Classically conditioned heart rate and respiratory-motor activity in newborn and neonatal pygmy goats

Classical discrimination conditioning of heart rate (HR) and respiratory-motor (RM) activity was examined in 16 newborn (average age = 1 day) and 8 neonatal (average age = 2 weeks) pygmy goats over 4 days of conditioning involving an electric shock US and auditory CSs. On the 4th day, one-half of the animals in each group received a low to moderate dose of ethanol to test the resistance of the CRs to drug effects. Discriminated conditioning of RM activity but not HR occurred in the newborn group, indicating an absence of close coupling between skeletal-motor activity and HR at this early age. While the newborn group failed to show recognizable HR reactions to the CSs during the 4 days of testing, it did show a long-latency brady-cardia UR beginning at 2 days of age that may have been secondary to baroreceptor reflex actions. The neonatal group displayed conditioning of both HR and RM activity. The similar latencies of the two types of CRs during the CS suggested that they may have been related to each other. However, the fact that the RM CR developed a day before the HR CR, combined with the observation that ethanol modified the HR CR but not the RM CR, supports the view that there was considerable independence between the two types of CRs.     

'They don't give us our marks': The role of formative feedback in student progress

This paper presents the results of an experimental evaluation of a change in assessment practice in one comprehensive secondary school. The school divided 104 Year 7 pupils into four mixed-ability teaching groups. One of these was given enhanced formative feedback on their work for one year, but no marks or grades. The other three groups were given marks and grades with minimal comments, which was the usual prior practice in this school (and many others). Using data derived from assessment, prior attainment, pupil attitudes and background information, we conducted a contextualized analysis of progress in the four teaching groups for all subjects. This showed that progress in the treatment group (formative feedback only) was substantially inferior to that of the other three groups. In this paper, we also use data from observation of the process and from group interviews with the students involved, to help explain these results. Our findings are relevant to a consideration of the often lessened impact of research findings when 'rolled' out into wider practice, and what may be done about this.     

The development and application of a specialised word list: the case of Fabrication

Learners in the trades are faced with learning a large amount of technical vocabulary along with the content of their field, but they do not tend to encounter this language outside their courses of study. This technical vocabulary is a core element in their developing knowledge of their trade and their learner identity. This article focuses first on identifying technical vocabulary in Fabrication using specialised written and spoken corpora, and through extensive checking with experts in the field as well as reference sources. A technical word list of 1079 types was developed, along with a list of common abbreviations and their meanings and a list of proper nouns. The technical word list covers over 30% of the vocabulary in the written Fabrication corpus and just over 9% of the spoken Fabrication corpus. The second part of the article discusses this vocabulary in light of the concept of vocational thresholds and provides suggestions for incorporating the word list into pedagogy, including an apprenticeship approach in which a focus on literacy/literacy acquisition is embedded into content teaching. Suggestions for future research are also included.     

Pupils' views on equity in schools

This paper presents student perspectives on what they consider to be a fair and equitable national education system, based on their own experiences of primary and secondary level schooling by the age of 13 or 14. A survey of 5432 students in five countries involved a questionnaire administered as part of an EU‐funded project to develop indicators of equity in European school systems. Overall, the UK students reported favouring an egalitarian system where all students were treated in the same way, and this was largely what they felt that they experienced. In this respect, they differed from their peers in the other EU countries, a substantial proportion of whom thought that the least able should receive more support and attention in class, but who found that more attention was actually given to the more able. The UK students also appeared to be more self‐confident about their ability to succeed in school. We discuss these results in terms of policies for school allocation, student assessment and the formation of personal notions of justice. In particular, we argue that equity in structure and procedure is important for the effective teaching of notions of justice in citizenship studies.     

Media rich, resource poor: practical work in an impractical environment

Film and media courses appear well placed to exploit technology convergence in exposing students both to practical skills and to theoretical concepts. For the University of Cape Town's (UCT) large film and media studies courses, it is impractical simply to use the technology of professionals as this would typically be too expensive to purchase and time‐consuming to run. Our approach has been to develop activities that can run with large classes in generic computer laboratories and which simulate environments and tools of the real world. Two illustrative examples, emphasising writing skills in context, involve the production of a TV news story and the development of a proposal for an educational soap opera. Using these, we reflect on our experience of integrating practical skills into the curriculum of a traditional academic institution, where these skills have a lower status and must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate changes in the higher‐status academic components. This suggests that such flexibility has to be part of the design of practical interventions and that they should additionally aim to provide a challenge to some of the more theoretical aspects of these courses. While developing one's own interventions allows for some of this flexibility to be incorporated into the design, it remains difficult for academic departments to adopt these solutions as their own, thus requiring continued involvement of the original developers to adapt to changes.     

Augmented Reality in Design Education: Landscape Architecture Studies as AR Experience

The rapid and ongoing development of digital technologies continues to create new opportunities for education. Over the last decade this has enabled the establishment of blended learning approaches and online education. More recently, Augmented Reality (AR) has emerged as a unique technology that can transform learning experiences across diverse disciplines. This article outlines the development of an AR prototype, Master of Time, which was created to educate first year students and non‐designers on the foundational principles of landscape architecture. This study examines the learning potential and benefits of AR technology with a focus on creating new practices in digital storytelling across situated experiences. In outlining project outcomes, the authors propose a series of critical design principles, strategies and methodologies for educators to apply when developing AR learning experiences across disciplines. Included within this is a framework for transdisciplinary and co‐design collaboration, which is essential for educators working in the forefront of learning technologies.     

Interpretations of child compliance in individuals at high- and low-risk for child physical abuse

OBJECTIVE: Our studies compared individuals at high- and low-risk for child physical abuse on measures of social information processing. METHOD: Two studies were conducted using similar methods. Twenty-eight childless women in Study 1 and 36 mothers in Study 2 read vignettes of parent-child interactions in which the child's level of compliance was difficult to interpret. Participants were asked a series of questions about the child's behavior and their own reactions. RESULTS: Accuracy and bias in identifying compliant behavior were assessed using a signal detection paradigm. In both samples, high- and low-risk participants did not differ in their overall accuracy in identifying children's behaviors. However, they used different evaluation standards such that high-risk participants were biased toward seeing more noncompliance and low-risk participants were biased toward seeing more compliance. High- and low-risk participants also made different types of errors in interpreting children's behavior. Low-risk participants were more likely to misinterpret noncompliant behavior as compliant, and there was a trend for high-risk participants to not perceive compliant behavior when it occurred. There were no differences in reported disciplinary responses in either study and the results for affective reactions were mixed. CONCLUSIONS: Specific differences in social information processing between high- and low-risk individuals replicated across samples, suggesting a reliable association between evaluation standards and risk of child physical abuse. However, the absence of differences in reported discipline and inconsistent findings on affective reactions indicate the need to identify the mechanism through which cognition influences parenting behavior.     

Formal reasoning ability and misconceptions concerning genetics and natural selection

Students often hold misconceptions about natural phenomena. To overcome misconceptions students must become aware of the scientific conceptions, the evidence that bears on the validity of their misconceptions and the scientific conceptions, and they must be able to generate the logical relationships among the evidence and alternative conceptions. Because formal operational reasoning patterns are necessary to generate these logical relationships, it was predicted that, following instruction, formal operational students would hold significantly fewer misconceptions than their concrete operational classmates. To test this hypothesis 131 seventh-grade students were administered an essay test on principles of genetics and natural selection following instruction. Responses were categorized in terms of the number of misconceptions present. The number of misconceptions was compared to reasoning ability (concrete, transitional, formal), mental capacity (<6, 6, 7), verbal intelligence (low, medium, high), and cognitive style (field dependent, intermediate, field independent). The only student variable consistently and significantly related to the number of misconceptions was reasoning ability; thus, support for the major hypothesis of the study was obtained.     

Nonword recall and phonemic discrimination in four‐ to six‐year‐old children

Previous research has established that the degree of ‘wordlikeness’ of nonwords affects young children's nonword repetition performance. Experiment 1 examined the possibility that output processes are responsible for the wordlikeness effect by using a probed recall procedure. Wordlikeness was defined in terms of phonological neighbourhood density, although this measure was found to be related to the traditional measure of wordlikeness involving adult ratings. A significant effect of number of phonological neighbours/wordlikeness was observed in favour of nonwords with many neighbours. In Experiments 2 and 3 the wordlikeness effect was qualified by a significant interaction with nonword repetition ability. Children with poorer repetition ability were affected by number of neighbours/wordlikeness, while children with better repetition ability were not. Children with poorer repetition ability were significantly poorer than the better repeaters with nonwords with few neighbours. The results were interpreted in terms of theories of phonological development that suggest progressive segmentation of lexical representations. In Experiment 4 the relationship of children's nonword repetition ability to phonemic discrimination ability was investigated. The results demonstrated that children with better nonword repetition ability had superior phonemic discrimination performance than children with poorer nonword repetition ability.