Systemizing and the gender gap: examining academic achievement and perseverance in STEM

For years, a popular explanation for women choosing to abandon studies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has been their lack of aptitude. This study challenged that notion by integrating theories of cognitive style, academic emotion, self-efficacy, and motivation to explain students’ academic achievement and perseverance in STEM when transitioning to college. A sample of 1597 high school and junior college students participated. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were first conducted to validate a reduced version of the cognitive style questionnaire. Structural equation modeling revealed that the cognitive style known as systemizing indirectly predicted STEM achievement and persistence by way of intrinsic motivation, learning anxiety, and self-efficacy, providing a new perspective for re-examining the gender gap in STEM.

     

The Information Seeking Strategies of High School Science Students

This study focused on the use of the Artemis web-based interface http://artemis.goknow.com/artemis/index.adp). This program provides a digital library for students to search, organise, and evaluation science information related to project-based investigations. The primary feature of the Artemis interface is a focused search tool. Key scaffolding features in Artemis include the collections of web sites, driving question folders, a persistent workspace for notes, cataloging of past search results, and the viewing of sites shared by other students. The primary goal of this study was to describe high school science students' use of the scaffolding features embedded in the Artemis interface. The researchers were interested in identifying the scaffolding features students use and describing how they use them in the context of finding science information related to investigations. In addition, to look at scaffolding interaction, relationships between feature use and student learning were examined. The context of this study was a four-week science investigation conducted by 43 high school biology students. Students worked in dyads to answer driving questions related to their topics of study (e.g., What do the conditions need to be in order for green algae to survive?). It was found that students relied heavily upon Organisational Feature scaffolds (persistent workspace) to help them organise information that was ultimately used by the students to produce domain specific artifacts. In addition, students spent much of their time conducting searches and saving results. However, classroom performance success was only significantly correlated with the use of Organizational Feature scaffolds – scaffolding features that students use to create driving questions, write notes about the information they found as a result of their searches, and keep track of their investigations. No other search tool used by the students possessed this important scaffolding feature. The students did not automatically use Collaborative Features – scaffolding features hypothesised to be powerful cognitive tools.     

The influence of a response format test accommodation for college students with and without disabilities

Standardised and other multiple-choice examinations often require the use of an answer sheet with fill-in bubbles (i.e. ‘bubble’ or Scantron sheet). Students with disabilities causing impairments in attention, learning and/or visual-motor skill may have difficulties with multiple-choice examinations that employ such a response style. Such students may request and receive testing accommodations that intend to mitigate these impairments, such as circling responses in a test booklet, which contains both the questions and corresponding multiple-choice answers. The current study evaluated this test accommodation as compared to using a bubble sheet or Scantron on a multiple-choice vocabulary test. College students with (n = 25) and without (n = 76) disabilities completed a vocabulary test under both booklet (accommodated) and bubble sheet (standard) conditions. Results demonstrated that answering in a test booklet, a much preferred response mode, allowed students to attempt significantly more items than using a bubble sheet, improving their overall test scores. Booklet responding tends to improve overall performance, even for students without disabilities, calling into question the specificity and validity of this accommodation.     

Prestige Among Graduate and Professional Schools: Comparing the U.S. News’ Graduate School Reputation Ratings Between Disciplines

Using a conceptual model, this study examines the variables associated with the U.S. News and World Report peer assessment ratings of graduate and professional schools in business, education, engineering, law, and medicine. What are the correlates of prestige among the nation’s leading graduate and professional schools, and are they consistent with prior studies of prestige? Not since the studies of the 1995 National Research Council (NRC) data have scholars examined the correlates of prestige for individual graduate programs, and no study has ever extensively examined the U.S. News graduate ratings. Using available data from U.S. News, as well as institutional websites and ISI Web of Science information, this analysis finds robust relationships between the U.S. News graduate school reputation ratings and the model-relevant indicators, especially enrollment size, admissions test scores, and faculty publications per capita.     

Individual differences in relative metacomprehension accuracy: variation within and across task manipulations

In recent decades, increasing numbers of studies have focused on metacomprehension accuracy, or readers’ ability to distinguish between texts comprehended more vs. less well. Following early findings that suggested readers are fairly poor at doing so, a number of studies have identified specific tasks to supplement a single reading of text that have resulted in greater metacomprehension accuracy. One assumption underlying these studies is that, in the absence of such tasks, metacomprehension accuracy is uniformly poor, and given their implementation, readers uniformly improve. Here we describe the individual variation that occurs both in the absence (e.g., within a single text reading manipulation) and presence (e.g., within a rereading or selective rereading task manipulation) of these supplementary tasks (N = 214), in order to make a case for greater attention to individual differences in metacomprehension accuracy. We also introduce a new manipulation in metacomprehension research, selective rereading, and argue that certain types of tasks may be more likely to reveal individual differences in metacomprehension accuracy due to the nature of the task being more or less demanding on working memory capacity.     

Utilization of cues in action anticipation in table tennis players

ABSTRACT

By manipulating the congruency between body kinematics and subsequent ball trajectory, this study investigated the anticipation capabilities of regional-level, college-level, and novice table tennis players using a full video simulation occluder paradigm. Participants watched footage containing congruent, incongruent, or no ball trajectory information, to predict the landing point of the ball. They were required to choose between two potential locations to make their prediction. Percent accuracy and relevant indexes (d-prime, criterion, effect size) were calculated for each condition. Results indicated that experienced table tennis players (both regional and college players) were superior to novices in the ability to anticipate ball trajectory using kinematic information, but no difference was found between regional-level and college-level players. The findings of this study further demonstrate the superior anticipation ability of experienced table tennis players. Furthermore, the present result suggests that there may be a certain “baseline” level of motor experience in racquet sports for effective action anticipation, while the addition of further motor experience does not appear to assist direction anticipation.