Relations among academic enablers and academic achievement in children with and without high levels of parent‐rated symptoms of inattention,impulsivity, and hyperactivity

This study examined the relationships among academic enablers (i.e., engagement, interpersonal skills, motivation, study skills) and academic achievement in children with and without high levels of parent‐rated symptoms of inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity (Symptoms of IIH Group). The study included 69 participants (29 [42%] in the IIH Group and 40 [58%] in the Comparison Group), with 33 boys and 36 girls in the third through fifth grades. The researchers found significant differences on the measure of academic enablers, including engagement, interpersonal skills, motivation, and study skills, in which participants in the Comparison Group received higher scores. In addition, several academic enablers mediated the relationship between symptoms of inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity and the academic outcomes of reading and teachers' ratings of total academic skills. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Task Dependency and the Role of Category Typicality and Metamemory in the Development of an Organizational Strategy

Second and fourth graders received 1 of 3 lists of items differing in category representativeness in either a free recall or a sort-recall task. The selection of list materials permitted a separation of the effects of age differences in category knowledge from those of that knowledge per se on children's recall behavior. Proximal and distal measures of metamemory also were derived. Levels of recall and clustering were superior in the sort-recall task and for items of high category typicality. Recall also increased with age, while grade effects for clustering were restricted to the sort-recall/high typicality condition. The deliberate use of an organizational strategy increased with items' category typicality and with age, and was more frequent in the sort-recall than in the free recall task. The results were interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that most 10-year-olds are capable of strategically activating category knowledge in appropriate task environments when items of high category typicality are provided.     

GENDER COMPARISONS OF BABY BOOMERS AND FINANCIAL PREPARATION FOR RETIREMENT

This study compared men and women, focusing on three middle‐year age groups incorporating the baby boomers, in relation to the level of savings for retirement and the number of savings vehicles utilized. The research tapped into a study conducted by the National Center for Women and Retirement Research. Usable responses were received from 1,287 persons, 872 females and 415 males. Multiple linear regression identified certain personal characteristics, economic factors, psy‐chosocial factors, attitudes, and investing methods that appeared to be related to the level of savings for retirement. Certain personal characteristics, economics, and psychosocial factors were identified for the investments used. The identified factors were true for both genders, thus a profile of the person most likely to have a higher level of savings for retirement and likely to own investments emerged. The males best fit the savings and investing profiles. Neither gender was saving adequately for retirement or taking full advantage of portfolio diversification, with women the lowest. Recommendations are made, based on the findings, for educators, financial institutions and advisors, employers, and policy makers.     

How Well Do Undergraduate Research Programs Promote Engagement and Success of Students?

Assessment of undergraduate research (UR) programs using participant surveys has produced a wealth of information about design, implementation, and perceived benefits of UR programs. However, measurement of student participation university wide, and the potential contribution of research experience to student success, also require the study of extrinsic measures. In this essay, institutional data on student credit-hour generation and grade point average (GPA) from the University of Georgia are used to approach these questions. Institutional data provide a measure of annual enrollment in UR classes in diverse disciplines. This operational definition allows accurate and retrospective analysis, but does not measure all modes of engagement in UR. Cumulative GPA is proposed as a quantitative extrinsic measure of student success. Initial results show that extended participation in research for more than a single semester is correlated with an increase in GPA, even after using SAT to control for the initial ability level of the students. While the authors acknowledge that correlation does not prove causality, continued efforts to measure the impact of UR programs on student outcomes using GPA or an alternate extrinsic measure is needed for development of evidence-based programmatic recommendations.     

‘The Most Respectable Looking of Revolutionaries’

Abstract

New political histories of late nineteenth-century British political culture have closely analysed the role of language and rhetoric in popular politics. The focus on the content of political messages has meant that the ways such messages were communicated has often been overlooked, as have the varied forms of political communication in the period. This article follows on from recent work that has sought to examine the place of material and visual culture in popular politics in the period. In particular, it focuses on the links between dress, class and politics. It suggests that visual, along with material, forms of political communication remained important and that they illuminate the political culture of the period.     

Effects of the TWA strategy on expository reading comprehension of students with autism

High‐functioning students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been shown to have significant reading comprehension difficulty. This multiple baseline study examined the effect of the think before reading, think while reading, and think after reading (TWA) strategy on expository text comprehension of four boys with ASD. Following baseline, each student received six sessions of TWA instruction. Data were collected on retell and comprehension question accuracy during the baseline, intervention and maintenance phases. Results supported the effectiveness of TWA as a reading strategy to increase the expository text comprehension of students with ASD. Effects during the intervention phase were immediate and consistent for comprehension questions, with greater variability observed for retell. Data collected at maintenance suggested that the gains were sustained for both comprehension questions and retell.     

Overregularization in language acquisition.

Children extend regular grammatical patterns to irregular words, resulting in overregularizations like comed, often after a period of correct performance ("U-shaped development"). The errors seem paradigmatic of rule use, hence bear on central issues in the psychology of rules: how creative rule application interacts with memorized exceptions in development, how overgeneral rules are unlearned in the absence of parental feedback, and whether cognitive processes involve explicit rules or parallel distributed processing (connectionist) networks. We remedy the lack of quantitative data on overregularization by analyzing 11,521 irregular past tense utterances in the spontaneous speech of 83 children. Our findings are as follows. (1) Overregularization errors are relatively rare (median 2.5% of irregular past tense forms), suggesting that there is no qualitative defect in children's grammars that must be unlearned. (2) Overregularization occurs at a roughly constant low rate from the 2s into the school-age years, affecting most irregular verbs. (3) Although overregularization errors never predominate, one aspect of their purported U-shaped development was confirmed quantitatively: an extended period of correct performance precedes the first error. (4) Overregularization does not correlate with increases in the number or proportion of regular verbs in parental speech, children's speech, or children's vocabularies. Thus, the traditional account in which memory operates before rules cannot be replaced by a connectionist alternative in which a single network displays rotelike or rulelike behavior in response to changes in input statistics. (5) Overregularizations first appear when children begin to mark regular verbs for tense reliably (i.e., when they stop saying Yesterday I walk). (6) The more often a parent uses an irregular form, the less often the child overregularizes it. (7) Verbs are protected from overregularization by similar-sounding irregulars, but they are not attracted to overregularization by similar-sounding regulars, suggesting that irregular patterns are stored in an associative memory with connectionist properties, but that regulars are not. We propose a simple explanation. Children, like adults, mark tense using memory (for irregulars) and an affixation rule that can generate a regular past tense form for any verb. Retrieval of an irregular blocks the rule, but children's memory traces are not strong enough to guarantee perfect retrieval. When retrieval fails, the rule is applied, and overregularization results.     

Autonomy-supportive teaching and its antecedents: differences between teachers and teaching assistants and the predictive role of perceived competence

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Research predicated on self-determination theory (SDT) has established a positive relationship between autonomy-supportive teaching and a range of...