The role of metacognitive competences in the development of school achievement among gifted adolescents

Gifted underachievers perform worse in school than would be expected based on their high intelligence. Possible causes for underachievement are low motivational dispositions (need for cognition) and metacognitive competences. This study tested the interplay of these variables longitudinally with gifted and non-gifted students from Germany (N = 341, 137 females) in Grades 6 (M = 12.02 years at t1) and 8 (M = 14.07 years). Declarative and procedural metacognitive competences were assessed in the domain of reading comprehension. Path analyses showed incremental effects of procedural metacognition over and above intelligence on the development of school achievement in gifted students (β = .139). Moreover, declarative metacognition and need for cognition interactively predicted procedural metacognition (β = .169), which mediated their effect on school achievement.     

Children''s Understanding of Cognitive Cuing: How to Manipulate Cues to Fool a Competitor

4-6-year-old children's understanding of cognitive cuing was studied in 2 experiments using a strategic interaction paradigm. Children could fool a competitor by hiding targets in locations that were labeled with semantically weakly associated cues and help a cooperative partner by hiding them in semantically highly associated locations. Very few 4-year-olds, half the 5-year-olds, and almost all 6-years-olds appropriately chose semantically highly vs. weakly associated hiding places to make the targets easy vs. difficult to find. The second experiment showed that 4-year-olds did not strategically manipulate cues as sources of information, although they themselves proficiently used them as such in a search task. These findings are discussed with regard to research on children's developing understanding of origins of knowledge and belief and with regard to recent claims that young preschoolers possess a metacognitive understanding of cognitive cuing.     

The Model American Foundation Officer: Alan Gregg and the Rockefeller Foundation Medical Divisions

From 1919 to 1951, Alan Gregg and his mentor, Richard Pearce, directed the Medical Education and Medical SciencesDivisions of the Rockefeller Foundation. Although they oversaw the expenditure of millions of dollars, today they are forgotten. Yet, the system that Gregg administered became the model for the funding of biomedical research after the Second World War. This paper draws on the records of the Rockefeller Foundation to assess Gregg and his impact on biomedicine and philanthropy.     

Peer Feedback Improves Students’ Academic Self-Concept in Higher Education

Research in Higher Education - Peer feedback has been shown to be an effective strategy to improve academic achievement. However, little evidence is available about the effects of peer feedback on...     

Practicing Resistance: Teacher Responses to Intergroup Aggression in the Classroom

Teachers are frequently advised to respond when they hear remarks that reflect anger, contempt, or disgust towards members of historically marginalized communities. However, there is little research on how teachers respond to such remarks. Focusing specifically on classroom talk about sexual identity, this study investigates how teachers responded to students who overtly expressed anger, contempt, or disgust towards LGBQ people. Data were collected on three teachers’ classroom practice, including teacher interviews, daily logs, and classroom observations. Findings indicate that variations in teachers’ responses to overt student bias reflect variations in underlying theories of how people unlearn their biases. This study suggests that grounding research on teachers’ responses to students’ biases in knowledge about how people learn might reveal new directions for research on ways to counter bias in the classroom.