No time to think: Reflections on information technology and contemplative scholarship

This paper argues that the accelerating pace of life is reducing the time for thoughtful reflection, and in particular for contemplative scholarship, within the academy. It notes that the loss of time to think is occurring at exactly the moment when scholars, educators, and students have gained access to digital tools of great value to scholarship. It goes on to explore how and why both of these facts might be true, what it says about the nature of scholarship, and what might be done to address this state of affairs.     

The effects of different approaches to reading instruction on letter detection tasks in normally achieving and low achieving readers

The present study used two letter detection tasks, the classic missing letter effect paradigm and a single word versus familiar word compound version of this paradigm, to study bottom-up and top–down processes involved in reading in normally achieving as compared to low achieving elementary school readers. The research participants were children in grades first to sixth who had been taught to read by three approaches to reading instruction (ARI): the whole language/global approach, the phonic/synthetic approach or the eclectic approach. Thus, the study attempted to clarify how different ARIs activate these processes in these two types of readers. The main hypothesis was that since low achieving readers rely on top–down processes for word recognition (see, e.g., Stanovich, 1980), the whole language ARI will reduce the difference in bottom-up tasks between them and the normally achieving readers. In the two experiments included in the study, participants were required to perform a letter detection task while reading short texts in Hebrew for comprehension. Contrary to this study hypotheses, the main finding was that the whole language ARI does not compensate for difficulties in bottom-up processes of low achieving readers. Moreover, the results of this study imply that any improvement in basic processes involved in reading proficiency produced by the whole language ARI for both the normal and the low achieving readers dissipates by grade three.     

Use of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test with low-functioning autistic children

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn, 1965) was adapted to facilitate administration to low-functioning autistic children who do not have a pointing response. By cutting the plates into individual pictures, children can respond by giving the examiner the target picture. Ten autistic and 10 preschool-aged children were given both the standard form (Form A) and the adapted form (Form C) by the same examiner less than one week apart. Several t-tests were calculated to test the hypotheses that the adaptation would not affect raw scores of normal, preschool-aged children; yet lowfunctioning autistic children would score significantly better on the adapted version. It was concluded that the two forms of the PPVT are equivalent forms when a pointing response exists, and it is therefore valid to use the published norms for the adapted version.     

The Impact of Children's Static versus Dynamic Conceptions of People on Stereotype Formation

Recent cognitive-developmental research has contributed much to our understanding of children's stereotyping. The present research identified another factor influencing stereotyping — children's theories about the malleability of human attributes. In two studies, 122 sixth graders learned about several different students' behaviors in unknown schools. In Study 1, they judged a school characterized by mostly negative behaviors, and in Study 2 they judged two schools (characterized by either mostly negative or positive behaviors). Across studies, children with a fixed view of personality (relative to those with a more malleable view of personality) made more extreme trait ratings of both the "positive" and "negative" schools, generalized their trait judgments to an unknown student, perceived greater within-school similarity and between-school differences, and showed less desire to interact with students in the "negative" school. Ways in which examining these theories may broaden our understanding of the origins of stereotyping and how to lessen it are discussed.     

The Remaining,Unconvinced Few: Using Twitter to Examine Non-CORFing Behaviors Following a Political Defeat

Twitter and other social media technologies offer social scientists new and innovative ways of investigating individual-level processes on a mass scale. The current study examined communicative behaviors associated with Cutting off Reflected Failure (CORF) in the aftermath of the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. The results support past research suggesting that following defeat, small numbers of highly involved individuals may not experience CORF but may instead turn to other rationalizations to make sense of the event in question. Findings are discussed in terms of our understanding of Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRG) and CORF, and in terms of the utility of Twitter in examining similar phenomena in the future.