuated when the ITIs thatpreceded each CS-US trial were short (60 sec) relative to when they were long (600 sec). This effect was isolated in the influence of the preceding ITI because the preceding ITI was consistently short for one CS and consistently long for a different CS, while the following ITIs were equally often short and long for both CSs. Ewing et al. interpreted this finding in the framework of Wagner’s (1981) SOP model. Experiment 1 replicated this trial-spacing effect and demonstrated a similar effect under conditions in which thefollowing ITI was consistently short for one CS and consistently long for a different CS, while the durations of preceding ITIs were equally often short and long for both CSs. Experiment 2 revealed that the detrimental effect of a short preceding or a short following ITI could be alleviated by extinguishing the conditioning context after CS-US training. The latter observation indicates that the trial-spacing effect is not mediated by a failure of a CS trained with a short ITI to enter into excitatory associations with the US, a conclusion that is not wholly consistent with the SOP model. Finally, we suggest that short pretrial and short posttrial ITIs may enhance the excitatory value of local context cues that modulate responding to a CS.     

Higher order occasion setting

Higher order occasion setting with serially presented stimuli was investigated in an appetitively motivated, discrete-trial operant study with rats. Reinforcement of barpressing during an occasion-setting light (a discriminative stimulus) was contingent on immediately preceding second-order occasion setters (i.e., a click train or a buzzer served as a conditional discriminative stimulus). Moreover, the meanings of the clicks and buzzer were themselves indicated by a third-order occasion setter that preceded them (i.e., a white noise acted as a second-order conditional discriminative stimulus). Subjects responded more frequently and had shorter latencies to the first response in the presence of the light on trials during which barpressing was reinforced than on trials during which barpressing was not reinforced. The likelihood that the subjects solved the problem by responding to unique compound stimuli was minimized by the insertion of a 5-sec gap between the different controlling stimuli presented on each trial. Thus, these subjects appear to have mastered a second-order conditional discrimination, which is equivalent to third-order occasion setting if the discriminative stimulus (light) is viewed as a first-order occasion setter. Although the subjects learned to respond appropriately to each of the compound stimuli, differences in responding to specific stimuli were consistent with a higher order feature-positive effect. Some implications of higher order occasion setting are discussed, including the issue of independence between the different levels of occasion setting signaled by a single stimulus.     

STUDENTS' APPROACHES TO LEARNING AND SATISFACTION WITH PROBLEM‐BASED CURRICULA FOR FOUR DIFFERENT PROFESSIONS

This research looked at students' satisfaction with, and changes in approach to, learning during their first year in problem‐based curricula for agriculture, architecture, medicine and paramedicine. While students at each school showed little change in approach apart from achievement orientation in the six‐month period after entry to the course, there were different patterns of approach at each school. Satisfaction with their respective schools was uniformly high — notably in terms of their emotional climate, supportiveness, student and teacher interaction, and meaningful learning experiences. Correlations between students' approach to learning and degree of satisfaction with their course strongly support earlier claims and research findings on the merits of problem‐based curricula, although they still need more careful definition to be useful to curriculum planners.     

Curricular strategies for reducing examination anxiety

Considerable stress is associated with undergraduate examinations. Traditional medical schools appear to regard such stress as inevitable and expect students to cope with their anxieties. The Newcastle medical school decided to develop curricular strategies for preventing (or at least reducing) such anxieties, rather than adopt medical or psychological treatment methods for students who subsequently appear unable to cope. Students and staff recommended changes to the original assessment programme after it had operated for four terms. This article reviews the changes and reports on students' greater satisfaction with them and the Newcastle medical school's attitude towards programme improvement. Suggestions are made for a more open, educational approach to student assessment by other learning institutions.     

Continuing Thoughts on Social Networking

A comprehensive meta-analysis of the research following Glass, McGraw, and Smith's (1981) technique integrated findings from twenty-five comparative studies from 1990 to 2003 targeting student achievement and distance education in allied health professions. Student achievement was assessed through course grades and resulted in an overall effect size of 0.15, a very small positive effect for distance learners when compared to traditional students. Several dependent variables—education levels, models of distance education, and instructional design components—related to the effect size. In the distance education setting, working professional students significantly outperformed graduate and undergraduate students. Open learning and synchronous instruction were the most effective distance education models of instruction. Instructional design components implemented into a distance education course resulted in greater student achievement scores.