Interstimulus interval and viewing time effects in monkey list memory

Two rhesus monkeys were tested in 6- and 10-item list memory tasks for performance changes as a function of the exposure duration of the list stimuli and the interstimulus interval (ISI) between successive list stimuli. Accuracy increased with longer item exposure duration and tended to decrease with longer ISI duration. Humans, by contrast, typically show increases in accuracy with ISI, a result taken as evidence of rehearsal. The decrease in accuracy for monkeys suggests that they were not using rehearsal processes in these list memory experiments. Further tests in which choice accuracy with predictable ISIs was compared with choice accuracy with unpredictable ISIs also yielded no evidence of rehearsal by the monkeys. This apparent absence of rehearsal mechanisms in monkeys, in situations also shown to support human rehearsal, is discussed as a potential difference in the visual working memory processes of the two species.     

The Consistency of Detecting Item Bias Across Different Test Administrations: Implications of Another Failure

Several item bias detection methods were applied to the analysis of bias among males and females for items from a curriculum-based mathematics test. The focus of this analysis was the consistency of the methods across different test administrations of the same items. The results indicated that, of the methods studied, the Mantel–Haenszel (M–H) and IRT-based sum-of-squares methods were the most consistent. However, the degree of reliability and agreement for these methods was modest at best. As with most prior research, no reasonable explanation could be found for the most consistently flagged items. A likely reason for this lies in the confusion of visible genetic group characteristics with their instructional backgrounds. A multidimensional perspective of item bias is proposed for future research that will take such confounding into account.     

A mixed method study of ethical issues in classroom assessment in Chinese higher education

The purpose of this study was to explore Chinese university professors’ decisions about ethical issues in classroom assessment. A survey with fifteen scenarios that describe professors’ thoughts about ethics in assessment practices was administrated to 555 professors from 143 colleges and universities in 29 provinces in China. The results of the quantitative analysis indicated that professors’ interest in professional development related to classroom assessment, and their dispositions were significantly associated with their agreement with experts in the field of classroom assessment. Professors’ gender, highest degree, professional rank, and years of teaching experience did not significantly predict their agreement. The qualitative analysis revealed that maintaining fair assessment vs being caring to students and asserting professors’ rights vs abiding by university policy were the crucial aspects for professors to consider in classroom assessment. Findings of the study could help educators identify ethical issues in assessment, develop guidelines to ensure fair assessment, and incorporate differentiated strategies in professional development workshops in higher education.

     

The tangled roots of real estate markets,the state,and public education

In this article, I use a case study of education in nineteenth-century Oregon to place the twentieth-century phenomenon of ‘shopping for schools’ within a broader historical context. In doing so, I make three points. First, documenting previously unacknowledged links between the spread of public education and efforts to market land, I suggest that education, real estate markets, and the state have deeper and more tangled roots than scholars have imagined. Second, I contend that wrestling with these tangled roots suggests the need for scholars to reexamine the role of private markets in shaping the organisation of educational opportunity across places and time. Third, I argue that histories like Oregon’s demonstrate that ‘state’ and ‘market’ are neither stable nor mutually exclusive categories.     

Metastasis and retroactive causality in incentive rhetoric

Our contemporary moment is characterized by the pervasiveness of economics in social life, and the extension of “incentives” into new areas represents this movement’s keystone. Originally a fairly narrow term from neoclassical economic theory, politicians, journalists, and cultural ?gures deploy “incentives” to explain all manner of activity: judicial rulings, gendered wage gaps, and even whether soccer players score penalty kicks. To address this, I elucidate the trope of metastasis – the rhetorical mechanism by which social life is “economized.” Metastasis entails a ?gurative displacement, wherein cause shifts from one place to another. More than simply a spread of narrow economic ideas into culture, incentive rhetoric metastasizes. It displaces alternative explanations onto neoclassical market axioms. Since its proponents insist that incentives are causal mechanisms, I introduce Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of Aristotle’s discourse on causality. Lacan rereads Aristotle’s “?nal cause” from a rhetorical perspective, and forwards the retroactive causality of the symbolic order. Incentive rhetoric exempli?es this concept, in which all outcomes are explained as having been caused by a prior, unseen market force. Incentive rhetorics promise a universal code that unlocks the mysteries of human behavior that reduces all context to discrete individual choices, thereby providing a discursive alibi for economic inequality.     

‘Is it because I’m a woman?’ Gender-based attributional ambiguity in higher education administration

This study examines gender-based attributional ambiguity among higher education administrators in the US, specifically academic deans. Attributional ambiguity involves situations in which members of underrepresented groups cannot determine whether interactions both negative and positive have occurred because of their minority status or for some unrelated yet plausible reason. A conceptual model of attributional ambiguity in higher education administration is presented highlighting the types of situations that produce this ambiguity, two variants of attributional ambiguity (i.e. cognitive and social), and the psychological and organizational consequences of such ambiguity. Reasons that attributional ambiguity is inherent to higher education administration are examined including the fluidity of gender roles, the culture of academia, and leaders’ minimization of discriminatory experiences. Implications for professional practice are also presented such as the need for curricula, trainings, mentoring, and coaching that addresses attributional ambiguity and greater publicity related to women’s underrepresentation in leadership roles in higher education.     

Writing Characteristics of Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder: A Meta‐Analysis

Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) frequently experience significant difficulty mastering basic academic skills. This meta‐analysis focuses on one specific potential area of learning difficulties for these students: namely, writing. To identify the extent and depth of the potential writing challenges faced by students with ADHD, we conducted a meta‐analysis comparing the writing performance of grade 1 to 12 students with ADHD to their normally achieving peers. We located 44 papers, yielding 45 studies with 87 effect sizes. The average weighted effect sizes showed that students with ADHD obtained lower scores than their normally achieving peers for writing quality (–0.78), output (–0.64), number of genre elements (–0.69), vocabulary (–0.76), spelling (–0.80), and handwriting (–0.62). Contrary to expectations, moderator analyses found that neither study quality nor the source from which ADHD students were drawn (i.e., school/community vs. clinic/hospital) accounted for variability above sampling error alone.