Use of a mnemonic technique to teach young children foreign language vocabulary

Children 3 to 6 years of age learned simple Spanish vocabulary items using an adaptation of the keyword method of foreign language vocabulary learning. Using this version of the keyword method, the learner remembered a picture of the translation referent of the vocabulary item interacting with the referent of a concrete English word which sounded like part of the foreign word (the keyword). Children who used the keyword method remembered more vocabulary translations than children who were not instructed in keyword method usage.     

Self-efficacy and achievement behaviors

In this article self-efficacy research is reviewed in domains relevant to education. Research addressing cognitive skills, social skills, motor skills, and career choices has shown that self-efficacy is an important construct that helps to explain students' learning and performance of achievement-related behaviors. Research also has identified variables that are associated with educational contexts and that signal to students how well they are achieving or making progress in learning. These task-engagement variables include models/social comparative information, goal setting, attributional and performance feedback, strategy instruction, cognitive processing, and reward contingencies. A suggested future self-efficacy research agenda might include maintenance and generalization of changes in self-efficacy, the identification of additional task-engagement variables, instrument development and validation, integration of efficacy information from diverse sources, developmental influences on self-efficacy, and teachers' sense of efficacy.     

Is Self‐worth Protection Best Regarded as Intentional Self‐handicapping Behaviour or an Outcome of Choking Under Pressure?

Self‐worth protective students characteristically perform poorly when they anticipate that poor performance is likely to reveal low ability, yet perform well in situations that involve little threat to self‐worth. The present study sought a further understanding of this variable pattern of achievement, assessing two possibilities: (1) that the poor performance of students high in self‐worth protection in situations of high evaluative threat is appropriately viewed as self‐handicapping behaviour in the form of strategic withdrawal of effort, and (2) that the poor performance of students high in self‐worth protection is an outcome of anxiety or “choking under pressure”. Participants were 72 undergraduate students, either high or low in self‐worth protection, assigned to one of three performance feedback conditions: humiliating failure, failure allowing face‐saving, and success. They subsequently completed 20 anagrams and 12 remote associates tasks, assessing performance, followed by 16 unicursal tasks during what was believed to be a practice period, providing an assessment of behavioural self‐handicapping in the form of intentional low effort. Students high in self‐worth protection performed poorly on the anagrams and remote associates following humiliating failure. They also reported greater anxiety across experimental conditions and claimed greater anxiety impairment than students low in self‐worth protection. These outcomes provide little support for an interpretation of self‐worth protection as self‐handicapping behaviour, instead supporting an interpretation of self‐worth protection as an outcome of choking under pressure, fuelled by evaluative threat.     

Similarities between human and animal spatial memory: Item and order information

Human subjects, sitting at the center of a circle of eight lights, were tested on analogues of radial-maze item-recognition (Roberts & Smythe, 1979) and order-recognition (Kesner & Novak, 1982) tasks. Subjects in the item-recognition condition saw a list of seven lights, and then the nonlist (eighth) light was tested against the first, fourth, or seventh light from the list. The subjects were required to point toward the nonlist light. Subjects in the order-recognition condition saw a series of eight lights, followed by a test of the first and second, fourth and fifth, or seventh and eighth serial positions. They were asked to point toward the light with the earlier serial position. Subjects’ item-recognition serial-position curves exhibited a recency effect with a 0-sec retention interval (Experiments 1 and 2), and were U-shaped (Experiment 1) or flat (Experiment 2) with a 30-sec retention interval. Subjects’ order-recognition serial-position curves were U-shaped at both retention intervals. Subjects’ reported mnemonics were, generally, unrelated to their choice accuracy. The results suggest analogous memory processes in animals and humans.     

Concurrent and predictive validity of parent reports of child language at ages 2 and 3 years

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; Dale, 1996; Fenson et al., 1994), parent reports about language skills, are being used increasingly in studies of theoretical and public health importance. This study (N = 113) correlated scores on the CDI at ages 2 and 3 years with scores at age 3 years on tests of cognition and receptive language and measures from parent-child conversation. Associations indicated reasonable concurrent and predictive validity. The findings suggest that satisfactory vocabulary scores at age 2 are likely to predict normal language skills at age 3, although some children with limited skills at age 3 will have had satisfactory scores at age 2. Many children with poor vocabulary scores at 2 will have normal skills at 3.     

Knowledge Based Artificial Augmentation Intelligence Technology: Next Step in Academic Instructional Tools for Distance Learning

With augmented intelligence/knowledge based system (KBS) it is now possible to develop distance learning applications to support both curriculum and administrative tasks. Instructional designers and information technology (IT) professionals are now moving from the programmable systems era that started in the 1950s to the cognitive computing era. In cognitive computing or KBS a machine understands natural language, adapts, learns, and generates and evaluates hypotheses. A KBS system can manage data and assist instructional designers in creating tools and curricula that generate meaningful applications. As a proof of the concept, the authors conducted an exploratory case study with the input of twenty subject-matter experts (programmers, instructional designers, and content experts) for development of a proto-type KBS scholarly writing software (SWS) application that can be used for distance/online learning. Philosophical differences between the artificial intelligence and augmented intelligence approaches are also discussed. The role of instructional designers in the development and use of augmented intelligence with IBM’s Watson is also a significant part of the discussion.     

Prosocial and Aggressive Behavior: A Longitudinal Study

Developmental theorists have made strong claims about the fundamental prosocial or aggressive nature of the human infant. However, only rarely have prosocial behavior and aggression been studied together in the same sample. We charted the parallel development of both behaviors from infancy to childhood in a British community sample, using a two-construct, multimethod longitudinal design. Data were drawn from the Cardiff Child Development Study (CCDS), a prospective longitudinal study of a volunteer sample of parents and their firstborn children. A sample of 332 mothers was recruited from National Health Service (NHS) prenatal clinics and general practice clinics in Wales, UK, between Fall of 2005 and Summer of 2007. Potential participants represented the full range of sociodemographic classifications of neighborhoods. Participating families were divided about equally between middle- and working-class families, were somewhat more likely to have sons than daughters, and the majority (90%) were in a stable partnership. In response to standard categories recommended for use in Wales at the time, the majority (93%) of mothers reported themselves as Welsh, Scottish, English, or Irish; most others named a European or South Asian nationality. Of the 332 families agreeing to participate, 321 mothers (M_age = 28 years) and 285 partners (M_age = 31 years) were interviewed during the pregnancy and 321 of the families contributed data at least once after the child's birth. After an initial home visit at 6 months, data collection occurred in four additional waves of testing when children's mean ages were approximately 1, 1.5, 2.5, and 7 years. Data collection alternated between family homes and Cardiff University. Of those families seen after the child's birth, 89% were assessed at the final wave of testing. Data collection ended in 2015. Methods included direct observation, experimental tasks, and collection of reports from mothers, fathers, other relatives or family friends, and classroom teachers. Interactions with a familiar peer were observed at 1.5 years. Interactions with unfamiliar peers took place during experimental birthday parties at 1 and 2.5 years. At 7 years, parents were interviewed, parents and teachers completed questionnaires, and the children engaged in cognitive and social decision-making tasks. Based on reports from parents and other informants who knew the children well, individual differences in both prosocial behavior and aggression were evident in children. Both types of behavior showed stability across the second and third years. The association between prosocial behavior and aggression changed over time: at 1.5 years, they were not significantly related (the association approached zero), but they became negatively correlated by 3 years. Different patterns were seen when children played with familiar versus unfamiliar peers. At 1.5 years, when children were observed at home with a familiar peer, prosocial behavior and aggression were unrelated, thus showing a pattern of results like that seen in the analysis of informants' reports. However, a different pattern emerged during the experimental birthday parties with unfamiliar peers: prosocial behavior and aggression were positively correlated at both 1 and 2.5 years, contributing to a general sociability factor at both ages. Gender differences in prosocial behavior were evident in informants' reports and were also evident at the 1-year (though not the 2.5-year) birthday parties. In contrast, gender differences in both prosocial behavior and aggression were evident by 7 years, both in children's aggressive decision-making and in their parents' and teachers' reports of children's aggressive behavior at home and school. By age 7, children's aggressive decision-making and behavior were inversely associated with their verbal skills, working memory, and emotional understanding. Some children had developed aggressive behavioral problems and callous-unemotional traits. A few (12%) met diagnostic criteria for conduct disorder or oppositional-defiant disorders, which had been predicted by early angry aggressiveness and lack of empathy for other people. Taken together, the findings revealed a gradual disaggregation of two ways in which children interact with other people. Individual differences in both prosocial behavior and aggression revealed continuity over time, with gender differences emerging first in prosocial behavior, then in aggression. Restrictions in the participant sample and the catchment area (e.g., all were first-time parents; all were drawn from a single region in the United Kingdom) mean that it is not possible to generalize findings broadly. It will be important to expand the study of prosocial behavior and aggression in other family and environmental contexts in future work. Learning more about early appearing individual differences in children's approaches to the social world may be useful for both educational and clinical practice.     

Grouping Continuous Data in Discrete Intervals: Information Loss and Recovery

Information loss occurs when continuous data are grouped in discrete intervals. After calculating the squared correlation coefficients between continuous data and corresponding grouped data for four population distributions, the effects of population distribution, number of intervals, and interval width on information loss and recover), were examined.     

Modulatory mechanisms in Pavlovian conditioning

Pavlovian conditioning has traditionally been thought to involve the acquisition of excitatory and inhibitory associations between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned stimulus (US). Recent research, however, has encouraged the view that Pavlovian learning may also encompass a higher order modulatory mechanism, in which animals use information about another stimulus to control responding to the CS. Positive modulators signal a positive relationship between the CS and the US, whereas negative modulators signal that the CS-US relationship is not in force. In both cases, the modulatory control appears to be orthogonal to the modulator’s direct associations with the US. This article reviews and evaluates the literature on this Pavlovian modulatory mechanism.     

Poor Performance in Mathematics: Is there a basis for a self‐worth explanation for women?

The self‐worth theory of achievement motivation holds that in situations in which poor performance is likely to reveal low ability, certain students (known as self‐worth protective students) intentionally withdraw effort in order to avoid the negative implications of poor performance in terms of damage to self‐worth. In this study, evidence of self‐worth protection was sought where it is perhaps least likely to be seen: in women in mathematics, where the negative effects of stereotype threat are suggested. Links between self‐worth protection and performance on three maths tasks (a computational task, an algebraic task, and the Tower of Hanoi, a game‐like task tapping into mathematical skills yet devoid of mathematical signs and symbols) and a verbal task (a remote associates task) were examined in an intellectually evaluative situation (following failure) and in an intellectually non‐evaluative situation (following success). Relative to low maths self‐worth protective students, high maths self‐worth protective students performed poorly on both mathematical tasks, but not on either the Tower of Hanoi or the remote associates test. Collectively, findings are consistent with the conclusion that a self‐worth explanation can be applied to the poor performance of women in mathematics. Critical eliciting conditions appear to be mathematical signs and symbols and the presence of evaluative threat.