Knowledge of persuasion and writing goals predict the quality of children’s persuasive writing

Reading and Writing - We assessed the influence of genre-specific discourse knowledge and writing goals on the persuasive writing of 4th and 6th grade students with and without learning...     

The identity of SENCos: insights through images

Stimulated by special educational needs co-ordinators' (SENCos) reactions to a published image, the researchers used photovoice methodology to explore SENCos' images of themselves in relation to the perceptions of three groups of their colleagues: senior management team, teachers and teaching assistants. The analysis of the images involved the application of Activity Theory, which has the capacity to illuminate and explore the social context.
The results demonstrate the complexity of the role of the SENCo and the need to negotiate different perceptions. The authors argue the case for policies and procedure to fully take into account these differences. The adoption of this methodology helped to provide a deeper understanding of these issues.     

The Nature of the Arguments for Creationism,Intelligent Design,and Evolution

Seventy-two Internet documents promoting creationism, intelligent design (I.D.), or evolution were selected for analysis. The primary goal of each of the 72 documents was to present arguments for creationism, I.D., or evolution. We first identified all arguments in these documents. Each argument was then coded in terms of both argument type (appeal to authority, appeal to empirical evidence, appeal to reason, etc.) and argument topic (age of earth, mechanism of descent with modification, etc.). We then provided a quantitative summary of each argument type and topic for each of the three positions. Three clear patterns were revealed by the data. First, websites promoting evolution were characterized by a narrow focus on appeals to empirical evidence, whereas websites promoting creationism and I.D. were quite heterogeneous in regards to argument type. Second, websites promoting evolution relied primarily on a small number of empirical examples (e.g., fossils, biogeography, homology, etc.), while websites promoting creationism and I.D. used a far greater range of arguments. Finally, websites promoting evolution were narrowly focused on the topic of descent with modification. In contrast, websites promoting creationism tackled a broad range of topics, while websites promoting I.D. were narrowly focused on the issue of the existence of God. The current study provides a quantitative summary of a systematic content analysis of argument type and topic across a large number of frequently accessed websites dealing with origins. The analysis we have used may prove fruitful in identifying and understanding argumentation trends in scientific writing and pseudo-scientific writing.     

Pigeons’ short-term memory for temporal and visual stimuli in delayed matching-to-sample

In the present experiment, we compared directly pigeons’ short-term memory of temporal and visual stimuli in a delayed matching-to-sample task. The sample stimuli consisted of red and green lights presented for 5 and 30 sec, followed by a retention interval and blue and yellow comparisons. For subjects in the visual group, duration was irrelevant and the color of the sample was the conditional cue. For animals in the temporal group, color was irrelevant and duration of the sample was the conditional stimulus. The results showed that acquisition of the matching task was faster and accuracy was higher in the visual than in the temporal group. More importantly, memory of either sample generally declined at a similar rate when the duration of the retention interval was increased and when the intertrial interval was reduced. Taken together, the results indicate that with 1–8-sec retention intervals, short-term memory for temporal stimuli is similar to that found with color-visual samples. The findings are discussed in terms of retrospective and prospective processing.     

Interaction of retention interval with CS-preexposure and extinction treatments: Symmetry with respect to primacy

Imposition of a retention interval between cue-outcome pairings and testing can alleviate the retardation of conditioned responding induced by pretraining exposure to the cue (i.e., the CS-preexposure effect). However, recent studies have reported an enhanced effect of CS-preexposure treatment with longer retention intervals (De la Casa & Lubow, 2000, 2002; Lubow & De la Casa, 2002). In a series of conditioned barpress suppression studies with rats, we examined the effects of imposing a retention interval just prior to testing following either CS-preexposure (cue alone before cue-outcome pairings) or extinction (cue alone after cue-outcome pairings) treatments. Experiment 1 replicated in a different preparation recent reports of CS-preexposure treatment effects increasing with longer retention intervals. Experiment 2 showed that spontaneous recovery of stimulus control of behavior after extinction can be obtained with the same parameters as those used to observe the augmented effect of CS-preexposure treatment. In Experiment 3, both the augmented effect of CS-preexposure treatment and spontaneous recovery from extinction were found when we used, in place of a retention interval, an associative priming manipulation.     

Summation of responding to CSs and an excitatory test context

The influence of test-trial delay of CS onset in obtaining response summation of an excitatory CS and an independently conditioned context was investigated. Water-deprived rats were given tone-shock and click-shock pairings in the training context and unsignaled footshocks in the test context. Durations of lick suppression in response to the tone (Test 1) and the click (Test 2) were then assessed in the test context. Licking was more suppressed when CS onset occurred early in the test session (e.g., 0 sec) than when it occurred later in the test session (e.g., 300 sec). The results from control groups that had received shock in an irrelevant context rather than the test context indicated that this effect was due to fear of the test context rather than diffuse, nonassociative fear. With onset of the clicks early in the test session on the second test day, response summation of the test context with the clicks was observed. This suggests that appreciable spontaneous recovery had occurred from any test-context extinction that took place on the first test day. We conclude that early onset of the CS on the test trial favors response summation of CSs and test context.     

Stimulus control following training on a conditional discrimination

Pigeons were trained on a conditional discrimination in which responding was reinforced either in the presence or in the absence of a vertical line, depending on the color of the key and the chamber’s illumination. When subsequently tested for generalization along the line-orientation dimension, all subjects showed a decremental gradient when the Unes were combined with the color that had signaled reinforcement in the presence of the vertical line. In addition, most subjects showed an incremental gradient when the lines were combined with the color that had signaled no reinforcement in the presence of the vertical line.