When We Inquire Into Our Own Practice: An Early Childhood Teacher Research Group

Every day, early childhood teachers confront issues, problems, and concerns in their classrooms. Sometimes they do nothing. Sometimes they use trial and error. Sometimes they go to a workshop or read an article. We have found a way to intentionally and systematically research and answer our own questions and to enrich our own professional development through teacher research. Teacher research provides early childhood educators with a strategy that supports reflective thinking and practice. This article describes the experience of a small group of early childhood teacher researchers. How is it different from other required assessments? How is it different from other professional development?     

Supporting school teachers’ rapid engagement with online education

Educational technology research and development - In response to Philipsen et al.'s (Educ Technol Res Dev 67:1145–1174, 2019) article titled “Improving teacher professional...     

Orthographic processing and visual sequential memory in unexpectedly poor spellers

Does unexpectedly poor spelling in adults result from inferior visual sequential memory? In one experiment, unexpectedly poor spellers performed significantly worse than better spellers in the immediate reproduction of sequences of visual symbols, but in a second experiment, the effect was not replicated. Poor spellers were also no worse at the immediate recognition of symbol sequences. Overall, the results indicate that inferior visual memory is not characteristic of unexpectedly poor spellers. However, they do have less efficient orthographic processing skill: they were significantly slower and more error prone than better spellers at classifying both regularly and strangely spelt words, as well as at detecting letter transpositions in long words. They can thus be considered as subtly worse word readers than better spellers. While the findings question the notion of unexpectedly poor spelling in relation to normal adults, they provide confirmation of the intimate relationship between reading and spelling processes.     

Decision making by humans in a behavioral task: Do humans, like pigeons, show suboptimal choice?

Consistent with human gambling behavior but contrary to optimal foraging theory, pigeons show a strong preference for an alternative with low probability and high payoff (a gambling-like alternative) over an alternative with a greater net payoff (Zentall & Stagner, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 278, 1203-1208, 2011). In the present research, we asked whether humans would show suboptimal choice on a task involving choices with probabilities similar to those for pigeons. In Experiment 1, when we selected participants on the basis of their self-reported gambling activities, we found a significantly greater choice of the alternative involving low probability and high payoff (gambling-like alternative) than for a group that reported an absence of gambling activity. In Experiment 2, we found that when the inhibiting abilities of typical humans were impaired by a self-regulatory depletion manipulation, they were more likely to choose the gambling-like alternative. Taken together, the results suggest that this task is suitable for the comparative study of suboptimal decision-making behavior and the mechanisms that underlie it.