A Person-Centered Approach to Students' Evaluations of Perceived Fear Appeals and Their Association With Engagement

A person-centered approach was employed to investigate how students' evaluation of perceived teacher utility value messages, i.e., fear appeals, as a threat and as a challenge, combined within individuals and how these combinations related to student engagement. Two studies were conducted with students in their final two years of secondary education. Empirically distinct clusters emerged at two time points in the academic year. Evaluating the message in the fear appeal at a higher level of challenge than threat was beneficial. Unexpectedly, high threat was associated with high engagement, as long as high challenge was also present, however, this combination was also related to high emotional disaffection. Moderate threat combined with moderate challenge had the most detrimental relationship with student engagement. Educational interventions should aim to increase the likelihood of a challenge evaluation.     

What’s your goal? The importance of shaping the goals of engineering tasks to focus learners on the underlying science

Instructional Science - Engaging in engineering tasks can help students learn science concepts. However, many engineering tasks lead students to focus more on the success of their construction than...     

Analysis of Articles in The American Biology Teacher for Essential Features of Inquiry Representation

Research in Science Education - Most studies on inquiry have focused on student outcomes, teachers’ conceptions of inquiry, implementation of inquiry in science classrooms, and inquiry...     

Can typical game features have unintended consequences? A study of players’ learning and reactions to challenge and failure in an educational programming game

It is difficult to motivate learners to seek out and persist at challenging learning tasks where failure is likely. However, in game environments, people seem highly motivated to engage with challenges and respond productively to failure. Many typical game features purportedly enhance intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy, which should improve students’ reactions to challenge and failure, which should in turn enhance learning. An experimental study with early middle school students tested these assumptions by comparing a “Full” version of a typical, commercial programming game to a “Minimal” version of the same game where common game features such as narrative, performance metrics, high-quality graphics, and sound were removed. In contrast to our hypotheses, players of the Full Game were less likely to choose coding challenges, were less tolerant of coding failures and gained less coding knowledge. Intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy did not differ between conditions. Correlational analyses showed that failure tolerance and challenge seeking may critically affect learning from educational games. The current study offers an existence proof that some common game features can hinder players' failure tolerance, challenge-seeking and learning, in certain game contexts. Future research should isolate the effects of individual game features, test generalizability and explore which contextual variables influence the findings.     

The Italian adaptation of courage measure

International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance - This project developed and examined the psychometric properties of an Italian version of the Courage Measure, the reduced version...     

Newborn irritability moderates the association between infant attachment security and toddler exploration and sociability

This longitudinal investigation of 84 infants examined whether the effect of 12-month attachment on 18- and 24-month exploration and sociability with unfamiliar adults varied as a function of newborn irritability. As expected, results revealed an interaction between attachment (secure vs. insecure) and irritability (highly irritable vs. moderately irritable) in predicting both exploration and sociability with unfamiliar adults. For exploration, results supported a dual-risk model; that is, toddlers who had been both highly irritable and insecurely attached were less exploratory than other toddlers. For sociability, results supported the differential-susceptibility hypothesis; that is, highly irritable infants, compared to moderately irritable infants, were both less sociable as toddlers when they had been insecurely attached and more sociable when they had been securely attached.     

Two for One: Squeezing Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering into a Core Computer Science Course

The final report of the Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula (CC2001) suggests that an updated computer science curricula must reflect the broadening nature of our discipline. Two areas that are included in the CC2001 are software engineering (SE) and human-computer interaction (HCI). While the first inclination might be to incorporate HCI concepts into a traditional SE course, we propose a different approach. This paper outlines a project-oriented HCI course in which we are able to emphasize some SE notions in the context of HCI concepts. Our course is also a maturation class for our students because they are exposed to a number of non-programming computer science activities, including project specification, software and interface design, user testing, prototyping and use of guidelines. We include an overview of course content that illustrates our approach. We also describe our coverage of specific CC2001 knowledge units and provide some feedback data for our course.     

The Role of Set for Variability in Irregular Word Reading: Word and Child Predictors in Typically Developing Readers and Students At-Risk for Reading Disabilities

ABSTRACT

In a quasiregular orthography like English, children inevitably encounter irregular words during reading. Previous research suggests successful reading of an irregular word depends at least partially on a child’s ability to address the mismatch between decoded form and stored word pronunciation, referred to as a child’s set for variability, and the word’s relative transparency, measured here using a spelling to pronunciation transparency rating. Item-level analyses were used to explore the relationship between general child performance on the set for variability mispronunciation task, word specific set for variability (predicting reading of that word), spelling to pronunciation transparency rating, and irregular word reading. Significant predictors included general word reading, general set for variability performance, and item-specific set for variability performance; word frequency and spelling to pronunciation transparency rating; and an interaction between word reading and the transparency rating. Results underscore the importance of considering both general and item-specific factors affecting irregular word reading.     

Learning by starch potato growers: learning in small businesses with no employees

In small businesses with no employees, learning environments have a low learning readiness. Consequently, learners need to rely on their own agency to shape their learning experiences. Results from a study of agricultural entrepreneurs indicated that the components of motivation and self-regulated learning strategies shape learner's agency and explain learning environment configuration in small businesses with no employees. Configuration of the learning environment was found to be a weak determinant of the learning performance of these learners. However, results showed that prior performance of learners in small businesses with no employees dictates how their agency operates and what learning effect is achieved; higher prior performance results in higher learning effects. We conclude that mechanisms that underlie learning in traditional learning environments work similarly in learning environments in small businesses with no employees.