Focus on the finish line: does high-impact practice participation influence career plans and early job attainment?

High-impact practices (HIPs) are important co-curricular educational experiences in post-secondary education, as they promote learning, development, and persistence among students. The goal of this study was to extend the research on HIPs to explore potential connections with HIP participation and career outcomes. Using data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, this study explores whether HIP participation influences college seniors’ post-graduation plans for career and further education and whether HIP participation has a positive impact on early job attainment for these students. Results suggest that even after controlling for a variety of demographic and institutional factors, HIP participation is a significant predictor of future career plans and early job attainment. HIP participation can give students a career-related advantage through transferable skill development, engaging in learning opportunities, and generating “stories” for potential employers.     

Australian school practices and the education experiences of students with a refugee background: a review of the literature

Schools have the potential for significant impact on the lives of Australian students with a refugee background. Many of these young people speak at least one language other than English, have previous histories of interrupted schooling or have experienced trauma during times of displacement and forced migration. Combined with the further challenges of settling within an unfamiliar cultural frame, these students experience a range of circumstances which are not present for many of their Australian-born peers. Australian students with a refugee background have diverse skill and abilities, with many showing independence and resilience. Opportunities for academic learning and development of social capital within the school context can be enhanced with relevant pedagogy and policy which draws upon and highlights the positive individual qualities that these students exhibit. Australian school practices are shaped by both state and federal education policies, which are interpreted and applied by individual schools within their own frameworks. This review considers recent literature on the experiences of Australian students with a refugee background as they participate in schooling, with a focus on the ways in which schools provide either opportunities or barriers to engagement.     

Learning Neuroscience with Technology: a Scaffolded,Active Learning Approach

Mobile applications (apps) for learning technical scientific content are becoming increasingly popular in educational settings. Neuroscience is often considered complex and challenging for most students to understand conceptually. iNeuron is a recently developed iOS app that teaches basic neuroscience in the context of a series of scaffolded challenges to create neural circuits and increase understanding of nervous system structure and function. In this study, four different ways to implement the app within a classroom setting were explored. The goal of the study was to determine the app’s effectiveness under conditions closely approximating real-world use and to evaluate whether collaborative play and student-driven navigational features contributed to its effectiveness. Students used the app either individually or in small groups and used a version with either a fixed or variable learning sequence. Student performance on a pre- and post-neuroscience content assessment was analyzed and compared between students who used the app and a control group receiving standard instruction, and logged app data were analyzed. Significantly, greater learning gains were found for all students who used the app compared to control. All four implementation modes were effective in producing student learning gains relative to controls, but did not differ in their effectiveness to one another. In addition, students demonstrated transfer of information learned in one context to another within the app. These results suggest that teacher-led neuroscience instruction can be effectively supported by a scaffolded, technology-based curriculum which can be implemented in multiple ways to enhance student learning.     

Local context and the comparator hypothesis

“Comparator” accounts of associative conditioning (e.g., Gibbon & Balsam, 1981; Miller & Matzel, 1988) suggest that performance to a Pavlovian CS is determined, by a comparison of the US expectancy of the CS with the US expectancy of general background cues. Recent research indicates that variation in the excitatory value of cues in the local temporal context of a CS may have a profound impact on conditioned responding to the CS (e.g., Kaplan & Hearst, 1982), implicating US expectancy based on local, rather than overall, background cues as the critical comparator term for a CS. In two experiments, an excitatory training context attenuated responding to a target CS. In Experiment 1, the context was made excitatory by interspersing unsignaled USs with target CS-US trials. In this case, posttraining extinction of the conditioning context restored responding to the target CS. In Experiment 2, the target CS’s local context was made excitatory by the placement of excitatory “cover” stimuli in the immediate temporal proximity of each target CS-US trial. In this experiment, posttraining extinction of the proximal cover stimuli, not extinction of the conditioning context alone, restored responding to the target CS. An observation from both experiments was that signaling the otherwise unsignaled USs did not appear to influence the associative value of the conditioning context. The results are discussed in relation to a local context version of the comparator hypothesis and serve to emphasize the importance of local context cues in the modulation of acquired behavior. Taken together with other recent reports (e.g., Cooper, Aronson, Balsam, & Gibbon, 1990; Schachtman & Reilly, 1987), the present observations encourage contemporary comparator theories to reevaluate which aspects of the conditioning situation comprise the CS’s comparator term.     

The Struggle for Early Childhood Curricula: A comparison of the English Foundation Stage Curriculum,Te Wha¨riki and Reggio Emilia

Parents, teachers, researchers and politicians often have strong and conflicting views about what is right for young children in the years before school. Curricula can become 'sites of struggle' between ideas about what early childhood education is for, and what are appropriate content and contexts for learning and development in early childhood. This paper focuses upon the way visions for early childhood are expressed through the curricula offered in three very different contexts--in England, New Zealand and Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy. These three examples of early childhood curricula are compared in order to explore how a growing pressure from vocational and instrumental influences can impact on progressive and socioculturally inspired early childhood curricula and approaches. A comparison of these examples also reveals how early childhood curricula and educational systems are often forged amidst differing contexts in relation to national and local control of early childhood curricula and approaches. These differing contexts can also give rise to differing conceptualisations of knowledge, learning and pedagogy. Des professeurs, des chercheurs et des politiciens ont souvent des vues fortes et contradictoires au sujet de ce qui est bon pour les jeunes enfants dans les anne´es avant l'e´cole. Les programmes d'e´tudes peuvent devenir 'des sites de lutte' entre les ide´es au sujet du but de la premie ¤ re e´ducation d'enfance, et au sujet du contenu et des contextes pertinents a ¤ l'apprentissage et le de´veloppement dans la petite enfance. Cet article se focalise sur la manie ¤ re que des visions pour la petite enfance sont exprime´es par les programmes d'e´tudes offerts en trois contextes tre ¤ s diffe´rents--en Angleterre, Nouvelle-Ze´lande et Reggio Emilia dans l'Italie Septentrionale. Ces trois exemples des programmes d'e´tudes de la petite enfance sont compare´s afin d'explorer comment une pression croissante des influences professionnelles et instrumentales peut faire une forte impression sur les programmes d'e´tudes et des approches progressifs et inspire´s par des approches socioculturels. Une comparaison de ces exemples re´ve ¤ le aussi comment les programmes d'e´tudes de la petite enfance et les syste ¤ mes d'e´ducation sont souvent forge´s parmi des contextes diffe´rents par rapport au controle national et local de programmes d'e´tudes sur la premie ¤ re enfance et des approches diffe´rents. Ces contextes qui diffe ¤ rent peuvent engendrer aussi conceptualisations qui diffe ¤ rent sur la connaissance, l'apprentissage et la pe´dagogie. Los padres, los profesores, los investigadores y los poli´ticos tienen a menudo visiones fuertes y en conflicto sobre lo que es correcto para los nin ¨ os pequen ¨ os en los an ¨ os que preceden a la escuela. Los planes de estudios pueden convertirse en "sitios de lucha" entre las ideas sobre el propo´sito de la educacio´n preescolar y sobre cuales son el contenido y contextos apropiados para aprender y para el desarrollo en la primera infancia. Este arti´culo se centra sobre la manera que las visiones para la nin ¨ ez temprana son expresadas a trave´s de los planes de estudios ofrecidos en tres contextos muy diversos--en Inglaterra, Nueva Zelanda y en Reggio Emilia en el norte de Italia. Estos tres ejemplos de los planes de estudios de la nin ¨ ez temprana se comparan para explorar co´mo una presio´n cada vez mayor de influencias vocacionales e instrumentales puede afectar los planes de estudios y acercamientos metodolo´gicos progresistas e inspirados por tendencias socioculturales. Una comparacio´n de estos ejemplos tambie´n revela co´mo los planes de estudios de la nin ¨ ez temprana y los sistemas educativos se forjan a menudo en medio de contextos divergentes en lo referente al control nacional y local de los planes de estudios y de los acercamientos metodolo´gicos sobre la nin ¨ ez temprana. Estos contextos divergentes pueden tambie´n dar lugar a conceptualizaciones divergentes del conocimiento, del aprendizaje y de la pedagogi´a.     

The importance of vowel diacritics for reading in Hebrew: What can be learned from readers with prelingual deafness?

This study investigates the importance of voweldiacritics for the reading of Hebrew inindividuals with different levels ofphonological control. A paradigm calling forwritten ordered-recall of 12 lists of 8consecutively displayed Hebrew nouns was usedas a test tool. Item presentation andbetween-item interval were computer-controlled.Half of the nouns on the lists were presentedwith vowel diacritics designating their vowels.The remaining nouns appeared with their voweldiacritics removed. Thirty-nine hearingstudents (mean grade 6.5) and twenty-seven students withprelingual deafness (mean grade 6.9)participated in the experiment. Analyses of thegroups' recall rate, recall-order accuracy, andintrusion error rate indicate that, overall,adding vowel diacritics had a facilitatingeffect on the participants' quantitative andqualitative STM performance. Fine-tunedpost-hoc examinations further suggest thatproviding vowel diacritics may be particularlyworthwhile for Hebrew readers with impoverishedreading skills. These findings are discussedwith regard to their implications for thereading of Hebrew.     

The influence of shock during response prevention upon resistance to extinction of an avoidance response

A recent study found that avoidance extinction is equally facilitated by response prevention (blocking) whether the latter involves CS-alone or CS-shock presentations. An experiment was performed to determine whether this result was due to the use of a lengthy shock (5 sec) during response prevention. Five groups of rats were extinguished: (1) without prior blocking, (2) after blocking with CS only, (3) after blocking with a lengthy (5 sec) CS-contingent shock, (4) after blocking with a brief (.5 sec) CS-contingent shock, or (5) after blocking with a brief (.5 sec) shock only. The group blocked with the brief CS-contingent shock was substantially more resistant to extinction than the other four groups. The unblocked group and the group blocked with brief shock only required more trials to extinguish than the groups blocked with CS only or with lengthy CS-contingent shock, but did not differ from each other. The groups blocked with CS only or with lengthy CS-contingent shock also failed to differ from one another. The data support a significant role for Pavlovian conditioning processes in the effect of response prevention upon avoidance extinction.     

Serial learning,interitem associations,phrasing cues,interference, overshadowing,chunking, memory,and extinction

Two experiments indicated that two approaches to serial learning are too extreme—the classical view that it consists only of interitem associations and various recent views that it involves no interitem associations. The novel assumption introduced here was that phrasing cues, normally conceptualized as merely segregating long series into smaller units or chunks, may also enter into associations with items, thereby reducing interitem interference and facilitating serial learning. It was found that one item could become a signal for another item, an interitem association, or be overshadowed by a phrasing cue, such as a brightness and temporal cue, also signaling that item. The items were .045-g pellets. Rats traversed a runway for items arranged in ordered series, 14-7-3-1-0 pellets (Experiment 1) or 10-2-0-10 (Experiment 2). Complete tracking of, for example, the 10-2-0-10 series would consist of fastest running to 10 pellets and slowest running to 0 pellets. In both investigations, the interitem association overshadowed was that between 0 pellets and the subsequent rewarded item, 0 → 14 (Experiment 1) or 0 → 10 (Experiment 2). Either repetitions of the 14-7-3-1-0 subpattern (Experiment 1) or merely the terminal 10-pellet item (Experiment 2) were phrased, both methods producing identical results. Overshadowing the 0-pellet item produced superior serial learning, more rapid extinction, and, in Experiment 1, considerable elevation of responding when the brightness phrasing cue was introduced in extinction, an effect said to be conceptually identical to spontaneous recovery and one demonstrating directly that phrasing cues are in reality overshadowing cues. It was suggested that many effects attributed to forgetting may be due to unrecognized overshadowing of memory cues by phrasing cues, giving rise to exaggerated estimates of forgetting.