Fostering house mice onto rats and deer mice: Effects on response to species odors

Newborn wild house mice (Mus musculus) were fostered upon maternal conspecifics, prairie deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus bairdi) or laboratory rats (Rattus norvegicus). Male subjects were weaned into individual cages, in which they remained until testing commenced. At 35 days of age, subjects were given a four-choice test in which they had the opportunity to investigate tunnels scented with clean wood chips or with chips soiled by an adult male conspecific, deer mouse or rat. Compared to theMus-nursed andPeromyscus-nursed mice,Rattus-nursed mice were more active during the test and less reluctant to investigate theRattus-scented tunnel. These results were replicated in a two-choice test (Mus- vs.Rattus-scented tunnels) that included a group of mice fostered onto conspecifics, but withRattus scents present in the maternity cage throughout the nursing period. Early exposure to the scent ofRattus had no significant effects on the responses ofMus-nursed mice to the scent ofRattus.     

Education,democracy and development in a period of revolutionary change

The observation of the present global scene raises questions about the socioeconomic, political and cultural framework laying the ground for a constructive interaction between the three forces which greatly determine people's existence and survival, namely Development, Democracy and Education. In this approach reference is made to John Dewey's classical remarks about the interrelation between Democracy and Education. They are examined in the light of specific historical conditions which are exemplified by references to the history of the Bohemian Lands and the first Czechoslovak Republic as well as by a critical view of current events, revealing the anti-human perversion of Dewey's model.

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Zusammenfassung Ein Blick auf die gegenwärtige weltweite Szene wirft Fragen auf nach dem politischen und sozio-ökonomischen Rahmen, der Grundlage einer konstruktiven Interaktion der drei Kräfte ist, die vor allem die Existenz und das Überleben der Menschen bestimmen, nämlich Entwicklung, Demokratie und Bildung und Erziehung. Dieser Ansatz bezieht sich auf John Deweysklassische Bemerkungen über die Wechselwirkung von Demokratie und Bildung und Erziehung. Diese werden im Lichte spezifischer historischer Bedingungen untersucht, welche gleichermaßen am Beispiel der Geschichte der Böhmischen Länder und der ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik veranschaulicht werden, wie durch einen kritischen Ausblick auf zeitgenössische Ereignisse, die die menschenfeindliche Perversion von Deweys Modell offenbaren.

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Résumé L'observation de la scène actuelle soulève des questions au sujet du cadre socio-économique, politique et culturel qui constitue le fondement d'une interaction constructive entre les trois forces qui déterminent essentiellement l'existence et la survie des peuples, à savoir le développement, la démocratie et l'éducation. Cette approche se réfère aux remarques classiques de John Dewey sur l'interrelation entre la démocratie et l'éducation. On les examine en fonction de conditions historiques spécifiques illustrées par l'histoire des pays de la Bohème et de la première République tchécoslovaque ainsi que par une vue critique des événements actuels, qui révèlent la perversion misanthropique du modèle de Dewey.

     

The role of IQ, expertise, and motivation in the recall of familiar information

High- and low-IQ children in the first, third, and fifth grades performed two free-recall tasks: a sort-recall task with sets of categorically related pictures, and a class-recall task, with children recalling the current members of their school class. All children were deemed to be experts concerning the composition of their school class, but, unlike experts in other domains, had no special motivation associated with their expertise. Recall and clustering on both tasks were high. The high-IQ children performed better than low-IQ children only on the sort-recall task. IQ was significantly correlated with measures of performance on the sort-recall task but not on the class-recall task. The results reflect the fact that the memory benefits associated with being an expert (here, elimination of IQ effects) are related to the greater knowledge the expert possesses and not to factors of motivation.     

Using Research to Improve the Cost Effectiveness of Early Intervention Programs

Since the implementation of Public Law 99457, the number of children served by early intervention programs has increased substantially. This article describes the d e s of advocacy and science in contributing to that expansion. A biosocial systems model of early development is used to explain how comparative experimental research can help to improve the cost effectiveness of early intervention programs. Examples of the benefits of such research are taken from the other articles reported in this issue of Early Education and Development.     

Predictors of reading literacy

Two reading literacy/text comprehension tests with different demands (on-line comprehension vs. memory-based comprehension) were administered to 6,104 15-year-old students from all German states and school types. The combined and specific effects of proximal and distal variables from small-scale psychological research as well as from large-scale educational studies on each text comprehension measure were investigated. Metacognitive knowledge, decoding speed, and the number of books at home (as an indicator for family background) were found to have specific and large effects on on-line comprehension and accounted for 46 percent of the variance with the highest effects for metacognition. Metacognitive knowledge was also highly predictive when the effects of specific prior knowledge and thematic interest on memory-based text comprehension were estimated simultaneously. In addition, students who showed relative strength in building up a coherent representation of specific texts (memory-based text comprehension) were characterised by high amounts of prior knowledge and thematic interest thereby underlining the importance of these student characteristics for learning.     

Accuracy of metacognitive judgments as a moderator of learner control effectiveness in problem-solving tasks

A possible explanation for why students do not benefit from learner-controlled instruction is that they are not able to accurately monitor their own performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether and how the accuracy of metacognitive judgments made during training moderates the effect of learner control on performance when solving genetics tasks. Eighty-six undergraduate students solved self-selected genetics tasks using either a full learner control or a restricted learner control. Results indicated that learner control effectiveness was moderated by the absolute accuracy (i.e., absolute bias) of metacognitive judgments, and this accuracy was a better predictor of learning performance for full learner control than for restricted learner control. Furthermore, students’ prior knowledge predicted absolute accuracy of both ease-of-learning judgments (EOLs) and retrospective confidence judgments (RCJs) during training, with higher prior knowledge resulting in a better absolute accuracy. Overall, monitoring guided control, that is, EOLs predicted time-on-task and invested mental effort regardless of the degree of learner control, whereas RCJs predicted the total training time, but not the number of tasks selected during training. These results suggest that monitoring accuracy plays an important role in effective regulation of learning from problem-solving tasks, and provide further evidence that metacognitive judgments affect study time allocation in problem solving context.     

Teacher–student interaction in contemporary science classrooms: is participation still a question of gender?†

We show that boys still have a greater access to the space for interaction in science classrooms, which is unexpected since in Sweden today girls perform better in these subjects than boys. Results from video-recorded verbal communication, referred to here as interaction, show that the distribution of teacher–student interaction in the final year of lower secondary school follows the same patterns as in the 1980s. The interaction space for all kinds of talk continues to be distributed according to the two-thirds rule for communication in science classrooms as described by previous research. We also show that the overall interaction space in science classrooms has increased for both boys and girls when talk about science alone is considered. Another finding which follows old patterns is that male teachers still address boys more often than girls. This holds true both for general talk and for talk about science. If a more even distribution of teacher–student interaction is desirable, these results once again need to be considered. More research needs to be undertaken before the association between girls’ attitudes and interest in science in terms of future career choice and the opportunity to participate in teacher–student interaction is more clearly understood.