“Neuromyths”: A Critical Consideration

The term “neuromyth” is becoming part of discourse in the field of mind, brain, and education. In this article, I review some problematic aspects of the practice, critique specific examples, and propose an alternative way of communicating with the public about findings in psychology and neuroscience.     

Median measure: an approach to IR systems evaluation

In this paper results from three studies examining 1295 relevance judgments by 36 information retrieval (IR) system end-users is reported. Both the region of the relevance judgments, from non-relevant to highly relevant, and the motivations or levels for the relevance judgments are examined. Three major findings are studied. First, the frequency distributions of relevance judgments by IR system end-users tend to take on a bi-modal shape with peaks at the extremes (non-relevant/relevant) with a flatter middle range. Second, the different type of scale (interval or ordinal) used in each study did not alter the shape of the relevance frequency distributions. And third, on an interval scale, the median point of relevance judgment distributions correlates with the point where relevant and partially relevant items begin to be retrieved. The median point of a distribution of relevance judgments may provide a measure of user/IR system interaction to supplement precision/recall measures. The implications of investigation for relevance theory and IR systems evaluation are discussed.     

The “Datafication” of Teaching: Can Teachers Speak Back to the Numbers?

Teachers face considerable and increasing pressure in their working lives. Labor intensification compels teachers to work faster, harder, and longer. However, teachers also experience increasing external control over what they teach and how they teach. These processes are increasingly made possible by the “datafication” of teaching, whereby the educational process is increasingly transformed into numbers that allow measurement, comparison, and the functioning of high-stakes accountability systems linked to rewards and sanctions. Although there is no question that being able to use student assessment data to support learning has an important place in teachers' repertoire of skills, “datafication” refers to the use of data in a way that has become increasingly detached from supporting learning and is much more concerned with the management of teacher performance as an end in itself. This article presents two currents of critical thought in relation to teachers' work, labor process theory and poststructural analyses grounded in the concept of performativity, and discusses them as a way of “making sense” of teachers' work and the “datafication” of teaching, with a particular focus on questions of control and resistance.

?It seeks to understand why, despite the pressures on teachers, teacher resistance has seldom developed in ways, at times, or on a scale that both experience and theoretical insight might have predicted. There are clearly significant differences between the two perspectives presented in this article, not least in the ways they conceptualize and explain “resistance.” However, common ground is identifiable and the two theoretical approaches can be bridged in a form that can be productive for those seeking to “speak back to the numbers.” In looking to broker this theoretical divide, I argue that frame theory, rooted within the sociology of social movements, can offer a fruitful way of theory bridging, while also providing the basis for a wider politics of transformation. The article offers several examples of grassroots initiatives formed to oppose standardized testing in England that provide practical examples of this “ideas work” in action.     

Perspectives on the future of educational technology

This study was conducted to determine the opinions of a broad-based sample of educational technology professionals and students about the future of our field. A nationwide sample of 268 university personnel (faculty members, doctoral students, and master's students) and trainers completed a Likert-type survey that contained 30 items covering six topic areas: Educational Technology and Learning Theory, Instructional Design Models, Technology and Individualized Instruction, Advances in Technology, Educational Technology and Schools, and Employment and Job Opportunities. The overall results reveal that educational technologists have a positive outlook toward the future of our field. Opinions were most positive in the areas of Educational Technology and Learning Theory, Employment and Job Opportunities, and Technology and Individualized Instruction, and were least positive in the area of Advances in Technology. There were numerous significant differences of opinion on individual items across the four respondent groups, with the greatest number of differences occurring between faculty members and master's students.     

On the Relative Value of Multiple-Choice, Constructed Response, and Examinee-Selected Items on Two Achievement Tests

Using analyses based on fitting item response models to data from the College Board's Advanced Placement exams in chemistry and United States history, we found that the constructed response portion of the tests yielded little information over and above that provided by the multiple-choice sections. These tests also allow examinees to select subsets of the constructed response items; we found that scoring on the basis of the selections themselves provided almost as much information as did scoring on the basis of the answers     

Self-presentation bias in surveys of teachers’ educational technology practices

This study investigated self-presentation bias in the self-reports of teachers about their practices in six topic areas in educational technology (Instructional Design, Assessment, Learner-Centered Instruction, Curriculum Alignment, Attitudes about Computers, and Use of Computers with Students). Subjects were 50 middle-school teachers. Data were collected using a 30-item Likert-type survey containing five items per topic area. Teachers responded to items in two forms: “what I do” and “what other teachers do.” Significant differences favoring the “I” form were obtained in three of the six areas (Instructional Design, Learner-Centered Instruction, and Curriculum Alignment) and on nine of the 30 items, indicating a rather strong self-presentation bias. Responses were generally positive across both forms. Results are discussed with implications for working with teachers and for using additional assessment measures that complement teacher self-reports.     

Asian Indian American Children's Creative Writing: An Approach for Cultural Preservation

Many children from diverse cultures experience disconnectedness between their home and school. As they attempt to reconcile the conflicts among their multiple worlds, they must negotiate their situatedness in a variety of contexts, i.e., home community versus school, and construct a multifaceted identity. Absent support from school, Asian Indian American adolescents engage in acts of cultural preservation (CP), which, in turn, support their scholastic achievement. This article explores the thematic content of a group of Asian Indian American children's creative writing generated for the Kahani Project—a culturally contextualized version of Writers’ Workshop. In their texts, the six adolescents discuss the importance of their cultural traditions as tools to contest the various micro-aggressions they experience in school. Data from this study argue for cultural inclusion, not only for those at risk, but also for those students who successfully navigate a mainstream curriculum.     

Repeated successive contrast in consummatory behavior with repeated shifts in sucrose concentration

Contrast in consummatory behavior was investigated following repeated shifts from 32% to 4% sucrose. In Experiment 1, contrast in licking and in open-field measures of activity occurred following the second and third downshifts. In Experiments 2a and 2b, equivalent contrast effects occurred following the first and second downshifts in sucrose. In Experiment 3, negative contrast remained unabated following nine downshifts in animals shifted between 32% and 4% sucrose on alternate days. Similar results were found for five downshifts in animals shifted every 2 days. In both of these latter conditions, positive contrast occurred over the first few shifts and was then lost as the 32% control group reached asymptote. These data show that repeated negative contrast effects in consummatory behavior are robust and enduring and occur under several different sets of experimental parameters. The results are discussed in terms of reinforcement level and emotional interpretations of contrast effects, and the possibility was suggested that the causal mechanism of contrast changes with repeated shifts.     

Group psychotherapy for adult women mistreated as children by pathological mothers

In this paper, group psychotherapy for adult women having similar backgrounds of abusive, pathological mothers is described. The goals of the group included: providing a support system to help the members cope with their destructive mothers, helping them to recognize how the conflictual relationship with their mothers generalized to other conflictual relationships particularly with abusive men, and helping the members to increase their behavioral repertoire for coping with their mothers' illogical and unreasonable demands. Unlike most treatment groups which take considerable time to develop trusting relationships, intimacy and cohesiveness among group members, the women in this group developed almost instant solidarity. This appeared due to their having a common bond based on sharing equally traumatic backgrounds and on their attraction to men as abusive to them as their mothers. Prior to the group, they felt that no one (including the individual therapist) could understand what their lives had been like. The solidarity in this group grew more intense with time which permitted deeper investigation of topics such as fear of unworthiness, closeness, and abandonment. Findings from a self-report questionnaire suggested that three of the five group members had achieved significant improvements in coping with their troublesome relationships with pathological mothers and abusive men. These three members attributed their gains to their new coping behaviors learned in group, the group's supportive environment, and the group's permission to examine fully the range of feelings they harbored toward their mothers and themselves.