Revising lecture notes: how revision,pauses, and partners affect note taking and achievement

Note taking has been categorized as a two-stage process: the recording of notes and the review of notes. We contend that note taking might best involve a three-stage process where the missing stage is revision. This study investigated the benefits of revising lecture notes and addressed two questions: First, is revision more effective than non-revision? Second, what revision method is best? Experiment 1 addressed the first question by comparing the performance of participants who revise or recopy lecture notes. Experiment 2 addressed the second question by investigating whether revision was best done (a) during pauses throughout the lecture or one equally-timed pause after the lecture, and (b) with a partner or alone. Dependent measures were original and additional notes and fact and relationship test scores. Results upheld three effects: (a) a modest revision effect—revisers recorded more additional notes and achieved somewhat higher scores on relationship items than re-copiers, (b) a pause effect—those revising during pauses outperformed those revising after the lecture on the notes and achievement measures, and (c) a modest partner effect—those revising with partners recorded more original notes than those revising alone. Furthermore, the combination of pauses and partners has merit and holds promise as a means for revision. Overall, findings suggested that revision is a new student-centered means to boost lecture note taking and achievement.     

Mentoring Beginning Teachers: Findings from Contextual Supervision

This article examines the contextual supervision (CS) model that has been developed and applied in several practicum settings of teacher-education programs over the past ten years. The study synthesizes the research findings on the potential effectiveness of CS in assisting faculty supervisors and classroom cooperating teachers with the task of mentoring pre-service teachers to develop their instructional repertoire. The CS model is described, its rationale is presented, research results on its application are summarized, its strengths and limitations are identified, and implications of its usefulness as a mentoring tool to enhance teacher performance are drawn.     

Local context and the comparator hypothesis

“Comparator” accounts of associative conditioning (e.g., Gibbon & Balsam, 1981; Miller & Matzel, 1988) suggest that performance to a Pavlovian CS is determined, by a comparison of the US expectancy of the CS with the US expectancy of general background cues. Recent research indicates that variation in the excitatory value of cues in the local temporal context of a CS may have a profound impact on conditioned responding to the CS (e.g., Kaplan & Hearst, 1982), implicating US expectancy based on local, rather than overall, background cues as the critical comparator term for a CS. In two experiments, an excitatory training context attenuated responding to a target CS. In Experiment 1, the context was made excitatory by interspersing unsignaled USs with target CS-US trials. In this case, posttraining extinction of the conditioning context restored responding to the target CS. In Experiment 2, the target CS’s local context was made excitatory by the placement of excitatory “cover” stimuli in the immediate temporal proximity of each target CS-US trial. In this experiment, posttraining extinction of the proximal cover stimuli, not extinction of the conditioning context alone, restored responding to the target CS. An observation from both experiments was that signaling the otherwise unsignaled USs did not appear to influence the associative value of the conditioning context. The results are discussed in relation to a local context version of the comparator hypothesis and serve to emphasize the importance of local context cues in the modulation of acquired behavior. Taken together with other recent reports (e.g., Cooper, Aronson, Balsam, & Gibbon, 1990; Schachtman & Reilly, 1987), the present observations encourage contemporary comparator theories to reevaluate which aspects of the conditioning situation comprise the CS’s comparator term.     

Text anxiety research in Western Germany: A review

Text anxiety research in West German schools is explored and measures currently used are described. Test anxiety is examined in relation to academic achievement research and theory. Distinctions between state and trait anxiety and between worry and emotionality are discussed. Test anxiety is investigated both in the traditional tripartite school system as well as in the non-traditional unitary comprehensive school. Results of several longitudinal studies point to the findings that there are socialization effects as explained by reference group theory and that these effects also are specific to the particular learning environment which the students experience in each school system. Future directions of test anxiety research in West German schools are explored.     

Sexual Risk Among African American Women: Psychological Factors and the Mediating Role of Social Skills

Prior research demonstrates a positive association between mental health problems and sexual risk for African American women. Using the social skills deficit hypothesis, we proposed that social skills mediate this relationship. African American women (n = 557, M age = 20.58) completed measures of depression, stress, emotional dysregulation, sexual risk behaviors, and perceptions of their social skills with their primary sexual partner. Social skills mediated the link between the mental health assessments and a composite sexual risk index. Theoretical implications of extending the social skill deficit hypothesis are discussed as well as implications for interventions.     

The impact of college selectivity on income for men and women

In this study a large national data set was used to assess the causal influence of college selectivity on earnings after controlling for a variety of background variables such as family background, financial considerations, academic ability, and degree aspirations. Using a recursive structural equation model, it was found that for both genders selectivity had a significant direct and indirect effect on earnings; however, selectivity could explain only a minute percentage of variance in income above and beyond the controls. Males and females differed slightly on the total effect of selectivity on earnings, but the indirect effect was twice as large for women as for men.     

Overshadowing as a function of trial number: Dynamics of first- and second-order comparator effects

In two conditioned lick suppression experiments with rats, we examined the permanence of the overshadowing effect as a function of the number of compound reinforced training trials. In Experiment 1, robust overshadowing was observed following 4 compound-US pairings but dissipated with 36 pairings. Overshadowing decreased because responding to the overshadowed stimulus increased, not because responding by the control group decreased. This dissipation was stimulus specific and not attributable to a response ceiling. Experiment 2 extended the generality of the effect to a sensory preconditioning design and further demonstrated that overshadowing lost through many compound-US pairings was restored by posttraining extinction of the training context. The results are explicable in terms of the extended comparator hypothesis (Denniston, Savastano, & Miller, 2001) under the assumption that the impacts of first- and second-order comparator processes grow differentially as a function of number of trials.     

The maintenance of matching behavior when contrast occurs in multiple concurrent concurrent schedules of reinforcement

Pigeons were trained on a multiple schedule of reinforcement in which each component was a concurrent schedule. The concurrent schedules were programmed by the changeover-key procedure. The primary purpose was to determine if the relative behavior allocated to two response alternatives is affected when absolute changes in these behaviors occur; i.e., to determine if matching is affected when positive behavioral contrast occurs. Results showed that (1) relative behavior in the unaltered component of the multiple schedule is not disrupted when positive contrast occurs in that component, (2) positive contrast occurred when the overall frequency of reinforcement in the reinforcement-correlated component(s) was high, but not when it was low, (3) changeover behavior was susceptible to positive contrast effects, and (4) changeover contrast and food-key contrast are independent phenomena.     

The order of presentation of conditioned stimuli during extinction

Three experiments examined the effects of prior extinction with nontarget CSs on a target CS’s rate of extinction and amount of associative loss. After fear was conditioned to several CSs, rats received extinction training with the target CS either before or after extinction with nontarget CSs. In general, neither rate of extinction nor amount of associative change, as measured by reinstatement and relearning, were significantly affected by order of extinction. The present results do not support Rescorla’s interpretation of extinction.