Memory and Executive Functioning in 12‐Year‐Old Children With a History of Institutional Rearing

We examined visual recognition memory and executive functioning (spatial working memory [SWM], spatial planning, rule learning, and attention shifting) in 12‐year‐olds (n = 150) who participated in the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a randomized controlled trial of foster care for institutionally reared children. Similar to prior reports at 8 years of age, institutionally reared children showed significant deficits in visual recognition memory and SWM. Deficits in attention shifting and rule learning were also apparent at this time point. These data suggest that early experiences continue to shape the development of memory, learning, and executive functioning processes in preadolescence, which may explain broader cognitive and learning difficulties commonly associated with severe early life neglect.     

Beyond the Tyranny of the Real: Revisiting Burke's Pentad as Research Method for Professional Communication

This article answers Carl Hemdl's call for furthering critical approaches to research in professional communication by forwarding Kenneth Burke's concepts of symbolic action, dramatism, and the pentad. This article illustrates, through an analysis of data gathered in a case study of technical writers, how Burke provides us with tools that can produce more varied terministic screens for how critical researchers conceptualize, interpret, and analyze workplace communication.     

The Relations between Frontal Brain Electrical Activity and Cognitive Development during Infancy

The relations between changes in the scalp-recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) and the development of the ability to perform successfully 2 cognitive tasks attributed to frontal lobe functioning were examined in 13 infants from 7 to 12 months of age. Infants successful in performing the A-not-B task with increasingly longer delays across the second half of the first year of life showed changes in power in scalp-recorded brain electrical activity in the frontal region and an increase in anterior/posterior EEG coherence. Infants with rapid mastery of object retrieval did not differ in frontal EEG development from infants who exhibited the normal developmental progression in object retrieval performance. In a task examining inhibition of reaching to a novel toy, there were no differences in frontal EEG as a function of performance. Results from a cross-sectional sample revealed similar findings. These data confirm work with nonhuman primates on the importance of maturation of frontal cortex in the successful performance on certain tasks (A-not-B), but do not confirm nonhuman primate data on the importance of frontal cortex for other tasks (object retrieval). The data also suggest that the electroencephalogram may be useful as a noninvasive measure of central nervous system development during the first year of life.     

Constructing a Pragmatic Science of Learning and Instruction with Functional Contextualism

Constructivism has been embraced by many in the field of instructional design and technology (IDT), but its advocates have struggled to move beyond theory to practice or to empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach. As an alternative to constructivism, a new perspective emerging in psychology, known as functional contextualism, is presented. Like constructivism, functional contextualism also rejects objectivist epistemology, but provides a much more coherent philosophical basis on which to build an empirical science of learning and instruction. The philosophical worldview known as contextualism is reviewed to outline the similarities and differences between constructivism and functional contextualism, and the key characteristics of functional contextualism and the science it supports, behavior analysis, are described. Implications of functional contextualism for research and practice in IDT are then explored. Eric Fox [eric.fox@wmich.edu] is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Western Michigan University. This article was written while he was a doctoral student in the Learning & Instructional Technology program at Arizona State University.     

Overlapping symptoms of substance abuse and learning handicaps: implications for educators

The effects of substance abuse have produced a population of students who exhibit behaviors similar to the behaviors of many youth with learning problems. Often such students are mislabeled as learning handicapped (including learning disability, behavioral disorder, and attention deficit/hyperactive disorder), when their primary problem is actually one of chemical abuse. The following issues are examined: (a) overlapping symptoms of chemical impairment and learning handicap that may result in misdiagnosis, (b) student populations at high risk for chemical abuse, (c) preventive measures, and (d) intervention and treatment for chemically impaired students.     

What the children’s literature of war is telling the children

This article discusses several issues arising from some wide reading of children’s literature of war and peace as part of a Comenius (EU) collaboration with partners in Belgium and Portugal. The focus here is on the content of the books rather than ways of telling. The issues raised concern national identities, gaps in the collective texts which perhaps reflect national identities, the emphasis on the home front rather than battles, the usefulness of children in wartime compared to most modern child readers, the ethical issues common to the literature in all three countries, the allegorical war literature available for young children, and, increasingly, the more realistic literature for the same group including stories of the holocaust.     

The Deep-Time Digital Earth program: data-driven discovery in geosciences

Current barriers hindering data-driven discoveries in deep-time Earth (DE) include: substantial volumes of DE data are not digitized; many DE databases do not adhere to FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) principles; we lack a systematic knowledge graph for DE; existing DE databases are geographically heterogeneous; a significant fraction of DE data is not in open-access formats; tailored tools are needed. These challenges motivate the Deep-Time Digital Earth (DDE) program initiated by the International Union of Geological Sciences and developed in cooperation with national geological surveys, professional associations, academic institutions and scientists around the world. DDE’s mission is to build on previous research to develop a systematic DE knowledge graph, a FAIR data infrastructure that links existing databases and makes dark data visible, and tailored tools for DE data, which are universally accessible. DDE aims to harmonize DE data, share global geoscience knowledge and facilitate data-driven discovery in the understanding of Earth''s evolution.     

Following the action in action learning: towards ethnomethodological studies of (critical) action learning

Action learning is a pedagogical practice that helps participants learn by talking about their workplace action with fellow participants (‘comrades in adversity’) in their action learning set. This paper raises questions about the action in action learning, such as: how do members of an action learning set learn from and through each other? How do they learn through their developing conversation and interaction?

To answer such questions, I argue that, ‘ethnomethodology’ (the study of ‘member's methods’ or ‘folk methods’ for doing any kind of practical action) is useful for showing the intricacy of the practical learning process in action learning, as in learning in action, more generally. The paper illustrates the conversational and interactional work of members doing things and learning together in action (for example discovering things in science and in board meetings); and argues that this approach may also be used to study action learning in practice.     

The Effects of Early Experience on Face Recognition: An Event-Related Potential Study of Institutionalized Children in Romania

Data are reported from 3 groups of children residing in Bucharest, Romania. Face recognition in currently institutionalized, previously institutionalized, and never-institutionalized children was assessed at 3 time points: preintervention ( n  = 121), 30 months of age ( n  = 99), and 42 months of age ( n  = 77). Children watched photographs of caregiver and stranger faces while event-related potentials were recorded. Results demonstrate that institutionalized children show pervasive cortical hypoarousal in response to faces and that foster care is somewhat effective in remediating this deficit by 42 months of age. All 3 groups of children distinguished between the familiar and unfamiliar faces. These results have the potential to inform an understanding of the role of early experience in the development of the neural systems that subserve face recognition.