The Mental Health Status of Law Students: Implications for College Counselors

The purpose of this study was to describe law students' psychological symptoms, assess the role of law school stress in students' symptoms, and suggest ways college counselors can help this population. More than half of the 316 participants displayed symptoms of depression and psychological distress, and nearly half showed symptoms of anxiety. Law school stressors significantly predicted students' symptoms. Workload, peers, and low instrumental support most impacted students, thus providing specific directions and implications for college counselors.     

Teaching for tomorrow: An exploratory study of prekindergarten teachers’ underlying assumptions about how children learn

This study investigated eight prekindergarten teachers’ underlying assumptions about how children learn, and how these assumptions were used to inform and enact instruction. By contextualizing teachers’ knowledge and understanding as it is used in practice we were able to provide unique insight into the work of teaching. Participants focused on children’s ability to remember information, frequently through engagement and repetition. Teachers also anticipated what children would be learning in the early elementary years and taught that content, yet they did not necessarily expect children to remember the information, or even know if children learned the information. Implications for the design of both preservice and in-service teacher education are discussed. This includes helping teachers develop a strong foundational understanding of how children learn, establishing the pedagogical content knowledge relevant to teaching advanced symbol systems like literacy, and shifting pedagogical reasoning about practice. Given the link between the quality of instructional support and learning in the early years, developing the early childhood teaching force’s capacity to use knowledge to reason skillfully about teaching offers a critical lever for creating robust learning in the early years.     

Conflicting views on the importance of emotion to human development and growth: Piaget and Whitehead

In this paper I analyse the concept of emotion on Jean Piaget's theory of development and Alfred North Whitehead's theory of growth. For Piaget, emotion is the motivating force of action emanating from outside the individual in the form of sensations emitted by objects. His view is rooted in the Newtonian conception of a universe comprised of isolated objects requiring an emotive force to initiate a series of mechanistic interactions between objects. Piaget reduces all conscious human experience to a cognitive formulation of these causal relations. His abstract concept of emotion as force fails to explain the relationship between bodily feelings, emotions, and higher forms of consciousness in human beings. Conversely, Whitehead explains that emotions are the crucial mediating factors between the welter of awareness of these feelings in higher organisms. His view is consistent with the new physics and its emphasis on indeterminacy, energy, and the organic relationship among events. Whitehead's concrete concept of emotion gives insight into the experience of bodily feelings and their relationship to the growth and learning of human beings. The implications of these conflicting views of emotion for psychology and education are clear. Psychologists must avoid the reductionist tendencies illustrated in Piaget's theory if they hope to understand the subtleties of human experience. Failing to do this will lead them to a concept of human growth and learning in which ideas have no internal relationship with the experience of the knower. Such a conception distorts our understanding of human beings and ignores the joy of knowing.     

Study techniques differentially influence the delayed judgment-of-learning accuracy of adolescent children and college-aged adults

The ways in which adult learners study information influences their judgment-of-learning (JOL) accuracy (e.g., Koriat et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 131(2), 147-162, 2002). The present study extends this investigation to adolescent children to determine whether developing learners’ metacognitive monitoring is similarly influenced by different study techniques. In two experiments, we examined JOL accuracy in adolescent children (ages 11 to 12) and college-aged adults. Across both experiments, we employed a standard delayed-JOL paradigm in which three groups of participants, differing in type of study technique, encoded weakly-related word pairs. One group studied the word pairs twice (study practice). A second group studied with the instruction to generate a word that linked the two members of the word pair together (elaborative encoding). The final group studied word pairs and then took an immediate cued-recall test with feedback (retrieval practice). In children and adults, retrieval practice led to better JOL accuracy as compared to study practice. Children differed from adults in how elaborative encoding influenced JOL accuracy. For adults, elaborative encoding resulted in better JOL accuracy than study practice; however, for children, JOL accuracy did not differ between the two groups. Our results suggest that encoding processes influence delayed-JOL accuracy in both age-groups.     

The Importance of Forgetting ‘Perishing’ in Whitehead’s Cosmology and Epistemology

In this paper, I will address a constructive criticism of the papers that appeared as a Symposium on Whitehead’s Process Philosophy of Education (Interchange, 26(4), pp. 341–415, 1995). In his criticism of those papers, George Allan (1998) claimed that the contributors to the Symposium were not as Whiteheadian as they thought they were because they failed to contextualize their papers in the harmony and holism of Whitehead’s organic philosophy. Allan thought, in essence, that we had committed a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Ironically, this is exactly what we had been trying to avoid. With regards to my paper, Allan felt that I had failed to explain the importance of perishing for Whitehead in the becoming and objective immortality of the superject of experience. Hopefully, I have done a better job of this in what follows. I would also like to begin exploring the implications of Whitehead’s cosmology and epistemology for the advance of theory in psychology. On a pleasant afternoon in Oulu, Finland I was discussing the ideas presented here with my friend Hannu Soini who said to me, “when one is learning it is important to forget certain things so they do not impede our creativity.” Hence, the title of this paper and a further exploration of the concepts that Hannu and I feel are impeding the advance of psychology. I would like to preface with a reminder that when I try to explain Whitehead’s philosophy succinctly I sometimes fail to explain things well. His is a truly organic conception of reality so please forgive me.     

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...     

Teaching and learning birth: "help all to know"

This guest editorial explores the idea that our worldview, regardless of education, influences our childbirth practices, sometimes interfering with achieving the goals of our discipline. Over time, we have lost our ability to support women through the process of childbirth so that they emerge as strong, healthy women. The high road ahead is to teach everyone, including ourselves, that we need to provide optimal, evidence-based care. Pursuing this path will take courage and commitment.     

Comparison of two article-level,field-independent citation metrics: Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and Relative Citation Ratio (RCR)

We reproduce the article-level, field-independent citation metric Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) using the Scopus database, and extend it beyond the biomedical field to all subject areas. We compare the RCR to the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), also an article-level, field-normalised metric, and present the first results of correlations, distributions and application to research university benchmarking for both metrics. Our analyses demonstrate that FWCI and RCR of articles correlate with varying strengths across different areas of research. Additionally, we observe that both metrics are comparably stable across different subject areas of research. Moreover, at the level of universities, both metrics correlate strongly.