What Can Be Learned from Something's Not Being Named

A new word-learning phenomenon is demonstrated and a new word-learning principle is proposed to account for it. In Study 1, 60 3-year-olds were shown a pair of objects and heard a novel label used repeatedly for one, but not for the other. In a forced-choice test of generalization of the label, the latter object was selected less often by the children than one that had not been present during training. This so-called Nominal Passover Effect was the same whether the speaker had completely ignored the comparison object during training or had referred to it with pronouns. The performance of a no-word control group ( N = 24) indicated that the effect was not due to a preference for the less exposed of the two choice objects. The effect is consistent with the Exhaustive Reference Principle, which stipulates that whenever a new generic word is used to name something, expect it to be extended to all entities in a situation that the speaker perceives and believes to be exemplars of the name. In Study 2 ( N = 48), the Nominal Passover Effect was replicated with 3 new sets of objects and with training language that contained only indefinite forms of reference. The passover experience was often sufficient to counteract children's tendency to generalize a novel label on the basis of perceptual similarity. The passover effect was not evident in free-choice name generalization tests in either study.     

Art and Design Education in the Ecology of Care

In the light of challenges arising from contemporary issues such as inclusivity, sustainability and justice, the connections between art, design and caring appears to be pertinent. What role can artists and designers play in the ecology of care? How can we lead art and design students to connect and lend their creative skills to care needs? Drawing on the ethics of care and a relational view on health this article highlights the various teaching approaches and initiatives introduced at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, to support and guide students to realise various art and design for health and wellbeing projects that provide opportunities for students to part take in ecology of care using their creative skills. Although creative explorations at the intersection of art, design and caring is still at an early stage, outcomes from this ongoing effort have been encouraging in response to the shifting social needs to create a more inclusive and flourishing society in Singapore.     

Considerations for designing practice for deaf readers

Low reading comprehension persists among deaf readers, and recent research indicates that low automaticity in recognizing words and parsing sentence patterns is a significant source of the difficulty. When a learner does manage to gain an insight about some aspect of printed English, there may be limited impact on comprehension until the new knowledge can be applied fluently because the multiple cognitive demands of reading call for completing basic linguistic operations with a minimum of conscious effort. The research literature agrees that the route to improved automaticity is effective practice, and, thus, practice is also a likely route to increased comprehension. This article presents considerations to guide the design of practice for deaf readers. Certain of these notions are relatively applied in nature and may shape practice activities directly, for example, the discussion of research-based guidelines for tailoring the sequence and composition of practice items. Other parts of the discussion, such as those related to word recognition, are more theoretical than directive, and they imply research hypotheses that can and should be tested empirically. A principal point of this article is that without appreciable improvements in practice, the reading of many deaf students will remain largely unimproved.     

Recovery from the overexpectation effect: Contrasting performance-focused and acquisition-focused models of retrospective revaluation

In four Pavlovian conditioned lick-suppression experiments, rats had two conditioned stimuli (CSs X and A) independently paired with footshock, followed by pairings of a compound of A and X with the footshock. On subsequent tests with CS X, less conditioned suppression was observed than in control subjects that lacked the compound AX→footshock trials. Thisoverexpectation effect was reversed through posttraining extinction of CS A, a result consistent with both performance- and acquisition-focused models of retrospective revaluation. However, only performance-focused models could account for how posttraining increases or decreases in the A-footshock temporal interval attenuate the overexpectation effect.     

Learning science through technological design

In the course of a decade of research on learning in technology‐centered classrooms, my research group has gained considerable understanding of why and how students learn science by designing technology. In this article I briefly review two dimensions in which science and technology share fundamental similarities: (a) the production and transformation of representations and (b∥ the action‐oriented language describing the two domains. Because it is fundamentally problematic to derive what ought to happen in science classrooms from other dimensions, I provide three episodes to illustrate what and how students know and learn science during technological design activities. Episodes and analyses embody the two dimensions previously outlined. Because these episodes are representative of the database established during an extensive research program, I suggest there is sufficient ground for using and investigating science‐through‐technology curricula. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 768–790, 2001     

The strategic impact model: An integrative approach to performance improvement and instructional systems design

Conclusion The Strategic Impact Model is distinctive in its portrayal of the integration of instructional and non-instructional interventions and its suggestion that all performance interventions undergo an analysis-design-development-production cycle, just as instruction does. It also differs from other similar models in its use of evaluative activities at each stage to assure alignment with strategic needs as well as quality control, and its suggestions for improving the chances of successful implementation by carrying out change management activities at each phase of the development process. He has special interests in distance education, historical and philosophical foundations of instructional technology and instructional development processes. He has special interests in planning and evaluating performance improvement initiatives, including training. An erratum to this article is available at .     

Implementing dynamicity in research designs for collaborative digital writing

This paper implements a dynamic (i.e. temporal and local) research design for collaborative digital writing (CDW) in writing assignments in higher education. This research design builds on my paper “Temporality revisited: Dynamicity issues in collaborative digital writing research”, published in this journal (Engerer 2020). The design identifies current state-of-the-art approaches to digital writing and introduces 1) the components of text (the process and products of writing and learning communication), 2) external variables such as learning orientations and group composition, 3) an intermediate layer of time management that is related to organizing the assignment, and 4) the sphere of knowledge construction. The main modification, however, is the addition of four features specifically connected to time-related aspects: 5) micro-analysis, 6) dynamicity, 7) writer relevance and 8) source status. This dynamized research design is applied in a study of writing assignments carried out by the author with students of information science in the spring term of 2016. It is demonstrated how the temporal organization of a CDW process can be visualized and how central concepts such as Task structure, Reference structure and Final target structure are construed, operationalized and dynamically related to each other. Furthermore, a real-time analysis of sequential concept building is provided. The discussion shows that the study integrates all the above elements 1)-8) of a dynamic research design for CDW, although to different degrees. The study presented here can provide a general background for designing research in CDW and can inspire CDW researchers to capture in their research designs the dynamic, time-related features in CDW.

     

Photoresists for microlithography

Photoresist technology, which is used for micro-patterning exploits changes in properties of polymeric materials, such as their solubility or volatility, upon photo-irradiation. This process has greatly benefitted from the knowledge base of organic chemistry and photo-induced organic transformations. The role of chemistry in the development of photoresists is described in this article.     

The necessity of each phase of the learning cycle in teaching high school physics

The learning cycle is a method of teaching—it is also a curriculum organization principle and is derived directly from the mental functioning model invented by Piaget. Although Jean Piaget contributed to the formation of the learning cycle (Piaget, 1973), its present structure has to be attributed to Dr. Robert Karplus and the persons who developed the materials of the Science Curriculum Improvement Study (SCIS). It was through the SCIS activities that many of us learned how to develop curricula and teach with the learning cycle. The learning cycle is built upon the premise that three distinct phases are necessary in developing understanding of a concept, that those phases have a definite sequence, and each phase has a definite structure or form. The research done in testing the form variable has already been reported in this journal (Renner, Abraham, & Birnie, 1985). This report explores whether or not each learning-cycle phase is necessary in learning a concept.