Next Steps for Mind,Brain, and Education: Strengthening Early‐Career Development

An increasing number of scholars are being trained in the field of mind, brain, and education (MBE), yet discussions of trainees' needs and how to meet them are rare. We, the inaugural International Mind, Brain, and Education Society (IMBES) Trainee Board, identify three broad needs of MBE trainees: guidance and support, greater access to and connections among the MBE community, and professional development. We report a first step to address these needs: a daylong trainee conference, which included sessions to foster connections among trainees, provide mentorship from MBE leaders, and provide knowledge and skill building for careers. Attendees' survey results suggest the conference successfully supported trainees' development. As substantial trainee needs remain, we offer specific ways that principal investigators, institutions, funding agencies, future IMBES trainee boards, and the MBE community can further address trainees' needs to support early‐career development and strengthen the MBE field generally.     

Developmental Change in Infant Categorization: The Perception of Correlations among Facial Features

Previous studies indicated that the ability to detect correlations among attributes emerges between 7 and 10 months of age. In the present study, the generality of this developmental transition was examined. Using an infant-control habituation procedure, 48 7- and 10-month-old infants were tested for the perception of correlations among basic facial features. The developmental effects were replicated. Only the 10-month-old infants demonstrated their sensitivity to the pattern of correlation by generalizing to a novel face that preserved the experienced pattern of correlation, while showing increased attention to a face in which the pattern of correlation was violated. 7-month-old infants generalized to both test stimuli containing familiar features, regardless of the status of the correlation. Implications for face perception and the processing of categorical information are discussed.     

Developmental change in infants' perception of correlations among attributes

The perception of relational information such as the correlation or co-occurrence among features should play a central role in abilities ranging from the perception and recognition of a simple pattern or object to the formation of a category. 4 experiments were conducted to examine developmental change in 4-, 7-, and 10-month-old infants' perception of correlations among attributes. The results suggested a developmental progression in infants' processing of simple correlational information, ranging from the processing of independent featural information only at 4 months, the perception of relations among features of a single pattern at 7 months, to the abstraction of invariant relations from a category at 10 months.     

The segregation of items into categories by ten-month-old infants

2 experiments were conducted investigating infants' use of structural relations (i.e., correlated attribute values) in dividing or segregating items into categories. Rosch argued that attribute values do not occur in all possible combinations in the real world. Even though values of attributes may vary continuously across objects, some combinations are more likely to occur than others, forming breaks or discontinuities between clusters of correlated values. Within a well-controlled laboratory context, using artificial categories and a standard infant-recognition memory procedure, the present experiments demonstrated 10-month-old infants' sensitivity to structural information like that proposed by Rosch to exist in the real world, and their ability to segregate items into categories on the basis of clusters of correlated attribute values.     

Closing the Gender Gap? Issues of gender equity in English secondary schools

Issues of gender equity in English secondary schools over the last decade have been dominated by a concern with the “under-achievement” of boys, implicitly acknowledging the apparent success of strategies developed in schools in previous decades to improve equality of opportunity for girls. This paper presents evidence to challenge this interpretation of the debate, arguing that policy-makers need to engage more centrally with diversity and heterogeneity of gender constructions and take note of inclusivity of needs rather than framing strategy within essentialist structures. We argue here, through exemplification developed with teachers in English secondary schools over the period 2000–2004, that there is a need to revisit policy and practice frameworks in England, as in Australia, to reassert the needs of girls as well as boys and to develop gender-relational policies which acknowledge and value difference and which have at their core the transformation of traditional aspirations and expectations of education.     

Access and use of technologies in the home in the UK: implications for the curriculum

There is increasing acknowledgement that differences exist in the levels of achievement of boys and girls in English primary schools, as evidenced by performances in National Curriculum tests at Key Stages 1 and 2. This article briefly examines the nature of these differences, both nationally and specifically within the context of a pilot study of four schools in different socio-economic contexts. Some of the underlying factors behind these differential achievements are considered, particularly within the context of literacy issues and of boys' constructions of masculinity. An analysis of the approaches towards creating a context for achievement of both girls and boys in these four schools is then offered, with a focus on pedagogic, organizational and socio-cultural strategies. It is suggested that, while intervention strategies which have the potential to raise the achievement levels of boys (and girls) are being successfully developed in each pilot school, there is as yet only limited evidence to suggest how and why these interventions are most effective, and indeed, how these interventions might be successfully adapted and transferred to other school contexts.     

Mentoring and target‐setting in a secondary school in England: an evaluation of aims and benefits

This paper reflects upon the nature of a target‐setting and mentoring scheme in an 11–16 school in England, through a series of retrospective interviews with students who continued into further education. It considers the extent to which the initiative impacted both upon students’ formal academic achievement at 16+ and upon the subsequent longer‐term aspirations of these students. Interviews with students who achieved considerable ‘value‐added’ in their GCSE examinations suggested that the impact of mentoring was strongest amongst those students who came from homes where there was less expectation of them participating in further and higher education, and that this effect was not differentiated according to gender. The paper suggests that longer‐term transformation of students’ aspirations, and the challenging of gendered course and career stereotypes, will only be achieved if schools adopt a more holistic and proactive approach to careers education and to widening participation for their students, and that the absence of such proactivity will limit the longer‐term gains initiated by successful mentoring activities.     

When is a search not a search? A comparison of searching the amed complementary health database via EBSCOhost,OVID and DIALOG

Background: The researchers involved in this study work at Exeter Health library and at the Complementary Medicine Unit, Peninsula School of Medicine and Dentistry (PCMD). Within this collaborative environment it is possible to access the electronic resources of three institutions. This includes access to amed and other databases using different interfaces. Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate whether searching different interfaces to the amed allied health and complementary medicine database produced the same results when using identical search terms. Methods: The following Internet‐based amed interfaces were searched: DIALOG DataStar; EBSCOhost and OVID SP_UI01.00.02. Search results from all three databases were saved in an endnote database to facilitate analysis. A checklist was also compiled comparing interface features. Results: In our initial search, DIALOG returned 29 hits, OVID 14 and Ebsco 8. If we assume that DIALOG returned 100% of potential hits, OVID initially returned only 48% of hits and EBSCOhost only 28%. In our search, a researcher using the Ebsco interface to carry out a simple search on amed would miss over 70% of possible search hits. Subsequent EBSCOhost searches on different subjects failed to find between 21 and 86% of the hits retrieved using the same keywords via DIALOG DataStar. In two cases, the simple EBSCOhost search failed to find any of the results found via DIALOG DataStar. Conclusions: Depending on the interface, the number of hits retrieved from the same database with the same simple search can vary dramatically. Some simple searches fail to retrieve a substantial percentage of citations. This may result in an uninformed literature review, research funding application or treatment intervention. In addition to ensuring that keywords, spelling and medical subject headings (MeSH) accurately reflect the nature of the search, database users should include wildcards and truncation and adapt their search strategy substantially to retrieve the maximum number of appropriate citations possible. Librarians should be aware of these differences when making purchasing decisions, carrying out literature searches and planning user education.     

Parsing Items into Separate Categories: Developmental Change in Infant Categorization

Three experiments report developmental change in infants' tendency to parse exemplars into separate categories. In Experiment 1, a familiarization-novelty preference procedure was used. Fifty-four 4-, 7-, and 10-month-old infants were familiarized with members of two basic-level animal categories (cats and horses) and tested with novel members of the familiarized categories and with members of a third category (dogs). In Experiment 2, a habituation-dishabituation procedure was used. Forty-eight 7- and 10-month-old infants were habituated to examples of both male and female faces and tested with novel gender-typical and gender-ambiguous faces. In both experiments, 10-month-old infants appeared to form differentiated categories, whereas younger infants formed a single category to include the range of items presented during familiarization. Experiment 3 ruled out a priori stimulus preferences as an explanation for the 10-month findings in Experiment 2.