A Comparison of Training Methods on the Acquisition of Automotive Product Knowledge

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of a traditional training program with a fluency‐building training program on the acquisition of automotive product knowledge in a lab setting. The effects were assessed by how accurately and quickly participants responded on a product‐knowledge test. Results indicated that participants who completed the fluency training responded faster and more accurately than control groups immediately after the study. However, the difference between the fluency group and the group that received study objectives disappeared when retention was assessed several weeks after training. The difference remained between these groups and a group that did not receive study objectives. The results were used to modify globally delivered training. This study extended previous studies by examining the effects of training designed to teach product knowledge to sales representatives in automotive dealerships and illustrates the benefits of collaboration between academic researchers and professional trainers.     

Designing an effective sexuality education curriculum for schools: lessons gleaned from the South(ern) African literature

Sexuality education forms part of the national school curricula of most sub-Saharan African countries, yet risk-related sexual behaviour among young people continues to fuel the HIV pandemic in this part of the world. One of the arguments put forward to explain why sexuality education seems to have had little impact on sexual risk-taking is that existing curricula have neglected to take into account the complexity of the social, cultural and gender norms that influence the behaviour of school-going young people in sub-Saharan Africa. Over the past few years, the Department of Basic Education in South Africa has recognised the need to provide guidance to teachers on the content, pedagogical processes and messages that are relevant to their specific context. This paper critically reflects on findings from a literature-based study conducted to identify the cognitive and social factors influencing the behaviour of school-going young people in South Africa and the risk and protective factors that might be particular to their circumstances. The findings provide helpful guidelines about the development, content and implementation of sexuality education curricula more likely to be relevant in contexts of serious poverty and disadvantage. Although based on the South African literature, the findings may also offer useful lessons for curriculum designers in other developing countries.     

Adaptation Guidance for Evidence-Based Teen Pregnancy and STI/HIV Prevention Curricula: From Development to Practice

Evidence-based interventions (EBIs) are effective in preventing adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections; however, prevention practitioners are challenged when selecting and adapting the most appropriate programs. While there are existing adaptation frameworks, there is little practical guidance in applying research in the field. To address this need, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Division of Reproductive Health initiated the Adaptation Guidance Project. The project included the development of a comprehensive adaptation guidance framework and adaptation kits for select evidence-based teen pregnancy and HIV prevention programs. In addition, three innovative concepts emerged that have application to other adaptation program and evaluation efforts, including moving research into practice. First, the authors defined the core components of an EBI in three distinct ways: core content, core pedagogy, and core implementation. Second, they piloted a practitioner-friendly adaptation guidance-messaging schema—Green, Yellow, and Red Light Adaptations, and last they included fidelity/adaptation monitoring logs. This article will describe the process used to develop the adaptation guidance kits, including the main features and tools.     

Planning text structure as a way to improve students' writing from sources in the compare–contrast genre

The aim of this study was to improve 7th- and 8th-grade students' (N = 83) compare–contrast reports when writing from sources. An instructional unit was designed and implemented for this purpose. It focused on increasing students' knowledge of compare–contrast text structure and on having students memorize and use a table to plan the structure of their reports. There was a large effect size of instruction, such that students in the instruction group made far greater gains in the holistic and structural quality of their writing (from pretest to posttest) than students in the control group.     

Learning opportunities from group discussions: warrants become the objects of debate

In the mathematics education literature, there is currently a debate about the mechanisms by which group discussion can contribute to mathematical learning and under what conditions this learning is likely to occur. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by illustrating three learning opportunities that group discussions can create. In analyzing a videotaped episode of eight middle school students discussing a statistical problem, we observed that these students frequently challenged the arguments that their colleagues presented. These challenges invited students to be explicit about what mathematical principles, or warrants, they were implicitly using as a basis for their mathematical claims, in some cases recognize the modes of reasoning they were using were invalid and reject these modes of reasoning, and in other cases, attempt to provide deductive support to justify why their modes of reasoning were appropriate. We then describe what social and environmental conditions allowed the discussion analyzed in this paper to occur.

Constraints on the Calibration of Performance

We examined the effect of experimenter-controlled incentives and feedback on the calibration of performance. Subjects answered 36 reading comprehension and 8 mathematical multiple-choice questions and rated the accuracy of their responses. Perfect calibration was possible only when true and estimated test performance were approximately equal. Incentives for improved performance (i.e., doubling the credit people received for correct answers) adversely affected performance and calibration compared to the same incentives for improved calibration (i.e., doubling credit for minimizing the error between true and estimated performance). Feedback had no effect on performance or accuracy nor did it interact with the incentive variable. An examination of coefficient α suggested a strong response bias by individuals when calibrating their performance; individuals tended to rate their performance accuracy consistently regardless of item difficulty or whether they answered the item correctly. Educational implications were discussed.     

College Students’ Psychological Needs and Intrinsic Motivation to Learn: An Examination of Self-Determination Theory

Over the last several decades, instructional communication scholars have studied and measured student motivation as an important learning outcome. Unfortunately, this research has lacked theoretical guidance and has treated student motivation as a construct that varies only in quantity, ignoring existing theory that suggests student motivation is best understood as a construct that differs in quality (i.e., intrinsic motivation). To create two new measures that incorporate theoretical explanations of student motivation, three studies (N = 1,067) were undertaken using self-determination theory (SDT) to operationalize students’ intrinsic motivation as a product of basic psychological need satisfaction. In the first two studies, the Student Psychological Needs Scale and the Intrinsic Motivation to Learn Scale were developed and validated. In the third study, parallel mediation analyses supported SDT’s prediction that the fulfillment of students’ psychological needs (i.e., autonomy, competence, relatedness) would mediate the relationship between personalized education practices and intrinsic motivation to learn.