What Experiences Do Expository Books on Recommended Book Lists Offer to K–2 Students?

Teachers can use expository texts to teach academic vocabulary, content knowledge, text structure, and text features. National associations' recommended book lists are often used to identify books for classrooms. Previously we identified expository texts on these lists from 2001–2002 and 2011–2012. The current study explored instructional possibilities these expository books afford. More recent books have more content, academic vocabulary, and supplementary information. However, many earlier and recent books lack text features such as page numbers, tables of contents, glossaries, and indexes. Teachers will need to supplement these books with other texts to provide experiences enabling proficiency with exposition.     

The Role of Religion in Therapy: Time for Psychologists to Have a Little Faith?

The argument has been made that religious and spiritual (R/S) forms of treatment, or R/S adaptations of existing treatments, are an appropriate, culturally sensitive, and potentially efficacious method of intervention when working clinically with religious patients experiencing psychological, behavioral, or physiological dysfunction. The previous articles in this special series describe four such interventions designed for use with patients with particular presenting problems including serious mental illness, cancer, eating disorders, and scrupulosity. This article offers a brief historical presentation on the growth of interest in R/S in clinical psychology and behavioral medicine, with particular attention to the general issue of the role of values in therapy, and includes criticisms of integrating R/S in treatment. The difficulty of appreciating unique R/S perspectives and their relevance for particular clients is emphasized and the question of whether a “true” understanding of R/S beliefs necessarily leads to better health is examined. Each of the four therapies presented in this special series is individually analyzed, and it is clear that they offer sensitive and culturally relevant approaches to treating the various disorders, though areas of potential improvement or possible confusion are highlighted. Finally, the following are deemed essential if R/S-informed therapies are to impact the field and be appropriately introduced with clients: (a) training of future and current practitioners; (b) longitudinal research on R/S; (c) outcome studies of R/S interventions; and (d) adequate funding for the achievement of these goals.     

What Does Computer-Mediated Control of a Thermal-Hydraulic System Have to Do With Moving Your Jaw to Speak? Evidence for Synergies in Process Control

Coordination phenomena can take many diverse forms, but ecological psychologists have focused primarily on understanding human motor control. In this article we report an experiment on human-machine coordination that was designed to replicate and extend an early experiment on human jaw movement during speech production that provided initial evidence of synergies. Participants controlled a thermal-hydraulic process simulation for about 1 hr per weekday for approximately 1 month. Half of the participants used a human-computer interface that presented predominantly lower level physical (P) information, whereas the other half used an interface that presented higher level functional (P+F) information as well. During the last block of trials, local perturbations were introduced by increasing the time constant of a particular component per trial by a factor of 20. The component perturbations had less impact on the performance of the P+F participants than the P, and this effect was mostly localized to components that had alternative degrees of freedom for control. Most important, the P+F participants exhibited more evidence of higher level control than the P, providing some initial evidence for synergies in process control. These findings suggest that it may be possible to develop a general unified theory of coordination that subsumes motor control and human-machine interaction as special cases.