Learning through Feature Prediction: An Initial Investigation into Teaching Categories to Children with Autism through Predicting Missing Features

Individuals with autism have difficulty generalising information from one situation to another, a process that requires the learning of categories and concepts. Category information may be learned through: (1) classifying items into categories, or (2) predicting missing features of category items. Predicting missing features has to this point been little used in special education. Children with autism were taught novel category information through either classification or feature prediction tasks. Both methods resulted in successful category learning. Furthermore, feature prediction learning resulted in better performance when predicting missing features of items at test. These results suggest that while both tasks are valuable tools for teaching categories to children with autism, the feature prediction task provides more successful post-learning use of the information acquired.     

Towards a process theory of learning: Feeling the beauty of the world

Alfred North Whitehead's theory of learning is best understood in the overall context of his process philosophy. The rhythmic cycles of growth forming the basis of human learning (romance, precision, and generalisation) are organically connected to the characteristics of life typifying all entities in the universe (self-enjoyment, creative activity, and aim).The kind of balanced education which best enhances growth and connectedness is one in which art and aesthetic appreciation in the broadest sense are dominant. By experiencing the beauty of the sunset, for example, children and adults have access to feelings that flow through them from the world and connect them to distant events taking place in space and time. These bodily feelings at the base of all experience provide concrete ways in which human beings can appreciate the intrinsic value of the world around them.By way of contrast, the methods of 17th century science replace our concrete experience of the sunset with abstract categories that are used to measure the phenomena in question and deny the importance of that experience in understanding the world. Schools' and universities' emphasis upon this methodology produces an imbalanced education with minds in a groove.A renewal of balance in education helps us to understand the false dichotomy between child-centered and and curriculum-centered education. Education for Whitehead must pay attention to both. Moreover, he understands that the academic freedom enjoyed by bands of imaginative scholars in universities is not an article of commerce to be sold to the highest corporate bidder but something to be valued for its intrinsic worth.     

Studies on the written characters orientation and its influence on digit reversal by children

Recent research has found that children reverse mainly the left-oriented characters when writing from memory (e.g. they write ? and ε instead of J and 3). In order to obtain an objective definition of the left-orientation of a character, the ratings of the level of left-orientation of all the asymmetrical capital letters and digits by 142 adult students was analysed in Study 1. Study 2, on 298 five–six-year-old children, examined an immediate prediction of Study 1, namely that the children reverse mainly the digits that the adult students have rated left-oriented. Other predictions, both of the posited representation of the writing during the reversal stage and the neurological process of mirror generalisation, were verified: the simplicity of the representation of the symmetrical digits 0 and 8 makes incorrect writings very rare; the mirror generalisation, which operates only in the left–right direction, makes other transformations (inversion or 180° rotation) very rare. Finally, the explanatory power of some putative individual factors of reversal (e.g. writing with the left hand) is shown to be far lower than that of the left-orientation of the characters.     

大众性：普遍化·日常化·泛化——中外古典正剧类似性特征一论

中外古典正剧类似性特征研究,是鉴于中外戏剧的差异性比较过多而作的一个“有异”的类似性系列探讨。如果用真正全球性的眼光和戏剧性的标准来打量中外古典正剧,首先在戏剧要素上就体现出了大众性特征,它主要表现在人物的普遍化、冲突的日常化和内容的泛化这三个方面,这是戏剧的艺术本质所致。     

The effect of distributed questioning with varied examples on exam performance on inference questions

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the distributed presentation of different versions of a question would produce better performance on a new version of the question than distributed presentation of the same version of the question. A total of 48 four question sets of five alternative multiple‐choice questions were presented during a college lecture course. The answers to all the four questions in each set required an inference from the same fact statement. One question in each set appeared on both a block exam and the final. Each of the other three questions was presented either on an online quiz before class, during class or on an online quiz a week after class. Answering different versions of a question before class, during class and after class resulted in better performance on a fourth version of the question on the exam and final than answering the same question before class, during class and after class. On the final exam, 44 questions were answered twice, first under a time constraint of 90 seconds and then when response time was unlimited. The two responses were virtually identical.     

Evidence of confusion about evidence of causes: comments on the debate about EBP in education

ABSTRACT

EBP – evidence-based policy and practice – has generated intense controversy. A rough continuum of positions can be discerned: At one pole are “tough-minded” commentators distinguished by their support of EBP; however, there are serious internal differences in this camp, for some regard randomised field trials (RFTs) as the gold standard methodology that should generate the evidence required in EBP; while other “softer” commentators have a more nuanced position wherein the RFT is an INUS factor – part of a “causal cake” which requires many other support factors to be present before any generalisation can be made about a policy. The evolution of this softer branch of the tough-minded pole is traced, from Campbell and Stanley, to Cronbach and Associates, to Cartwright and Hardie. At the other pole are the tender-minded, many of whom are members of the philosophy of education community; they are sceptical about EBP, perhaps the most serious of their criticisms being that educational processes are not apt for causal investigation at all. The arguments that are offered in support of this position are judged to be deficient.