Strategy selection for cognitive skill acquisition depends on task demands and working memory capacity

The involvement of working memory capacity (WMC) in ruled-based cognitive skill acquisition is well-established, but the duration of its involvement and its role in learning strategy selection are less certain. Participants (N = 610) learned four logic rules, their corresponding symbols, or logic gates, and the appropriate input–output combinations in three-gate circuit patterns. Participants practiced 120 repetitions of each rule (480 total gates) over the course of 10 training blocks. Memory load varied between subjects. The confluence of task demands and individual differences in WMC (N = 518) dramatically affected speed–accuracy tradeoffs and strategic use of a computerized help function. Cluster analysis revealed five distinct groups of participants based on the combination of response accuracy, latency, and help use. Some groups with moderate to high mean WMC acquired the task with predictable performance patterns. Other groups, prevalently under a memory load and with low mean WMC, failed to learn or overused help.     

Patterns of Home‐ and Classroom‐based Toy Play of Preschoolers With and Without Intellectual Disabilities

Children with and without intellectual disabilities were observed playing with toys during both home‐based independent play and classroom‐based freeplay situations. Categorical and sequential play was analysed for within‐ and between‐group patterns. Within‐group patterns during classroom freeplay were similar for both groups. There were no significant differences among home‐based categorical play variables for children with intellectual disabilities; however, children without intellectual disabilities engaged in significantly more constructive play than other home‐based categorical play types. Between‐group analyses of home–classroom difference scores revealed greater variability in play for children with intellectual disabilities than children without intellectual disabilities. The analyses presented complement and extend extant work on contextually‐based variation of children’s toy play supporting a more positive ability profile for children with intellectual disabilities than that engendered by classroom‐based observations. Results have implications for (a) perceptions of and attitudes toward children with intellectual disabilities held by stakeholders, and (b) how intervention targets are determined.     

On spirituality and education

It is a mistake to ignore the scientific study of spirituality. Research examining the structure and function of concepts such as “spirit” and “spirituality” is likely to reveal new insights into the relationship between a functional spirituality and other thinking skills, including creativity. The study of spirituality should not stand alone as a discrete, somewhat eccentric, focus of enquiry. There should, instead, be an effort at synthesis with mainstream psychological science and basic and applied research in the field of education. There should be some effort made to examine the functional significance of a functional spirituality. Educational researchers should feel free to consider spirituality as a focus for dialogue and exchange with colleagues and students alike. The students in my class, and some of my colleagues, may have at first recoiled slightly when I began asking them for their thoughts on spirituality, but the dialogue has been truly stimulating, interesting, and enlightening.     

Florida public hurricane loss model: Research in multi-disciplinary system integration assisting government policy making

Homeowner insurance rate making is an important public policy issue in the State of Florida. The State of Florida has over 2 trillion dollars of residential properties exposed to hurricane risk. The State has declared that it shall adopt public policy to encourage the use of sophisticated actuarial methods to assure that consumers are charged lawful insurance rates (Section 627.0628(1)(a)). To that effect, the State's insurance regulatory agency, the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR), sponsored the development of a Florida Public Hurricane Loss Model (FPHLM) to assess the risk and project insured residential losses. The FPHLM is an open and public model that has been developed primarily by university experts without influence from either the insurance industry or the state regulators. It is open to public scrutiny and provides an understandable baseline to check the assumptions as well as the outputs of the proprietary models. The FPHLM thus makes the rate evaluation process more objective and less political. It enables the state to justify rejecting or accepting rate increases based on an independent and transparent model, rather than a process that can be influenced politically. As a multi-disciplinary large scale research project with an iterative and incremental development cycle, the FPHLM system development and integration faced numerous challenges varying from technical factors to project management aspects. This paper will discuss the research experiences accumulated during the development of the FPHLM and the impact it has had on the homeowner insurance rate filing process in the State of Florida.     

Reading vocabulary influences in phonological recoding during the development of reading skill: a re-examination of theory and practice

Children’s skill at recoding graphemes to phonemes is widely understood as the driver of their progress in acquiring reading vocabulary. This recoding skill is usually assessed by children’s reading of pseudowords (e.g., yeep) that represent “new words.” This study re-examined the extent to which pseudoword reading is, itself, influenced by orthographic rimes (e.g., eep) of words of the child’s reading vocabulary, during the development of reading skill. In Study 1, children with word reading levels of 6–10 years read matched pseudowords that do and do not share an orthographic rime with words of their reading vocabularies. Study 2 was conducted to further examine such a comparison for children of the 6- to 8-year word reading levels. There was a small and constant advantage of shared lexical orthographic rimes for children with reading levels 6–8 years but from 8 to 10 years that advantage increased significantly, as expected by Ehri’s phase account of word reading development. The pseudoword reading of children learning to read English involves use of lexical orthographic components as well as context-free recoding of graphemes to phonemes. This implies a qualification to the common interpretation of pseudoword reading as a measure of context-free grapheme–phoneme recoding. Such a measure should use selected pseudowords that do not share orthographic rime units or other multigrapheme components with words of the children’s reading vocabularies.     

Trajectories of Physical Discipline: Early Childhood Antecedents and Developmental Outcomes

This study examined childhood antecedents and developmental outcomes associated with trajectories of mild and harsh parental physical discipline. Interview, questionnaire, and observational data were available from 499 children followed from ages 5 to 16 and from 258 children in an independent sample followed from ages 5 to 15. Analyses indicated distinct physical discipline trajectory groups that varied in frequency of physical discipline and rate of change. In both samples, family ecological disadvantage differentiated the trajectory groups; in the first sample, early child externalizing also differentiated the groups. Controlling for early childhood externalizing, the minimal/ceasing trajectory groups were associated with the lowest levels of subsequent adolescent antisocial behavior in both samples and with parent–adolescent positive relationship quality in the second sample.     

Undergraduates’ learning experience and learning process: quantitative evidence from the East

This article examines the construct validity of the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) in Hong Kong and investigates the similarities and differences in the process of learning among students in different disciplinary studies. It is based on a survey of 1,563 undergraduate students in two disciplines, humanities and sciences, and of principally Chinese ethnicity. Findings from exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses support the scale structure of the four subscales of a modified version of the CEQ (good teaching, clear goals and standards, appropriate work, and appropriate assessment) in a non-Western context and could provide a basis for cross cultural research and international benchmarking. While there was variation across subgroups, there was a genuine pattern of relationships between the perceptions of learning environment and learning strategies shown by structural modeling. This information could be used to inform the design of discipline-specific programs in the new curriculum.     

Web-enhanced case-based activity in teacher education: a case study

Recent work in case-based reasoning (CBR) reinforces the importance of situated learning, expert cases, and authentic tasks and activities for novice learners. As novices engage CBR environments, they apprentice in the experts’ practices while developing the understanding, knowledge and skill of a given community. This study examined how prospective teachers, as novices in a semester-long course, engaged and developed expert-like practices using the case knowledge of experienced teachers who teach with technology. By engaging experienced teachers’ knowledge and skill via Web-enhanced cases, prospective teachers refined their understanding of teaching culture and teaching with technology as they transitioned to the teaching community.