The nature of citizenship education provision: an initial study

While compulsory citizenship education has apparently been accepted and, in some quarters, regarded as overdue, in schools there has been little opportunity to discuss the meaning of ‘citizenship’. This article reports an initial study of four schools, with a focus on one of them. From this study it was evident that teachers and students have different views about what they are offering and being offered. Some implications of the spaces between these differences are aired in the conclusion of the article.     

The dual role of the context in postpeak performance decrements resulting from extended training

The context??s role in Pavlovian conditioning depends on the trial spacing during training, with massed trials revealing a function akin to that of discrete stimuli, and spaced trials revealing a modulatory function (Urcelay & Miller, Journal of Experimental Psychology. Animal Behavior Processes, 36, 268?C280, 2010). Here we examined the contextual determinants of a common but largely ignored effect: attenuated conditioned responding with extended reinforced training (i.e., a postpeak performance deficit [PPD]). Contextual sources of PPDs were investigated in four fear-conditioning experiments with rats. In Experiment 1, as the number of reinforced trials increased, conditioned responding decreased, even when testing occurred outside the training context. Experiment 2 revealed opposing influences of context on the PPD based on trial spacing, which interacted with whether testing occurred in the training context. This finding reconciles Experiment 1??s results with previous data (Bouton, Frohardt, Sunsay, Waddell, & Morris, Journal of Experimental Psychology. Animal Behavior Processes, 34, 223?C236, 2008). Experiment 3 suggested that extended training with these parameters did not lead to habituation to conditioned or unconditioned stimuli. In Experiment 4, few or many massed training trials were followed orthogonally by context extinction or no context extinction. After many pairings, context extinction reduced the PPD (i.e., enhanced responding), suggesting a competitive role of the context. These results, together with prior data suggesting that context modulates expressions of the PPD, are consistent with the view that contexts can play two distinctly different roles.     

Attention as an acquisition and performance variable (AAPV)

This article introduces a new model of Pavlovian conditioning, attention as an acquisition and performance variable (AAPV), which, like several other so-called attentional models, emphasizes the role of variation of cue salience, together with associative strength, in accounting for conditioning phenomena. AAPV is primarily (but not exclusively) a performance-focused model in that it assumes not only that both the saliences and associative strengths of cue representations change during acquisition, but also that they are both influential at the time of test in determining responding. Different weights are given to the representations’ associative strengths according to the representations’ respective saliences at test. The model also treats the representation of a stimulus that is directly activated by presentation of that stimulus as distinct from the representation of the same stimulus that is activated by presenting a companion of the stimulus. Additionally, extinction is viewed as resulting from a decrease in the salience of the cue’s representation, rather than a decrease in associative strength. Simulations of several Pavlovian phenomena are presented in order to illustrate the model and assess its robustness.     

Challenges and Achievements: Teaching Shakespeare''''s Sonnet 34 to a Third Year "English Literature" Class

In the course offerings to students in the Foreign Languages College here atGuangxi Teachers'University,I had noted what was in my opinion an overemphasis onprose at the expense of poetry;and also a dearth of courses thatwentdeeply into a singlesubject,period,or writer.In place of this,courses tended to be survey,background,criticism,or history.After discussing this with my colleague,Professor Zheng Shuning,here at the Uni-versity,I determined to take a different approach in my Fall Term,…     

Contribution of conditioned opioid analgesia to the shock-induced associative US-preexposure deficit

The modulatory effect of conditioned opioid analgesia on learning in the US-preexposure paradigm was examined in three experiments using water-deprived rats. In Experiment 1, it was found that tailflick latencies increased immediately after the rats were exposed to a context in which footshock had previously been administered. Prolonged nonreinforced exposure to the context attenuated this analgesia. Experiment 2 tested the possibility that the effectiveness of CS-US pairings in an excitatory context might be reduced by a conditioned analgesic response that lessens the perceived intensity of the US. Administration of the opiate antagonist naloxone prior to CS-US pairings in the excitatory context reduced the US-preexposure deficit—that is, the retarded response to the CS—but did not eliminate it, suggesting that part of the observed deficit resulted from conditioned activation of the endogenous opioid system. In Experiment 3, it was found that exposure to the excitatory context immediately prior to a CS-US pairing in an associatively neutral context resulted in a conditioned response deficit, indicating that the analgesia elicited by the excitatory context was sufficient to reduce US effectiveness. In combination with other recent reports, these results suggest that the associative deficit resulting from preexposure to a shock US may, in certain instances, represent the sum of several different associative processes.