Recent progress in the plastic methods of structural analysis

The techniques described in Part I of this paper for the calculation of plastic failure loads under proportional loading are further exemplified by indicating solutions for a rectangular building frame, a Vierendeel girder, and a shed-type portal frame. A method for estimating deflections of a frame just as the collapse load is attained is then described, with some indications as to its reliability. More general conditions of loading than proportional loading are next discussed, and generalized load and failure concepts are defined. The theorems and techniques for determining critical shakedown loads under variable, repeated loading are then described and illustrated. The relation of the elastic-plastic shakedown analysis to the much simpler analysis for failure under single load applications is discussed.     

Overshadowing not potentiation of illness-based contextual conditioning by a novel taste

In four experiments using rat subjects, we investigated the effects of presenting a novel flavor cue at the time of pairing an environmental context with illness. In each experiment, the subjects were allowed to spend time in a distinctive cage before receiving an injection of LiCl. For some, plain water was made available on these conditioning trials; for others, a novel taste (HCl) was presented. We measured the strength of the context aversion by assessing the ability of the contextual cues to block the acquisition of an aversion to sucrose in a further phase of training. We found that initial training with HCl present made the context less effective as a blocking cue and concluded that the HCl had overshadowed learning about the context. We suggest that this blocking procedure provides a more accurate assessment of contextual aversion than does the consumption test that has more usually been used and that taste-context overshadowing may be a more robust phenomenon than has thus far been thought.     

Lecturing and other face-to-face teaching – too much or too little? An assessment based on student feedback and fail rates

Institutes of higher learning are tending to reduce the amount of face-to-face teaching that they offer, and particularly through the traditional pedagogical method of lecturing. There is ongoing debate about the educational value of lectures as a teaching approach, in terms of both whether they facilitate understanding of subject material and whether they augment the student educational experience. In this study, student evaluation of teaching scores plus academic outcome (percentage of students who fail) was assessed for 236 course units offered by a science faculty at an Australian university over the course of one year. These measures were related to the degree to which lectures and other face-to-face teaching were used in these units, controlling for factors such as class size, school and year level. An information-theoretic model selection approach was employed to identify the best models and predictors of student assessments and fail rates. All the top models of student feedback included a measure reflecting amount of face-to-face teaching, with the evaluation of quality of teaching being higher in units with higher proportions of lectures. However, these models explained only 12–20% of the variation in student evaluation scores, suggesting that many other factors come into play. By contrast, units with fewer lectures have lower failure rates. These results suggest that moving away from lectures and face-to-face teaching may not harm, and indeed may improve the number of students who pass the subject, but that this may be incurred at the expense of greater dissatisfaction in students' learning experience.     

Characteristics of the Effective Teacher based on Pupil Evaluations

This research compared high-load and low-load versions of a text by manipulating text presentation, text organization, and example context on measures of fact and concept learning. The low-load text presentation variable enhanced fact and concept learning and post-reading ease of comprehension ratings. The low-load text organization variable led to higher post-reading ease of comprehension ratings. Ease of comprehension was related significantly to fact and concept learning. These findings are supported by cognitive load theory and extend the research to include variables that influence text processing.     

Chinese Business Process Re-engineering

The popularity of business process re-engineering (BPR) and its international diffusion from the United States make it important to understand the influence of cultural factors on this concept. The global economic prominence of the Chinese and their distinctive cultural characteristics prompted our study of Chinese business process re-engineering. This article addresses a large gap in the Chinese management literature and is intended to help those who are managing organizations or marketing information technology (IT) products and related services in Greater China. We systematically compare IT-enabled change in the American and Chinese business cultures. Informal planning and process modelling, highly interdependent social and organizational relationships with ingrained hierarchies, and the prevailing attitudes towards information management and organizational change will shape the preparation for IT-enabled process innovation efforts as well as the design and implementation of IT-enhanced business process models in Chinese organizations.     

Interval between preexposure and test determines the magnitude of latent inhibition: Implications for an interference account

The effect of a retention interval on latent inhibition was studied in three experiments by using rats and the conditioned taste-aversion procedure. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated an apparent loss of latent inhibition (i.e., a strengthening of the aversion) in preexposed subjects that experienced a retention interval of 12 days between conditioning and the test. In Experiment 2, we found no effect of this retention interval on the habituation of neophobia produced by the phase of exposure to the flavor. In Experiment 3, we showed that interposing a retention interval between preexposure and conditioning produced effects exactly comparable to those seen in Experiment 1. The implications of these results for rival theories of latent inhibition, as an acquisition deficit or as a case of interference at retrieval, are discussed.     

Context specificity of sensory preconditioning: Implications for processes of within-event learning

A variant of the taste aversion procedure for sensory preconditioning, as used by Rescorla and Cunningham (1978), was employed in a study of the context dependency of within-event learning. In two experiments, rats received Phase 1 exposure to a simultaneous flavor compound, AX; flavor X was paired with illness during Phase 2, and any tendency for the resulting aversion to be elicited by A was measured. It was found that subjects were less likely to shun flavor A as a consequence of this training if the Phase 1 and test episodes were conducted in distinctively different contexts. This effect was evident both when the change of context occurred just before the test with flavor A (Experiment 1) and when it occurred before Phase 2 (Experiment 2). These results were taken to imply that, as is often found with serial associations, the retrieval of within-event associations is subject to contextual control. The implications of these findings for the interpretation of perceptual learning effects are discussed.     

PSYCHIATRY

This article describes the reading instructional program that first-graders in an urban school located in a large, Midwestern city received as a result of a grant initiative. Various assessments of the children's reading revealed some important areas for reading success were missing. As a result, suggestions were shared with the school staff to balance the first-grade reading curriculum. However, one confounding variable prevented the teachers’ ability to change their instruction.