Temporal cuing of runs in series of reward events reduces interevent anticipation

In Experiment 1, a group of rats were runway trained on each of two reward series for 32 days. The two series consisted of three runs, the first two of which were, respectively, rewarded and nonrewarded; the third run was rewarded in one series but nonrewarded in the other. A 40-min interval separated the two series; the first and second runs within the series were separated by a 10-min interval, whereas the second and third runs were separated by a 30-sec interval. The reward (and nonreward) events and temporal cues of the two series are designated R-NR/R-NN. A second group was similarly trained, with the exception that the 10-min interval separated the second and third runs (RN-R/RN-N). Both groups developed appropriate differential running on the third run of the two series, and the RN-R/RN-N animals ran appropriately (slowly) on the second run of both series. Appropriate Run 2 performance appeared in one half of the R-NR/R-NN animals (depending upon order of series presentation); the remaining half ran faster on Run 2 of the R-NR series than on the same run of the R-NN series, an effect currently termed interevent anticipation. A cue shift phase in which all within-series intervals were 30 sec showed that the temporal intervals were controlling performance before the shift. Experiment 2 showed that interevent anticipation appears when all within-series intervals are either 10 min or 30 sec from the beginning of training, suggesting that the elimination of interevent anticipation in Experiment 1 was due to the differential cuing of runs by the temporal intervals rather than the particular interval duration. The overall findings suggest that the similarity of Run 2 and Run 3 performance termed interevent anticipation may be due to a failure to discriminate the ordinal position of runs within a series.     

Impact of early intervention on expressive and receptive language development among young children with permanent hearing loss

Along with early detection, early intervention (EI) is critical for children identified with hearing loss. Evidence indicates that many children with sensorineural hearing loss experience improved language abilities if EI services were initiated at an "early" age. The present study's objectives were to determine the impact of a state EI program on language over time of children with permanent hearing loss and evaluate the association of EI enrollment by age 6 months with early language skill development. Young children in a state EI program were included in this longitudinal study. Results indicate that children enrolled prior to age 6 months were more likely to have age-appropriate language skills at baseline than children enrolled at or after 6 months, and maintained age-appropriate skills over time. Children enrolled at or after 6 months had lower baseline skills but made significant language progress, irrespective of hearing loss severity.     

Paradigms of Gifted Education: A Guide to Theory-Based,Practice-Focused Research. Dai,D. Y., & Chen,F. (2014)

Discrepancies exist between the research literature on the social competence of gifted children and educators’ subjective experience of their students’ social problems. Five alternative hypotheses are examined which may account for discrepancies in these perspectives. To resolve these discrepancies between experience and experiment, five areas of change are suggested to improve research on the social competence of gifted children.     

A Non-authoritative Educational Metadata Ontology for Filtering and Recommending Learning Objects

Digital libraries populated with learning objects are becoming popular tools in the creation of instructional technologies. Many current efforts to create standard metadata structures that facilitate the discovery and instructional use of learning objects recommend a single, authoritative metadata record per version of the learning object. However, as we argue in this paper, a single metadata record — particularly one with fields that emphasize knowledge management and technology, while evading instructional issues — provides information insufficient to support instructional utilization decisions. To put learning objects to instructional use, users must examine the individual objects, forfeiting the supposed benefits of the metadata system. As a solution, we propose a system that includes multi-record, non-authoritative metadata focussed on the surrounding instructional context of learning objects.