Habla reguladora y control de la memoria: Un esquema teórico de integración de las acciones y operaciones de memorización

Resumen

Se propone la integración de varias líneas de investigación de origen diferente: los estudios dentro del marco teórico de niveles de procesamiento, las investigaciones soviéticas sobre memoria y actividad, los trabajos sobre el desarrollo de las estrategias de memoria y los estudios sobre meta-memoria y control de la memoria. Para ello se distingue entre tres tipos de procesos: operaciones de codificación y recuperación, acciones simples, ligadas a sus condiciones de aplicación, y acciones generales (planes) que exigen el dominio de otras acciones más simples. Estos tres tipos de procesos se integran de modo jerárquico en un marco teórico general de la memoria. En este marco teórico, el lenguaje (el habla reguladora, más exactamente) juega un papel fundamental como instrumento básico de la génesis y control de las acciones de memoria.     

Being highly internationalised strengthens your reputation: an empirical investigation of top higher education institutions

In an educational context characterised by globalisation, reputation constitutes a crucial issue for today’s higher education institutions. Internationalisation of higher education is often seen as a potential response to globalisation and, consequently, higher education has become increasingly internationalised during the past decade. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between internationalisation and reputation in top higher education institutions. Results reveal that internationalisation positively influences a university’s reputation but also moderates the relationship between the institution’s reputation and its institutional performance with regard to research quality, teaching quality and graduate employability.     

La educación de adultos en una ciudad estadounidense: Algunos datos y reflexiones

La alfabetización y educación de adultos reviste características muy distintas en cada país. En este artículo se presentan algunos hechos paradójicos desde el punto de vista de la educación comparada que deberían hacernos reflexionar. Mientras en una ciudad norteamericana, Menfis, es notable el apoyo comunitario voluntario, el enfoque didáctico es sin embargo individualizado. Por contra en España el enfoque didáctico es más grupal, pero la comunidad apenas participa en la educación de sus propios adultos, dejándola en manos de las estructuras oficiales gestionadas por la administración.     

When easy comes hard: the development of adaptive strategy selection

Can children learn to select the right strategy for a given problem? In one experiment, 9‐ to 10‐year‐olds (N = 50), 11‐ to 12‐year‐olds (N = 50), and adults (N = 50) made probabilistic inferences. Participants encountered environments favoring either an information‐intensive strategy that integrates all available information or an information‐frugal strategy that relies only on the most valid pieces of information. Nine‐ to 10‐year‐olds but not older children or adults had more difficulties learning to select an information‐frugal strategy than an information‐intensive strategy. This counterintuitive finding is explained by children’s less developed ability to selectively attend to relevant information, an ability that seems to develop during late childhood. The results suggest that whether a strategy can be considered “easy” depends on the development of specific cognitive abilities.     

Maternal experiences of childhood abuse and intimate partner violence: Psychopathology and functional impairment in clinical children and adolescents

Objectives

The current study examined the independent effects of mothers’ childhood abuse (CA) and intimate partner violence (IPV) on psychopathology and functional impairment in children; and the potential moderating and mediating role of individual and family factors in these relationships. Additionally, this study explored the potential cumulative effects of both maternal CA and IPV on children's outcomes.

Method

The sample included 547 Spanish children and adolescents aged between 8 and 17 years, and their parents, who had accessed mental health services. The assessment was based on structured interviews with the children and their parents. Statistical analyses were carried out through hierarchical multiple, negative-binomial and logistic regressions, and Structural Equation Models.

Results

Children whose mothers experienced CA and those whose mothers suffered physical IPV showed increased DSM-IV disruptive disorders and externalizing behavior problems, respectively. Children who directly observed physical IPV and also suffered physical punishment by parents showed increased internalizing problems. IPV had effects, either direct or indirect by physical punishment, on children's externalizing problems. Cumulative effect analyses indicated that the prevalence of disruptive disorders was highest in children whose mothers had suffered both CA and IPV.

Conclusion

Spanish children whose mothers have suffered CA, IPV or both, are at high risk of serious conduct problems, whereas children exposed to IPV and who were also physically abused are at greater risk of internalizing problems. Physical punishment of children contributes in part to explain externalizing problems of IPV-exposed children. These findings indicate potential targets of assessment and intervention for families seeking help in mental health services.     

Cultural Frame Switching and Emotion Among Mexican Americans

Recent evidence indicates that bicultural individuals shift between interpretive frames rooted in different cultures in response to cues encountered in a given situation. The explanation for these shifts has been labeled cultural frame switching. The current research sought to investigate the effect of priming culture among Mexican Americans. Culture was primed by exposing either Mexican or American icons to Mexican Americans prior to the individuals completing an attribution task followed by completing questionnaires assessing emotion. Results revealed that participants primed with American icons reported fewer external attributions and less positive emotion than did participants primed with Mexican icons.     

Comprehension strategy training in content areas

The main objective of this paper is to present the results of two studies developed to test the effectiveness of teaching different strategies for identifying important information in the context of ordinary instruction. Training in both studies can be characterised as metacognitively oriented and contextualised in content areas. Also, the same strategies have been the object of training in both cases. Previous knowledge activation and diagrammatic representation of relations among text ideas were among the main strategies trained. 31 subjects (11 to 12 years-old) participated in the first study, and 104 (11 to 14 years-old) in the second one. In both cases, subjects were divided into two groups, experimental and control. Assessment was made through an interview carried out separately with two texts. Results reached statistical significance mainly in study 2, but only for students in higher grades. These results show the effectiveness of the kind of training developed and the importance of taking into account the developmental and/or academic level of students in order to determinate when to introduce strategy training.