Products and processes of agri-scientific service-learning: adding harmony to Dopico and Garcia-V��zquez

This forum response adds a conceptualization of harmony to Dopico and Vázquez’ investigation of pedagogy that combines citizen science, environmental and cross-cultural research, and service-learning. Placing many appropriate and significant aspects of culturally situated science education in an authentically relational context beyond the classroom, this paper calls attention to insightful contributions and new directions for research, such as the process of inducing or eluding nihilism regarding ecological issues. How can such a question be researched effectively in order to learn about the family of pedagogies emerging in response to the need for more ecologically conscious and relationally authentic teaching across many disciplines? In this paper, I use a Vygotskian framework and an abbreviated case study of agricultural service-learning from my research, drawing attention to the importance of students’ culturally-mediated construction of setting as they interact in older and newer ways.     

Contextual modulation of attention in human category learning

In a category-learning experiment, we assessed whether participants were able to selectively attend to different components of a compound stimulus in two distinct contexts. The participants were presented with stimulus compounds for which they had to learn categorical labels. Each compound comprised one feature from each of two dimensions, and on different trials the compound was presented in two contexts, X and Y. In Context X, Dimension A was relevant to the solution of the categorization task and Dimension B was irrelevant, whereas in Context Y, Dimension A was irrelevant and Dimension B was relevant. The results of transfer tests to novel stimuli suggested that people learned to attend selectively to Dimension A in Context X and Dimension B in Context Y. These findings contribute to the growing body of evidence that people can learn to selectively attend to particular dimensions of stimuli dependent on the context in which the stimuli are presented. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that context-dependent changes in attention transfer to other categorization tasks involving novel stimuli.     

A configural theory of attention and associative learning

A formal account of the relationship between attention and associative learning is presented within the framework of a configural theory of discrimination learning. The account is based on a connectionist network in which the entire pattern of stimulation presented on a trial activates a configural unit that then enters into an association with the trial outcome. Attention is assumed to have two roles within this network. First, the salience of the stimuli at the input to the network can be increased if they are relevant to the occurrence of reinforcement and decreased if they are irrelevant. Second, the associability of configural units can increase on trials when the outcome is surprising and decrease when the outcome is not surprising.     

Faculty Workload: An Analytical Approach

Recent discussions of practices in higher education have tended toward muck-raking and self-styled exposure of cynical self-indulgence by faculty and administrators at the expense of students and their families, as usually occurs during periods of economic duress, rather than toward analytical studies designed to foster understanding This article looks briefly at some examples of this tendency and then offers an analytical approach to understanding faculty workloads and the ways of assessing and evaluating faculty work.