Effect of Incentives on Learning in Middle-and Lower-Class Children

Classified by Warner's Index of Status Characteristics as either middle class (MC) or lower class (LC), 10- and 15-year-old children learned a list of five low association nonsense syllables by the anticipation method to a criterion of one perfect recitation under one of three incentive conditions: material, social approval, or no incentive. As predicted, 10-year-old LC children performed better when offered a material incentive, whereas their MC peers performed best under social approval. There were no significant differences in learning between 15-year-old MC and LC children, suggesting that with age older LC children become more responsive to nonmaterial reinforcers as they become increasingly exposed to MC norms.     

The Effect of Negative Incentives in Serial Learning: VII. Theory of Punishment

Eighty three-, four-, five-, and six-year-old boys and girls were presented with experimental conditions where context, transformational complexity, and verbal cue were varied, Two experimental tasks, a perceptually Concrete and an Abstract task, were included and Ss were assigned to a Verbal Cue or a Nonverbal Cue condition. All Ss responded to both the present progressive and the past tenses. Results revealed significant effects of the Age and Tense factors, and improved performance on Comprehension over Production. Younger children made fewer overall errors than older ones. Ss performed better on the present progressive than on the past tense on the perceptually Concrete task, while the reverse was true on the Abstract task. These findings demonstrate that language performance is the result of a complex interrelationship between transformational complexity and the perceptual properties of linguistic structures.     

The Importance of Overt Responding in Programmed Instruction Even with Added Incentives for Learning

Among the fundamental tenets of programmed instruction is the requirement of overt responding. Past research has not determined when this tenet holds true. We systematically replicated the work of Tudor (1995) by showing that overt responding in computer-based instruction improves learning, even when there is an incentive that might be thought to improve learning enough to mask the effect of overt responding. Subjects were exposed to both read-only and overt-response materials. One group received course-related, bonus points based on posttest performance, whereas the other group received points simply for participation. Within-subject comparison showed greater performance increases when overt responding was required, regardless of the point incentive. No significant differences were found between groups.     

The Will to Truth,the Death Drive and the Will to Power

This paper claims that Freud’s idea of the death drive is analogous to the will to truth in traditional philosophy and can be better understood as a truth drive. The argument is based upon Nietzsche’s interpretation of the will to truth as a concealed will to death. This interpretation emphasizes the opposition between truth and life; truth is a concept of constancy while life is a concept of change. Freud’s recognition of the conservative nature of the drives brings him to the paradoxical conclusion of the existence of a death drive. It is paradoxical, for Freud, since it considers death as a fundamental principle of life and as its aim. The paper suggests that by replacing the concept of death by the concept of truth and using Nietzsche’s idea of “the will to power” this paradox can be resolved without losing Freud’s insight of the dialectic nature of psychological life.

     

An Experimental Study of Thorndike's Theory of Learning

Cattell, Raymond B. Personality: A Systematic, Theoretical, and Factual Study. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950. Pp. 689. Reviewed by Percival M. Symonds.     

Moving to Learn: How Guiding the Hands Can Set the Stage for Learning

Previous work has found that guiding problem‐solvers' movements can have an immediate effect on their ability to solve a problem. Here we explore these processes in a learning paradigm. We ask whether guiding a learner's movements can have a delayed effect on learning, setting the stage for change that comes about only after instruction. Children were taught movements that were either relevant or irrelevant to solving mathematical equivalence problems and were told to produce the movements on a series of problems before they received instruction in mathematical equivalence. Children in the relevant movement condition improved after instruction significantly more than children in the irrelevant movement condition, despite the fact that the children showed no improvement in their understanding of mathematical equivalence on a ratings task or on a paper‐and‐pencil test taken immediately after the movements but before instruction. Movements of the body can thus be used to sow the seeds of conceptual change. But those seeds do not necessarily come to fruition until after the learner has received explicit instruction in the concept, suggesting a “sleeper effect” of gesture on learning.     

图式教学对阅读理解能力、推理能力与自我效能感的影响

本研究采用自然实验法对吉林省松原市逸夫实验小学160名四、五年级的学生进行了对比实验研究,探讨图式教学对阅读理解能力、推理能力和自我效能感的影响。结果表明:(1)四、五年级实验班学生的阅读理解能力普遍提高,五年级明显。(2)仅五年级实验班学生的推理能力有了显著提高,相对而言,图式教学对五年级学生推理能力的影响要优于四年级。(3)四、五年级实验班学生的自我效能感均明显增强。这说明图式教学比常规教学更能有效地提高学生的阅读理解能力和自我效能感。     

引发小学生学习中逆反心理原因的实验研究

小学生学习中出现逆反心理是一种极为普遍的社会心理现象。了解引发小学生学习中产生逆反心理的原因对克服小学生逆反心理,提高学习效率具有现实意义。本研究发现取消感兴趣的活动、过度要求、剥夺自主性,厌倦情绪都会明显引发小学生学习中的逆反心理。     

Cross‐Situational Learning: An Experimental Study of Word‐Learning Mechanisms

Cross‐situational learning is a mechanism for learning the meaning of words across multiple exposures, despite exposure‐by‐exposure uncertainty as to the word's true meaning. We present experimental evidence showing that humans learn words effectively using cross‐situational learning, even at high levels of referential uncertainty. Both overall success rates and the time taken to learn words are affected by the degree of referential uncertainty, with greater referential uncertainty leading to less reliable, slower learning. Words are also learned less successfully and more slowly if they are presented interleaved with occurrences of other words, although this effect is relatively weak. We present additional analyses of participants’ trial‐by‐trial behavior showing that participants make use of various cross‐situational learning strategies, depending on the difficulty of the word‐learning task. When referential uncertainty is low, participants generally apply a rigorous eliminative approach to cross‐situational learning. When referential uncertainty is high, or exposures to different words are interleaved, participants apply a frequentist approximation to this eliminative approach. We further suggest that these two ways of exploiting cross‐situational information reside on a continuum of learning strategies, underpinned by a single simple associative learning mechanism.     

Three Students with Developmental Disabilities Learn to Operate an iPod to Access Age-Appropriate Entertainment Videos

Students with developmental disabilities may not have the necessary skills or the same opportunities to access multimedia-based leisure materials as their typical peers. Portable multimedia devices such as the iPod Touch® may provide them with a useful tool for accessing age-appropriate leisure material. The present study examined the feasibility of teaching 3 students with developmental disabilities to independently operate an iPod to watch age-appropriate entertainment videos. A delayed multiple-probe design across participants was implemented with baseline, intervention, fading, and follow-up phases. Video modeling and least-to-most response prompting were successfully used to teach these 3 students to operate an iPod Touch® to watch preferred videos without adult assistance. The results complement previous findings supporting the use of video modeling as an instructional strategy and add to the literature by using portable multimedia devices as assistive technology for teaching an age-appropriate leisure skill.