Part and whole practice: chunking and online control in the acquisition of a serial motor task

A four-component aiming movement was used to examine the relative effectiveness of part and whole practice. Following a pretest, participants were assigned to one of three practice groups. Participants in a "Whole" group practiced the four components together as a unit. A "No Overlap" group practiced the first two and last two components of the task, alternating every fifth trial. An "Overlap" group practiced the transition between the second and third components on every trial by alternating practice of the first three and last three components every five trials. Participants in all groups improved significantly from pretest to immediate posttest and maintained their performance over a 24-hr delay. Contrary to the "chunking hypothesis," participants in the No Overlap group improved as much as those in the other two groups. Kinematic data indicated that participants in all three groups learned to use response-produced feedback earlier in the individual movement trajectories. Moreover, participants appeared to acquire a general ability to make transitions between movement components rather than specific transitions. The results suggest that segmented or segmented "overlap" practice regimes may benefit learning movement sequences of short duration.     

Analyzing the cross-cultural transfer of professional practices through organizational stories

Portions of this article were presented at the annual Conference of the Southern Anthropology Society, Atlanta, GA, April 1994.     

Obesity‐Related Hormones in Low‐Income Preschool‐Age Children: Implications for School Readiness

Mechanisms underlying socioeconomic disparities in school readiness and health outcomes, particularly obesity, among preschool‐aged children are complex and poorly understood. Obesity can induce changes in proteins in the circulation that contribute to the negative impact of obesity on health; such changes may relate to cognitive and emotion regulation skills important for school readiness. We investigated obesity‐related hormones, body mass index (BMI), and school readiness in a pilot study of low‐income preschoolers attending Head Start (participating in a larger parent study). We found that the adipokine leptin was related to preschoolers' BMI z‐score, the appetite‐regulating hormones ghrelin and glucagon‐like peptide 1 (GLP‐1), and pro‐inflammatory cytokines typically associated with early life stress; and that some of these obesity‐related biomarkers were in turn related to emotion regulation. Future work should evaluate how obesity may affect multiple domains of development, and consider modeling common physiological pathways related to stress, health, and school readiness.     

Testing measurement invariance of mathematics self-concept and self-efficacy in PISA using MGCFA and the alignment method

The aim of the study is to investigate the measurement invariance of mathematics self-concept and self-efficacy across 40 countries that participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 and 2012 cycles. The sample of the study consists of 271,760 students in PISA 2003 and 333,804 students in PISA 2012. Firstly, the traditional measurement invariance testing was applied in the multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA). Then, the alignment analyses were performed, allowing non-invariance to a minimum to estimate all of the parameters. Results from MGCFA indicate that mathematics self-concept and self-efficacy hold metric invariance across the 80 groups (cycle by country). The alignment method results suggest that a large proportion of non-invariance exists in both mathematics self-concept and self-efficacy factors, and the factor means cannot be compared across all participating countries. Results of the Monte Carlo simulation show that the alignment results are trustworthy. Implications and limitations are discussed, and some recommendations for future research are proposed.

     

Spatial thinking in science,technology, engineering,and mathematics: Elementary teachers' beliefs,perceptions, and self-efficacy

Fostering students' spatial thinking skills holds great promise for improving Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. Recent efforts have focused on the development of classroom interventions to build students' spatial skills, yet these interventions will be implemented by teachers, and their beliefs and perceptions about spatial thinking influence the effectiveness of such interventions. However, our understanding of elementary school teachers' beliefs and perceptions around spatial thinking and STEM is in its infancy. Thus, we created novel measures to survey elementary teachers' anxiety in solving spatial problems, beliefs in the importance of spatial thinking skills for students' academic success, and self-efficacy in cultivating students' spatial skills during science instruction. All measures exhibited high internal consistency and showed that elementary teachers experience low anxiety when solving spatial problems and feel strongly that their skills can improve with practice. Teachers were able to identify educational problems that rely on spatial problem-solving and believed that spatial skills are more important for older compared to younger students. Despite reporting high efficacy in their general teaching and science teaching, teachers reported significantly lower efficacy in their capacities to cultivate students' spatial skills during science instruction. Results were fairly consistent across teacher characteristics (e.g., years of experience and teaching role as generalist or specialist) with the exception that only years of teaching science was related to teachers' efficacy in cultivating students' spatial thinking skills during science instruction. Results are discussed within the broader context of teacher beliefs, self-efficacy, and implications for professional development research.     

Being a Learner Using Social Media in School: The Case of Space2cre8

The aim of this article is to gain knowledge about what it means to be a learner using social media in an educational setting. The article presents an ethnographic study of students in a multiethnic community in Oslo who participate in a social networking site called Space2cre8 (S28). In this article, we set out to explore the kind of space for learning that can be created in a lower secondary classroom by a social networking site. The article provides a detailed study of how two students made use of this social networking site as part of school activities, and it outlines two specific ways in which to be a learner using social media in school. The findings suggest that a social networking site such as S28 can provide different resources for different students with different learner identities, and might represent a space in which everyday knowledge and school knowledge merge to offer a hybrid space for learning.