The Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation: A Quarter Century of Contribution,A Future of Challenge and Optimism

The Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation (JEPC) is beginning its second quarter century of publication. Given the challenges education faced in 1990, when the journal began publishing, and the evolving challenges of 2015, it became important to answer two questions: (1) Has JEPC successfully contributed to the facilitation of service delivery leading to improved outcomes? (2) What major challenges should JEPC consider—in an era of diminishing school budgets, professional autonomy, and social safety nets—to ensure that it can help to meet the needs of struggling learners, their fellow students, and the people and organizations who work on their behalf? To help answer these questions, this article discusses JEPC's contributions to consultation, current and future challenges, and possible directions for meeting the current and future needs of struggling learners, their peers, and all other stakeholders to which JEPC has dedicated itself.     

Agents control in intelligent learning systems: The case of reactive characteristics

Intelligent learning systems (ILSs) have evolved in the last few years basically because of influences received from multi-agent architectures (MAs). Conflict resolution among agents has been a very important problem for multi-agent systems, with specific features in the case of ILSs. The literature shows that ILSs with cognitive or pedagogical agents are prone to arbitration methods, where as ILSs with reactive agents are much in favor of control mechanisms. For these kind of systems, different control types are proposed based on the different stimuli that these agents will receive. These stimuli are aspects to be evaluated during the teaching/learning process such as: (1) error analysis, (2) learning styles, (3) analogies, (4) social aspects, etc.

The paper reviews several ILSs, related to our work; different control mechanisms are proposed to solve the agents' intervention conflicts. Finally, the use of several mechanisms is exemplified by the results of a specific ILS.     

Application of the Literacy Training Service component of the National Service Training Program in New Bilibid Prison (Philippines)

International Review of Education - In 2000, the government of the Philippines launched its National Service Training Program (NSTP), a compulsory 2-semester course component for all the...     

Correlation analysis of performance measures for multi-label classification

In many important application domains, such as text categorization, scene classification, biomolecular analysis and medical diagnosis, examples are naturally associated with more than one class label, giving rise to multi-label classification problems. This fact has led, in recent years, to a substantial amount of research in multi-label classification. In order to evaluate and compare multi-label classifiers, researchers have adapted evaluation measures from the single-label paradigm, like Precision and Recall; and also have developed many different measures specifically for the multi-label paradigm, like Hamming Loss and Subset Accuracy. However, these evaluation measures have been used arbitrarily in multi-label classification experiments, without an objective analysis of correlation or bias. This can lead to misleading conclusions, as the experimental results may appear to favor a specific behavior depending on the subset of measures chosen. Also, as different papers in the area currently employ distinct subsets of measures, it is difficult to compare results across papers. In this work, we provide a thorough analysis of multi-label evaluation measures, and we give concrete suggestions for researchers to make an informed decision when choosing evaluation measures for multi-label classification.     

How Science Teachers DiALoG Classrooms: Towards a Practical and Responsive Formative Assessment of Oral Argumentation

Journal of Science Education and Technology - We present lessons learned from an ongoing attempt to conceptualize, develop, and refine a way for teachers to gather formative assessment evidence...     

Taking critical thinking,creativity and grit online

Technology has the potential to facilitate the development of higher-order thinking skills in learning. There has been a rush towards online learning by education systems during COVID-19; this can therefore be seen as an opportunity to develop students’ higher-order thinking skills. In this short report we show how critical thinking and creativity can be developed in an online context, as well as highlighting the importance of grit. We also suggest the importance of heuristic evaluation in the design of online systems to support twenty-first century learning.

     

Mental attention in gifted and nongifted children

The relationship between the construct of mental attention and “giftedness” is not well established. Gifted individuals could make effective use of their executive functions and this could be related to their mental attentional capacity. The dialectic constructivist model developed by Pascual-Leone introduced the concept of mental attention or “effort”, relating it to mental capacity. The aim of this study is to investigate whether the measurement of mental capacity (M-measurement) is differential for a group of children with high IQs. 110 students between 4 and 18 years old participated in this study. Some were Gifted (n=70) and others Non-Gifted (n=40). Wechsler-R Scale and the Figural Intersection Test were administered to all participants. An interesting pattern was found in the younger groups. The gifted scored higher than the non-gifted in the Figural Intersection Test and much higher than their theoretical M. The non-gifted scored quite close to their theoretical M (based on age). In the oldest group, the gifted again achieved higher scores, but now they scored at the theoretical level, and the non-gifted underperformed.     

Baroque Tower on a Gothic Base: A Lakatosian Reconstruction of Students' and Teachers' Understanding of Structure of the Atom

The main objective of this study is a reconstruction of students' and teachers' understanding of structure of the atom based on the following framework: a) history of science can be conceived as that of competing rival research programs; b) some of the greatest scientific research programs progressed on inconsistent foundations; c) in actual scientific practice, counter-examples would be considered as mere anomalies; d) work of Thomson, Rutherford and Bohr led to the postulation of atomic models based on competing frameworks of understanding. This study is based on 171 freshman students enrolled in General Chemistry I and 7 chemistry teachers at the Instituto Universitario de Tecnología, El Tigre, Venezuela. All the students and teachers were asked to respond to a 11 item questionnaire and explain their responses. The questionnaire was administered about a month after the students/teachers had finished the topic of atomic structure. Students' and teachers' responses were classified in the following categories: Positivist/inductivist, Transitional and Lakatosian. Results obtained show that students and teachers: a) have a very similar positivist understanding of the progress of science; b) are inconsistent in their responses by switching from a positivist response on one item to a Lakatosian on an another; c) also showed some consistent response patterns by resisting changes in some of their core beliefs by invoking "auxiliary hypotheses"; and d) consider that observable hard experimental facts give science its objective status, whereas the interpretations being subjective perhaps go beyond the fold of science.     

Two studies of low income parents' involvement in schooling

An interview and an intervention study are reported. Interview findings extend research on the positive relationship of parent involvement to school success. That is, although most of the low income families reported low-moderate participation, a postive relationship was found between parent involvement and school adjustment as early as kindergarten. With respect to negative valuing and barrier interpretations of low participation, the data support the latter; all but a few parents reported positive attitudes toward school involvement, while the majority indicated significant barriers. In comparing Latino and non-Latino groups, the former reported more barriers. Within the Latino group, parents whose children had made a good school adjustment indicated the most participation. Non-English proficient parents reported more barriers than those proficient in English but comparable degrees of involvement. In the intervention study, a simple strategy resulted in more treatment than control parents attending a school event. Differences in attendance were related to ethnicity and language.This work was carried out in conjunction with a dropout prevention demonstration project conducted as a collaborative effort of the School Mental Health unit (Janelle Munn, Director) and Dropout Prevention unit (Pete Martinez, Director) of the Los Angeles Unified School District and the School Mental Health Project at UCLA (Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor, Co-directors). Partial support for the project came from the U.S. Department of Education. The authors, of course, assume full responsibility for the contents, but we want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of participating schools and project staff (especially Mary Beth DiCecco and Alison McAlpine). And although she declined author credit, this work could not have been accomplished with the many contributions of Linda Taylor, the project director. We would also like to thank Regina DeWitter, Teresa Gonzales, Kathy Eides and the many other UCLA students who assisted in various phases of the research.