Changing Minds With the Story of Adaptation: Strategies for Teaching Young Children About Natural Selection

Research Findings: Educational guidelines recommend a delayed, piecemeal approach to instruction on adaptation by natural selection. This approach is questionable given suggestions that older students’ pervasive misunderstandings about adaptation are rooted in cognitive biases that develop early. In response to this, Kelemen et al. (2014) recently showed that young children can learn a basic yet comprehensive explanation of adaptation by natural selection from a picture storybook intervention. However, this research was conducted in a laboratory-based setting with children from middle and higher socioeconomic backgrounds. To further explore the intervention’s efficacy, this investigation examined whether Kelemen et al.’s (2014, Experiment 2) findings extend to a more diverse sample of children tested in a more naturalistic setting, namely, after-school programs. After a 10-min picture storybook reading that described adaptation within a fictitious but realistic mammal species, 5- to 6- and 7- to 8-year-old children’s learning of adaptation was examined. Results revealed that younger and older children benefitted from the intervention; however, older children displayed pronounced learning and generalization. Practice or Policy: Findings confirm that children are capable of learning complex biological ideas and that comprehensive storybook interventions are simple but powerful teaching tools. Implications for instruction on natural selection are discussed.     

Teachers’ perceptions of the benefits and challenges of three-dimensional virtual worlds for social skills practice

This case study describes how a systematic 7-Step Virtual Worlds Teacher Training Workshop guided the enculturation of 18 special education teachers into three-dimensional virtual worlds. The main purpose was to enable these teachers to make informed decisions about the usability of virtual worlds for students with social skills challenges, such as students with autism. A 10-point rating scale was used to measure the perceived usability of virtual worlds for social skills practice. Although the mean usability was higher after the intervention, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test did not reveal a statistically significant difference between the mean ratings (p = .14). A majority of the participants (76%) tended to be supportive of the idea of using virtual worlds in special education. Three key themes emerged from the qualitative instruments, namely, Virtual World Pedagogy, Virtual World Benefits, and Virtual World Challenges, encompassing 18 codes overall. This article focuses on the benefits and challenges of virtual worlds for social skills practice as perceived by special education teachers. Social skills practice and repeated practice opportunities in a stress-reduced environment emerged as the key benefits, although these affordances were affected by various challenges. The study concludes with suggestions for future research for special education purposes.     

Higher education experiences of elite student-para-athletes in the UK

This article presents the narrative accounts of six elite student-para-athletes attending higher education full time in the UK. Whilst literature concerning the student-athlete population in the UK is growing, there is no research at present that brings to the fore the voices of student-athletes who represent their country in Paralympic sports. In addition, research concerning the experiences of higher education students with disabilities in the UK is heavily concerned with the experience of learning as opposed to the more nuanced experiences of ‘being’ a university student. Accounts concerning the lived experience of higher education were gathered via semi-structured interviews and analysed through a process of interpretative phenomenological analysis producing an intricate, intimate and personal theme for each participant. Analysed and presented as individual case studies, the research demonstrates the uniqueness of experience despite the existence of common and shared life environments. The accounts explore three life-worlds – university, elite sport and disability – and expose the difference in meaning-making by each participant to the identities of ‘athlete’, ‘student’ and ‘disabled’, specifically within the context of higher education. The accounts are presented as three themes that illuminate the contrast in experience: (1) university as a normative and positive experience; (2) university as a disappointing and hindering experience; and (3) university as an experience of personal salvation and purpose. Findings are mapped to the social-relational model of disability to better understand the relationship between individual perception, impairment and environment.     

Content and impact of articles published by school psychology faculty

School Psychology faculty members are expected to publish articles in peer‐reviewed journals that impact the fields of education and psychology. Both the content and the impact of the articles school psychologists publish may change across time and differ from other disciplines. The current analysis sought to understand average article impact, content, and research focus, and to describe those articles that have the highest impact factor. All of the articles (n = 3670) published by school psychology faculty between January, 2010 and December, 2015 were collected and examined. Three reviewers were trained over 2 hr to read abstracts and to classify the content of those abstracts. The literature was systematically classified into four categories: assessment, consultation, intervention, and professional issues. The title, keywords, and abstract were used to find the category of best fit for each publication. The majority of articles published fall into the broad category of Professional Issues. The average article is cited 17.68 times in Google Scholar and 4.9 times in Web of Science. These data will be useful to understand publication content trends and identify gaps in research.     

Validity of the comprehensive receptive and expressive vocabulary test in assessment of children with speech and learning problems

The current researchers investigated construct, predictive, and differential validity for the Comprehensive Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Test (CREVT). Participants were 243 public school students, ages 5.5 to 17.25 years. They represented four primary disabilities: Learning Disability (n = 115), Learning Disability with Speech Impairment (n = 29), Mental Retardation (n = 40), and Speech Impairment (n = 59). Adequate construct validity for the CREVT was documented, using the Wechsler Intelligence Test for Children–III as a criterion. Also, the CREVT significantly predicted the scores on the Wide Range Achievement Test–3. Lastly, the CREVT effectively differentiated between students with disabilities. These findings suggest that the CREVT may be helpful in identifying the presence of learning problems. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 39: 613–619, 2002.     

Increasing on‐task behavior in the classroom: Extension of self‐monitoring strategies

We examined the effectiveness of a tactile self‐monitoring prompt to increase on‐task behaviors among 3 elementary‐aged students in a special education classroom. Students were taught to self‐monitor their attention by using the MotivAider (MotivAider, 2000), an electronic beeper that vibrates to provide a tactile cue to self‐monitor. An ABAB reversal design was used for each participant. Results indicated that upon implementation of the self‐monitoring intervention, students increased on‐task behavior from a mean of 55% to more than 90% of the intervals observed. Additionally, teachers and students provided high ratings of treatment acceptability of this self‐monitoring intervention. Limitations, implications, and future directions of these findings are discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 43: 211–221, 2006.     

Being a ‘wog’ in Melbourne – young people's self-fashioning through discourses of racism

The Greek community in Melbourne, Australia, is large and has a long history in the city. It is diverse and associated with a range of cultural, social and political structures. It has strong transnational links and in many ways exemplifies ‘diasporic’ in contradistinction to ‘migrant’. This paper focuses on young people from this community, particularly those who attend schools established to promote Greek language and cultural maintenance. In this paper, we examine such students’ explorations of their cultural identifications, most specifically how they adopt the term ‘wog’. This term is complex and its place in Australian discourse has shifted over time. Tracking these shifts and considering them as a context for these young people's use of the term allows us to consider the processes involved in their self-fashioning. We argue that their uptake of ‘wog’ involves the deployment of irony, given their awareness of its strong association with racism. We are also interested in the potential for women's experience to be silenced through the common association between ‘wog’ and protest masculinities. We argue that these students’ use of the term illustrates self-fashioning that provides insights into the complexities that surround cultural identification at the micro level, including schooling, but also in the broader context of globalisation.     

Stimuli that signal the absence of reinforcement are paid more attention than are irrelevant stimuli

According to established theories of attention (e.g., Mackintosh, 1975; Sutherland & Mackintosh, 1971), simple discriminations of the form AX+ BX- result in an increase in attention to stimuli A and B, which are relevant to the outcome that follows them, at the expense of X, which is irrelevant. Experiments that have apparently shown such changes in attention have failed to determine whether attention is enhanced to both A and B, which signal reinforcement and nonreinforcement, respectively, or just to A. In Experiments 1 and 2, pigeons were trained with a number of discriminations of the kind AX+ BX-, before compounds that had been consistently nonreinforced were involved in a subsequent discrimination. Both experiments provided support for theories that propose that more attention is paid to stimuli that consistently signal nonreinforcement than to irrelevant stimuli in simple discriminations.