Something About the Way You Speak: A Meta-analysis on Children’s Linguistic-based Social Preferences

There is growing interest in the role of linguistic cues (accents, dialects, language) in driving children’s social preferences. This meta-analysis integrated 131 effect sizes involving 2,680 infants and children from 2 days old to 11 years. Overall, children prefer native-accent, native-dialect, and native-language speakers over non-native counterparts (d = 0.57). Meta-regression highlighted that bilinguals (d = 0.93) do not exhibit less native-speaker preference compared to monolinguals (d = 0.62). Children displayed stronger preferences based on accent (d = 1.04) than dialect (d = 0.44) and language (d = 0.39). Children’s cultural background, exposure to non-native speech, age, and preference measure were not significant moderators. The data are discussed in light of several theoretical explanations for when and why children show linguistic-based social preferences.     

Infants' perception of object trajectories

Filling in the gaps in what humans see is a fundamental perceptual skill, but little is known about the developmental origins of occlusion perception. Three experiments were conducted with infants between 2 and 6 months of age to investigate perception of the continuity of an object trajectory that was briefly occluded. The pattern of results across experiments provided little evidence of veridical responses to trajectory occlusion in the youngest infants, but by 6 months, perceptual completion was more robust. Four-month-olds' responses indicated that they perceived continuity under a short duration of occlusion, but when the object was out of sight for a longer interval, they appeared to perceive the trajectory as discontinuous. These results suggest that perceptual completion of a simple object trajectory (and, by logical necessity, veridical object perception) is not functional at birth but emerges across the first several months after onset of visual experience.     

Beyond Average: Contemporary statistical techniques for analysing student evaluations of teaching

Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) have been used to evaluate higher education teaching performance for decades. Reporting SET results often involves the extraction of an average for some set of course metrics, which facilitates the comparison of teaching teams across different organisational units. Here, we draw attention to ongoing problems with the naive application of this approach. Firstly, a specific average value may arise from data that demonstrates very different patterns of student satisfaction. Furthermore, the use of distance measures (e.g. an average) for ordinal data can be contested, and finally, issues of multiplicity increasingly plague approaches using hypothesis testing. It is time to advance the methodology of the field. We demonstrate how multinomial distributions and hierarchical Bayesian methods can be used to contextualise the SET scores of a course to different organisational units and student cohorts, and then show how this approach can be used to extract sensible information about how a distribution is changing.     

Beyond mere knowledge of mathematics: The importance of knowing-to act in the moment

Knowing-to is active knowledge which is present in the moment when it is required. To try to produce knowing-to, formal education focuses on forms of knowing which are easier to teach and to test: knowing-that (factual), knowing-how (technique and skills), and knowing-why (having a story in order to structure actions and from which to reconstruct actions). Together these constitute knowing-about the subject. Expertise is demonstrated by being able to respond to assessments: to write essays and to solve routine problems. The central problem of education is that knowing-about does not in itself guarantee knowing-to, as teachers have attested throughout the ages. For example, Edward Fitzgerald (Harrison, 1937) captures it beautifully in one stanza of his purported translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:Myself when young did eagerly frequent,Doctor and Saint and heard great argument,About it and about: but ever more Came out by the same door as in I went (p. 341).Instead of trying to reach definitions, we illustrate distinctions amongst kinds of knowing as used by various authors in the past. Then we turn to our own experience, for it is in one's own experience that one can locate and enliven sources of metaphoric resonances and metonymic triggers which constitute understanding. Drawing on our experience we distinguish knowing-to from other forms of knowing, and explore implications of that distinction for teaching and learning mathematics. We propose that knowing-to act in the moment depends on the structure of attention in the moment, depends on what one is aware of. Educating this awareness is most effectively done by labelling experiences in which powers have been exhibited, and developing a rich network of connections and triggers so that actions come to mind. No-one can act if they are unaware of a possibility to act; no-one can act unless they have an act to perform.This revised version was published online in September 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Can parents and teachers provide a reliable and valid report of behavioral inhibition?

Reliability and validity of parent and teacher report of behavioral inhibition (BI) was examined among children aged 3 to 5 years. Confirmatory factor analysis supported 6 correlated factors reflecting specific BI contexts, each loading on a single, higher order factor of BI. Internal consistency was acceptable, with moderate stability over 1 year and strong correlation with a brief inhibition subscale from a temperament questionnaire. Children who were rated by mothers and teachers as high BI took longer to initiate contact with a stranger, spoke less often and for shorter periods, and required more prompting to elicit speech compared with low-BI peers in a simulated stranger interaction task. Father report of BI was significantly associated with mean duration of speech and eye gaze.     

Decisional deprivation among senior staff in secondary schools

A survey of secondary school deputy heads and heads of science departments indicates that, despite the trend towards participative school management in recent years, there remain important areas of decisional deprivation common to both groups and that these centre on school finance. The areas of decisional deprivation and equil‐ibruim, however, are not apparently related to the management priorities of either group. A strategy is proposed, based on careful and detailed task definition, aimed at both reducing deprivation and enabling deputies and heads of department to play an even more effective part in school management than currently, suggesting that their management priorities, and those of their heads, require adjustment.     

Telepresence and the Exemplification Effects of Disaster News

Exemplification theory (Zillmann, 1999 Zillmann , D. (1999). Exemplification theory: Judging the whole by the sum of its parts. Media Psychology , 1, 69–94.[Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 2002 Zillmann , D. ( 2002 ). Exemplification theory of media influence . In J. Bryant &; D. Zillmann (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research ( , 2nd ed. , pp. 213 – 245 ). Mahwah , NJ : LEA . [Google Scholar]; Zillmann &; Brosius, 2000 Zillmann , D. , &; Brosius , H.-B. ( 2000 ). Exemplification in communication: The influence of case reports on the perception of issues . Mahwah , NJ : LEA . [Google Scholar]) suggests exemplar representations in media content may cause people to make overestimated judgments about phenomena included in this content. The current study sought to examine the role telepresence plays in increasing this exemplification effect. Two-hundred and seventeen participants viewed a news story about Hurricane Katrina using one of three channels: HDTV, NTSC, or on an iPod. Data were consistent with predictions as participants who experienced greater spatial presence and perceptual realism while watching this news story reported increased judgments of the severity of hurricanes and also reported a greater likelihood to engage in behaviors associated with hurricanes. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Don't just look,listen: uncovering children's cognitive strategies during spelling-related activities

This paper reports on a study that used verbal protocols to uncover the cognitive strategies of children from Sydney, Australia, aged 8- to 9-years-old, when they were engaged in a range of word sorting and editing activities. The children's cognitive strategies have been analysed in terms of a developmental stage theory of spelling. The findings are contrasted with the skills and characteristics of competent spellers at each recognised stage of spelling development. The paper considers the orthographic knowledge and spelling strategies of children that are evident when they are asked to ‘think aloud’ about English words and contrasts this with what is (or is not) captured through the developmental stage theory of spelling. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for the findings on classroom practice.