Getting Comfortable with Discomfort: Preparing Counselor Trainees to Broach Racial,Ethnic, and Cultural Factors with Clients during Counseling

Counselors’ considerations of racial and cultural factors in the lives and experiences of clients enhances counseling outcomes. Acknowledgement of cultural factors enhances counselor credibility, client satisfaction, and the depth of client disclosure. This article opens with an overview of the Continuum of Broaching Behavior (Day-Vines et al. 2007), continues with a case illustration that enumerates categories along the continuum, provides empirical support for the continuum, and closes with a set of instructional strategies for counselor educators to infuse within a multicultural counseling course.     

Achievement Motivation Goals in Relation to Academic Performance in Traditional and Nontraditional College Students

This study extended Dweck's model of achievement motivation to the collegiate level, and it is the first to apply this model to nontraditional students. We examined the relationship between goal orientations and academic performance in 262 undergraduate students grouped by nontraditional vs. traditional status. Although both groups rated themselves higher on learning goals than on performance goals, non-traditional students endorsed learning goals even more strongly than their traditional peers. Goal orientations were a better predictor of academic success than student status. Consistent with Dweck's model, a learning goal orientation was positively related to successful academic performance for both groups. The relationship between performance goals and academic success was less straightforward, but students who rated both goal orientations as relatively weak had the lowest cumulative GPAs. Traditional and nontraditional students differed on variables that were inversely related to academic performance. Less successful traditional students endorsed irrational beliefs (a possible index of learned helplessness), while less successful nontraditional students worked more hours at a paid job.     

Philosophy of Communication: Qualitative Research,Questions in Action

Qualitative research meets and gathers insight and information, commencing with the particular. Qualitative research moves us from reductive and abstract engagement to experience of the subject matter before us. Philosophy of communication, understood as qualitative research in action, centers inquiry on questioning, reading, writing, editing, thinking, and interpretation. These five qualitative acts of inquiry are not isolated categories, yet they are simultaneously distinct characteristics within philosophy of communication scholarship. I contend that these five coordinates facilitate the performative engagement of philosophy of communication inquiry. I offer a story centered on five research coordinates, explicated with scholars repeatedly referenced in philosophy of communication literature. I engage these scholars in a manner akin to Walter Benjamin’s (1968) “pearl diving,” seeking insight from selected parts of their copious contributions. Their collective insights function as threads with which I weave a story about the doing of philosophy of communication.     

I Remember You: Independence and the Binomial Model

We focus on the problem of ignoring statistical independence. A binomial experiment is used to determine whether judges could match, based on looks alone, dogs to their owners. The experimental design introduces dependencies such that the probability of a given judge correctly matching a dog and an owner changes from trial to trial. We show how this dependence alters the probability of a successful match of dog to owner, and thus alters the expected number of successful matches and the variance of this expected quantity. Finally, we show that a false assumption of independence that results in incorrect probability calculations changes the probability of incorrectly rejecting the null hypothesis (i.e. the Type I error).     

Learning via mnemonic pictures: Analysis of the presidential process

In three experiments, junior high school students learned the numerical order of 14 U.S. presidents according to either a complex mnemonic strategy or their own techniques. Reliable performancepattern differences between the two groups were detected, both in the presence and absence of overall level-of-recall differences. Chief among the pattern differences were the classic serial-position profiles produced by control subjects, but not by those using mnemonic strategies, and the slower response times (suggesting a more complex retrieval process) of subjects using mnemonic strategies.     

Toward a computational model of tutoring

This article addresses several issues around successful integration of instructional science and computer science. It addresses issues of building computational models of tutoring and incorporating instructional principles into them. The first barrier to overcome in working toward this integration is development of principled programs in which cognitive principles about learning and teaching are realized at a level of granularity consistent with building computational models. Such cognitive studies would facilitate fine-grained modeling of learning and teaching. The second barrier to overcome is the gap between the two disciplines in terms of goals, motivations, literature, and even definitions of concepts. This situation suggests that effort should be concentrated on two areas: research on understanding basic principles behind learning and teaching, and the establishment of clearer lines of communication between instructional and computer scientists. This article addresses both these issues. An earlier version of this article will appear as a chapter in the NATO Workshop volumeFoundations and Frontiers in Instructional Computing Systems, P. Winne and M. Jones, Eds., Springer-Verlag, NY.