Young Children’s Representations of Spatial and Functional Relations Between Objects

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children’s (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity. Further experiments probed the sources of younger children’s difficulty by comparing children’s performance placing a target object in a hole, on a 2‐dimensional form, or atop another solid object. Together, the findings suggest that some factors limiting adults’ object representations, including the difficulty of comparing the shapes of positive and negative spaces and of representing shapes in 3 dimensions, contribute to young children’s errors in manipulating objects.     

Argumentative skills development in teaching philosophy to secondary school students through constructive controversy: an exploratory study case

The use of argumentative strategies that promote the defense of well-grounded personal arguments contributes to the development of a critical, ethical and political thought that leads to responsible and socially committed people. Based on the quality of the produced arguments in philosophical essays, this work evaluates the potential application of a cooperative learning method – the constructive controversy – for the development of argumentative skills in secondary school students in philosophy. The quality of the arguments was evaluated through the analysis of a total of 144 philosophical essays produced by the students over a school year. The results point to the advantages of using this method over more traditional ones in the acquisition of argumentative skills.     

Introducing Dialogic Teaching to Science Student Teachers

It is commonly believed that science teachers rely on language that allows only minor flexibility when it comes to taking into account contrasting views and pupil thoughts. Too frequently science teachers either pose questions that target predefined answers or simply lecture through lessons, a major concern from a sociocultural perspective. This study reports the experiences of science student teachers when introduced to the Communicative Approach to science education drawing on dialogic teacher-talk in addition to authoritative teacher-talk. This approach was introduced to the students in an interventional teaching program running parallel to the student teachers’ field practice. The practical implications of this approach during initial teacher education are the central focus of this study. The data consisting of videos of lessons and interviews indicate that the student teacher awareness of teacher-talk and alternative communicative options did increase. Student teachers reported greater awareness of the different functions of teacher-talk as well as the challenges when trying to implement dialogic teaching.     

Do we measure novelty when we analyze unusual combinations of cited references? A validation study of bibliometric novelty indicators based on F1000Prime data

Lee et al. (2015) – based on Uzzi et al. (2013) – and Wang et al. (2017) proposed scores based on cited references (cited journals) data which can be used to measure the novelty of papers (named as novelty scores U and W in this study). Although previous research has used novelty scores in various empirical analyses, no study has been published up to now – to the best of our knowledge – which quantitatively tested the convergent validity of novelty scores: do these scores measure what they propose to measure? Using novelty assessments by faculty members (FMs) at F1000Prime for comparison, we tested the convergent validity of the two novelty scores (U and W). FMs’ assessments do not only refer to the quality of biomedical papers, but also to their characteristics (by assigning certain tags to the papers): for example, are the presented findings or formulated hypotheses novel (tags “new findings” and “hypothesis”)? We used these and other tags to investigate the convergent validity of both novelty scores. Our study reveals different results for the novelty scores: the results for novelty score U are mostly in agreement with previously formulated expectations. We found, for instance, that for a standard deviation (one unit) increase in novelty score U, the expected number of assignments of the “new finding” tag increase by 7.47%. The results for novelty score W, however, do not reflect convergent validity with the FMs’ assessments: only the results for some tags are in agreement with the expectations. Thus, we propose – based on our results – the use of novelty score U for measuring novelty quantitatively, but question the use of novelty score W.     

Stimulus competition in the absence of compound conditioning

Most associative theories have assumed that stimulus competition occurs only between conditioned stimuli (CSs) that are trained in compound. The present research investigated the possibility of competition between two CSs that were individually paired to the same unconditioned stimulus (US). We used human subjects in an anticipatory suppression analogue to Pavlovian conditioning. Experiment 1 showed that X+ training followed by A+ training resulted in impaired responding to X. This did not occur when A+ training preceded X+ training. Experiment 2 replicated the basic effect and showed that it did not occur when the Phase 2 training consisted of A? instead of A+ nor when the A+ pairings occurred in a second context. Experiment 3 showed that A+ pairings occurring in a second context could still produce the effect when X was tested in the context in which the A+ pairings had occurred, but not when X was tested in a context different from that used for A+ training. Collectively, these results suggest that individually trained CSs may compete with each other when one of those CSs is more strongly activated by the test context than the other one.     

The evolution of student-coach’s pedagogical content knowledge in a combined use of sport education and the step-game-approach model*

Background: One of the essential elements within Sport Education is the inclusion of student roles and responsibilities. While previous research has examined students’ performance in officiating tasks, the examination of student-coaches’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) within peer-assisted tasks of Sport Education has been scarce. Indeed, the only study to date which has examined student-coach effectiveness was conducted by Wallhead and O’Sullivan [2007. “A Didactic Analysis of Content Development During the Peer Teaching Tasks of a Sport Education Season.”Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy 12 (3): 225–243]. In that study, student-coaches struggled to manifest PCK by providing appropriate demonstrations, to diagnose errors, or to modify tasks for higher order content development. The study of PCK may be a useful heuristic to examine instructional effectiveness in physical education.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the evolution of the PCK of a cohort of student-coaches across three hybrid Sport Education-Step Game Approach seasons, and to examine the impact of protocols put in place to specifically enhance coaches’ PCK.

Participants and setting: Twenty-one students and one teacher from a school class in the north of Portugal participated in the present study.

Method: Data from multiple sources were collected: (a) videotape observations of all lessons, (b) field notes, and (c) pre-lesson interviews with the student-coaches. These were then subjected to deductive examination through a process of thematic analysis.

Findings and conclusions: Following a baseline season that identified four key limitations within the student-coaches’ instruction (task presentation, error diagnosis, feedback, and task modification), these students participated in specific coach preparation that involved modelling teacher’s instruction, pre-lesson meetings, and coaches’ corners. While showing marked improvement in their content knowledge across the second season, a second protocol was instigated during the third that involved the student-coaches to participate in stimulated reflections of their instruction and the incorporation of planning sheets to enhance their instruction. It was found that both interventions were efficacious in developing student-coaches’ PCK, which allowed a more complete transfer of the instructional responsibility from the teacher to the students. These results give insight into the importance of including coach education protocols within the design of seasons of Sport Education with respect to student-coaches’ instructional preparation.     

Bidirectional associations

Associations are usually assumed to have only a predictive directionality, from Event 1 (E1) to Event 2 (E2). However, this unidirectionality, if it really exists, could be specific to the use of conditioned responses as the index of learning (i.e., conditioned responses are ordinarily elicited only when a conditioned stimulus [CS] predicts an unconditioned stimulus [US]). The present research used neutral stimuli, devoid of CS-US directionality, in order to test whether the underlying associative mechanism was unidirectional in nature. We used colors and figures as E1s and E2s. In Experiment 1, human subjects saw the events in the E1→E2 direction during training. In theconsistent group, the same E1 was always followed by the same E2; in theinconsistent group, E1s and E2s were paired randomly. In a subsequent test phase, we presented an E2 and subjects had to judge whether a particular E1 was associated with it. The judgments of the consistent group were higher than those of the inconsistent group, thereby suggesting that the association that the consistent subjects had learned was bidirectional. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed the results of Experiment 1 while controlling for some alternative interpretations based on the representation-mediated formation of associations.     

The Cultivation of Idealistic Moral Expectations: The Role of Television Exposure and Narrative Engageability

The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of how fictional television shapes people’s expectations about the moral workings of the real world, relying on cultivation theory and models of narrative and moral effects as theoretical frameworks. Using a cross-sectional sample of the general German adult population, this study investigated the relationship between television viewing time (overall television and three genres—crime drama, medical drama, sitcoms) and narrative engageability with three idealistic moral expectations (just world beliefs, professional altruism of doctors, tolerance of otherness). Although genre viewing was not related to idealistic moral expectations, overall television viewing and narrative engageability proved to have consistent positive relationships. Results indicate that television viewing, the audience’s eagerness to engage with narratives (narrative engageability), and moral expectations about the real world are intertwined and mutually dependent.