Overcoming MSW Students' Reluctance to Engage in Research

Social work students are typically reluctant to engage in research. The research partnership model takes a service-learning approach, allowing students to work with data from a community agency and resulting in a final paper with all the sections of an empirical journal article. Use of this model in teaching social work research enhances student motivation, learning, and skills through hands-on activities within an authentic context, and by using group support with individual accountability, structured and incremental learning opportunities, and teaching from a strengths-based perspective.     

Visual orienting in college athletes: explorations of athlete type and gender

Covert orienting was measured in 50 college athletes and 51 nonathletes of both genders. Visual environments of the sports were both static (swimming, track) and dynamic (soccer, volleyball). Participants made speeded responses in a task measuring vigilance, alerting, automatic orienting, voluntary orienting, modulation of automatic orienting, and modulation of inhibition of return. Gender differences werefound in the overall response times of nonathletes and in the alerting measures for all participants. However, all participants were similar in their automatic orienting. Sport-specific effects were seen in voluntary orienting and in the modulation of automatic orienting. These gender and sports-related findings are interpreted in light of the experience athletes have in the dynamic control of spatial attention.     

One Thing Behind Another: a school based study of children's drawing abilities

Abstract Young children do not typically represent in their drawings the occlusion of a farther object by a nearer one. In response to such arrays, they frequently show either a horizontal or a vertical bias, i.e. either depicting the two objects side by side or one above the other. Though there seems to be a strong bias towards depicting array‐ rather than view‐specific information, this tendency does not seem to indicate any limitation in graphic skills. This experiment attempts to assess the differences in drawing response across two conditions—one which seems to demand view specificity, i.e. a games condition, and one which apparently does not. In a communication game, the drawings were produced by one child, designated as ‘Artist’, so that the other child, assigned to the role of ‘Detective’, could identify the chair which the ‘Artist’ had sat on. It is suggested that instructional effects, together with initial decisions to communicate with peers or adults, may be implicated in the relatively greater incidence of occlusion output in the standard over the games condition, particularly in the middle age ranges.     

Internationalisation and indigenisation in Papua New Guinea’s universities: promoting authentic agency

ABSTRACT

In uncertain times for higher education learning communities, the risks of societal and epistemic dependence on a single globally dominant set of academic knowledge practices are evident. Nonetheless, many higher education institutions in developing nations struggle to achieve international presence unless they uncritically adopt these dominant practices, even where they recognise the need to use and promote local knowledge systems. We explore these dynamics in postcolonial Papua New Guinea, through an assessment of the intentions for internationalisation of the six PNG universities and barriers to agency. Our approach recognises the dialectical relationship between ‘internationalisation’ and ‘indigenisation’. We suggest that a pervasive but narrow view of indigenisation, emphasising the localisation of university staff, has hampered other forms of both indigenisation and internationalisation, producing more stasis than synthesis within PNG’s universities. Effective international agency by PNG universities, and their partners, requires more critical and continuous discourse between the international and the indigenous.     

Exploring the Co‐Development of Reading Fluency and Reading Comprehension: A Twin Study

This study explores the co‐development of two related but separate reading skills, reading fluency and reading comprehension, across Grades 1–4. A bivariate biometric dual change score model was applied to longitudinal data collected from 1,784 twin pairs between the ages of 6 and 10 years. Grade 1 skills were influenced by highly overlapping genetic and environmental factors. Growth in both skills was influenced by highly overlapping shared environmental factors. Cross‐lagged parameters indicated bidirectional effects, with stronger effects from fluency to comprehension change than from comprehension to fluency change.     

Theory-based Correlations and Their Role in Children's Concepts

Recent accounts of conceptual development have emphasized the important role intuitive theories play in concept formation; however, it is still not clear exactly how these theories exert their influence. We present evidence that elementary school age children use theories to link together specific features associated with individual concepts. The results of our first experiment indicate that theory-based correlations play a prominent role in typicality judgments and in decisions about category membership. In a second experiment, we demonstrate that children's theories play an important role in determining which attributes will be considered most central to the concept. The results of these studies suggest that feature correlations can serve to link children's concepts with their intuitive theories of the world.     

Ability,demography, learning style,and personality trait correlates of student preference for assessment method

More than 400 students from four universities in America and Britain completed measures of learning style preference, general knowledge (as a proxy for intelligence), and preference for examination method. Learning style was consistently associated with preferences: surface learners preferred multiple choice and group work options, and viewed essay‐type and dissertation options less favourably. Deep learners, on the other hand, favoured essay‐type and oral exams as well as final dissertations. Males favoured oral (viva voce) exams and females coursework assessment. Extraverts preferred multiple choice, oral, and group work assessment, while openness was positively associated with essays and oral exams but negatively associated with multiple choice and group work. Regression analysis showed that personality, learning style, general knowledge, and demographic factors accounted for 5–10% of the variance in preferred examination technique. Results in part replicate earlier studies and are discussed in terms of changes in examination methods.     

An empirical analysis of an alternative configuration of the Academic Motivation Scale

The purpose of this study was to examine an alternative configuration of the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS), a psychometric instrument used as a measure of academic motivation in various academic environments. The analyses utilised data from a convenience sample of 2354 business students, broken into two random subsamples of 1177 cases. Exploratory factor analysis of the 28 AMS scale items was conducted on the estimation sample. The results indicated good model fit for a four-factor configuration consisting of amotivation, external regulation, identified regulation, and intrinsic motivation as indicated by factor loadings, as well as internal consistency and reliability statistics.

Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on the holdout sample to independently assess the construct validity and internal consistency of the item loadings on the reconfigured scale. Results indicated good model fit for the four-factor configuration and a significant loss of fit for competing three- and one-factor models. The uncovered factor structure advances our understanding of how the items on this scale cluster into theoretically meaningful constructs. This knowledge may be utilised in research designed to further assess the impact of motivational states on educational outcomes such as academic performance, absenteeism, dropout rates, etc.     

Evidence for Common Etiological Influences on Early Literacy Skills in Kindergarten

Understanding how the etiology of print awareness and phonological awareness are related to the etiology of decoding can provide insights into the development of word reading. To address this issue, we examined the degree of overlap among etiological influences of prereading skills in 1,252 twin pairs in kindergarten. Genetic, shared environmental, and nonshared environmental factors were significant for all three literacy phenotypes. The majority of genetic and shared environmental influence on decoding was due to common factors that included print awareness and phonological awareness. Notably, only a single genetic factor contributed to all three literacy phenotypes, but there was additional shared environmental influence common to phonological awareness and decoding. Findings suggest commonalities in the etiology of prereading literacy skills that could inform work on the development of reading skill.