In search of a happy medium in instructional technology research: Issues concerning external validity,media replications,and learner control

Due in part to the diverse characteristics and training of its researchers, the field of instructional technology is currently plagued by much uncertainty regarding meaningful research questions and accepted paradigms for investigating them. Major areas in which these uncertainties are manifested concern the degree of emphasis to be placed on basic versus developmental research and considerations involving the separation of media from methods in research designs. To help researchers achieve a “happier medium” in balancing instructional technology goals with the performance of well-designed and scientifically sound studies, greater attention to three concerns is advocated: the external validity of studies to increase the relevance of findings to applied technologies; usage of media replications to test the generalizability of findings obtained with individual media and to demonstrate delivery applications; and learner control as a potentially effective and practical means of adapting validated instructional strategies to individuals. Each of these issues is discussed in relation to research conducted by the authors and to suggested designs for future studies. The authors would like to thank Robert D. Tennyson for his helpful suggestions regarding an earlier draft.     

Private Speech of Learning Disabled and Normally Achieving Children in Classroom Academic and Laboratory Contexts

Learning disabled (LD) children are often targets for cognitive-behavioral interventions designed to train them in effective use of a self-directed speech. The purpose of this study was to determine if, indeed, these children display immature private speech in the naturalistic classroom setting. Comparisons were made of the private speech, motor accompaniment to task, and attention of LD and normally achieving classmates during academic seatwork. Setting effects were examined by comparing classroom data with observations during academic seatwork and puzzle solving in the laboratory. Finally, a subgroup of LD children symptomatic of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was compared with pure LD and normally achieving controls to determine if the presumed immature private speech is a function of a learning disability or externalizing behavior problems. Results indicated that LD children used more task-relevant private speech than controls, an effect that was especially pronounced for the LD/ADHD subgroup. Use of private speech was setting- and task-specific. Implications for intervention and future research methodology are discussed.     

Spelling improvement for college students who are dyslexic

Academic problems of the dyslexic child often persist in adult life. Such problems as spelling can interfere with the performance of such adult learners in college. Federal legislation requires reasonable accommodation for these students. At some colleges, this consists of allowing use of tape recorders in lectures and sometimes allowing extra time on examinations. Remediation of reading, writing, and spelling among dyslexic college students is often not addressed. This study reports the use of a modified Orton-Gillingham approach in comparison with a nonphonetic approach and with a group receiving no remediation. The results indicate a significant increase in spelling performance for the group receiving the modified Orton-Gillingham remediation. This contrasts with no significant change in the group receiving nonphonetic remediation and in the control group (no remediation), and indicates that adulthood is not too late for appropriate intervention for the dyslexic student. Colleges offering such intervention and the students receiving it will benefit from improved performance.     

Contextual cues and the retrieval of competing memories of goal events

In Experiment 1, four groups of rats were initially trained on a discrimination which established a stimulus as a signal for reinforcement. That signal was then presented during subsequent partial reinforcement training in a way that could potentially interfere with retrieval of the memory of nonreinforcement (S^N) on the preceding trial either because (1) thestorage and retrieval contexts for S^N were different (retrieval failure hypothesis), or (2) the memory of reinforcement produced by the signal acted as a competing memory (competing memory hypothesis). Experiment 1 supported the competing memory hypothesis. In Experiment 2, we investigated the effect of stimulus change on the capacity of the context to retrieve a competing memory of a temporally remote reinforcement event with which the context was strongly associated. Retrieval of a competing memory was impaired by differences between the storage and retrieval contexts in a manner analogous to the effect of context on retrieval of a reinforcement event memory from an immediately preceding trial.     

Datafying the teaching ‘profession’: remaking the professional teacher in the image of data

This paper explores how data-driven practices and logics have come to reshape the possibilities by which the teaching profession, and teaching professionals, can be known and valued. Informed by the literature and theorising around educational performativity, the constitutive power of numbers, and affective responses to data, it shows how different US educators experienced, and came to embody, new forms of numbers-based accountability. Drawing on interviews with teachers, and school- and district-level leaders, as well as relevant school-based documents, it is argued that such data are now both effective (i.e. they change ‘what counts’ within the profession) and affective (i.e. they produce new expectations for teachers to profess data-responsive dispositions over actual educative practices). This prevalence and use of data have combined not only to change teaching into a ‘data profession’, but also to change teachers into ‘professors’ of data.     

The development of visual short-term memory capacity in infants

Four experiments assessed visual short-term memory capacity in 4- to 13-month-old infants by comparing their looking to changing and nonchanging stimulus streams presented side by side. In each stream, 1 to 6 colored squares repeatedly appeared and disappeared. In changing streams, the color of a different randomly chosen square changed each time the display reappeared; the colors remained the same in nonchanging streams. Infants should look longer at changing streams, but only if they can remember the colors of the squares. The youngest infants preferred changing streams only when the displays contained one object, whereas older infants preferred changing streams when the displays contained up to 4 objects. Thus, visual short-term memory capacity increases significantly across the first year of life.     

Explaining the Predictive Accuracy of Teacher Judgments of Their Students' Reading Achievement: The Role of Gender,Classroom Behavior,and Emergent Literacy Skills in a Longitudinal Sample of Children Exposed to Poverty

The factors that explain why teachers are ableto accurately predict their students' futurereading ability were examined in a longitudinalstudy from first- to third-grade in childrenexposed to poverty (N = 170). Teacher ratingswere similarly based on both their students'emergent literacy skills and classroombehavior. Meanwhile, the influences ofclassroom behavior on later variability inreading skills were much less than, and almostcompletely redundant with, prior emergentliteracy. Virtually all of the shared variancebetween teacher ratings and later readingskills was explained by prior levels ofemergent literacy. Implications of the resultsand future research were discussed.     

The Implications of Cognitive Style for the Management of Student‐Supervisor Relationships

Abstract There has been little research into thesis supervision despite numerous testimonies asserting its critical importance in higher education. From the studies which have been carried out, it is evident that there are two main issues contributing to student dissatisfaction and low completion rates. One is the feeling of isolation expressed by students. The second, and most widely reported, is the nature of the relationship between supervisor and student. This paper describes an innovative programme of supervision which helps resolve the first of these issues. It also reports a preliminary study into the allocation of students to supervisors on the basis of the cognitive styles of both parties. Although, at this stage, there is no clear‐cut evidence to demonstrate the benefits of a ‘matching’ approach, it is suggested that a focus on the interaction between student and supervisor, using qualitative methods, rather than on the individuals themselves, may prove fruitful.