NARST: a lived history

In this Forum, we construct a history of the National Association for Research in Science Education (NARST) through the analysis of documents and through the personal perspectives of individuals. The history of NARST is inseparable from the biography of the individuals through whose lives it was produced and reproduced. The history of NARST is a living history that both shapes and was shaped by the biographies of its members.

Microanalysis of variable-interval performance during stimulus compounding

Additive summation is observed when more responses are emitted to the simultaneous presentation (tone-plus-light) of independently conditioned stimuli (tone and light) than to either stimulus presented alone. The current experiment sought to determine if this increased rate during tone-plus-light was a function of a new modal interresponse time (IRT) or a differential mixing of pauses with a modal IRT characteristic of the responding in tone and light alone. Three rats were trained on a three-component multiple schedule where tone and light were each associated with a variable-interval 30-sec schedule while a variable-interval 100-sec operated in the simultaneous absence of these stimuli, tone-off and light-out. Baseline response rates were 2–4 times as high in tone or light as in their absence. In testing, more responses were emitted to tone-plus-light than to tone or light by all animals, but the modal IRT was in the 0.2–0.4-sec IRT bin for all test conditions. Tone-plus-light controlled fewer long IRT values and more responses in the short modal category than tone or light alone. These results support the response mixing hypothesis of stimulus control; i.e., no “new” behavior was observed during the novel combination of stimulus elements, only a mixture of previously reinforced behavior patterns in different proportions.     

Assessing young children's social concept development

A number of questions regarding the nature of social concept development in young children were investigated in this study. In an earlier study, a social concept picture-sorting task was developed to obtain normative data on young children's social concept development. For this replication study, a larger more heterogeneous sample was used consisting of 64 kindergarten and 65 first grade public school students from lower to upper middle-class socioeconomic levels. Profile analysis was used to compare grades, sex, and racial groups. All three variables had a significant impact on performance. Significant differences in difficulty were found among the nine concepts measured. Three of the most difficult concepts (family-not family, those who protect us, and past-present) are commonly included in early childhood curriculum. These results suggest that the level of concept development needs to be considered in planning social studies curriculum and instruction for young children.     

Using Deliberate Practice to Transform Learning Culture: Helping Students Put Real Skills in their OSCM Toolbox

Students select majors like supply chain management largely because they want to obtain a high‐paying job at graduation. They expect that after 4 or 5 years of studies, they will be ready to achieve early‐career success. Data, however, reveal that students often are not prepared. Recruiters are noticing. In various studies, employers say that a large majority of graduates are not workplace ready. We argue that this readiness gap results from a mismatch between academia's focus on knowledge transfer and employers’ expectations that new hires possess real competencies. To remedy this readiness gap, we redesigned our curriculum to adopt a deliberate practice pedagogy. What have we learned? Deliberate practice is hard work. Both faculty and students must learn and practice new behaviors. The good news: deliberate practice helps students acquire real expertise that recruiters value. This article makes the case for deliberate practice and outlines a proven path to transformation.     

Stimulus modality and short-term memory in rats

Two experimental paradigms are presented aimed at determining the retention of auditory and visual information over brief delay intervals. First, a conditional delayed matching-to-sample procedure was used in which rats were required to symbolically match the modality of the sample stimulus with one of two comparison stimuli. In the second experiment, subjects were trained and tested using a Konorski-type procedure. Despite the conceptual and procedural differences between the two procedures, subjects in both experiments showed steeper forgetting functions for visual events than for auditory events, while performance levels at 0-sec delay intervals were equivalent for both stimuli. These results, when taken together with related research conducted with pigeons, suggest that content of memory may have important influences on the short-term retention abilities of animal subjects.