Programmed instruction: What it is and how to do it

Five behaviorological features of programmed instruction are outlined: behavioral objectives, reinforcement, activity rate: high and relevant, successive approximation, and mastery progression. Each of these topics is explained, and examples are given to illustrate the differences between programmed instruction and the more common transmission model of teaching. A final section provides suggestions on specific techniques of successive approximation.     

Moderation in Management Research: What,Why, When,and How

Many theories in management, psychology, and other disciplines rely on moderating variables: those which affect the strength or nature of the relationship between two other variables. Despite the near-ubiquitous nature of such effects, the methods for testing and interpreting them are not always well understood. This article introduces the concept of moderation and describes how moderator effects are tested and interpreted for a series of model types, beginning with straightforward two-way interactions with Normal outcomes, moving to three-way and curvilinear interactions, and then to models with non-Normal outcomes including binary logistic regression and Poisson regression. In particular, methods of interpreting and probing these latter model types, such as simple slope analysis and slope difference tests, are described. It then gives answers to twelve frequently asked questions about testing and interpreting moderator effects.     

Remembering Early Childhood: How Much, How, and Why (or Why Not)

In this article, we consider recent research on three questions about people's memories for their early childhood: whether childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, whether implicit memories survive when explicit memories do not, and why early episodic memories are sketchy. The research leads us to form three conclusions. First, we argue that childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, as long as the term is defined clearly. Specifically, people are able to recall parts of their lives from the period between ages 2 and 5 years, but they recall less from that period than from other periods. Second, we conclude that implicit memories from early childhood may be evident even when explicit memories are not, a finding that suggests early experience may affect behavior in ways that people do not consciously recognize. Third, we argue that although young children are well known to be wonderfully efficient learners of semantic information, they have difficulty in either encoding or retrieving the interlinked aspects of events that lend them their autobiographical character. Although more evidence is needed, the relative lack of episodic memories of early childhood may be linked to maturation of prefrontal cortex.     

Bridging History and Social Psychology: What, How and Why

This special issue aims to bridge history and social psychology by bringing together historians and social psychologists in an exercise of reading and learning from each other??s work. This interdisciplinary exercise is not only timely but of great importance for both disciplines. Social psychologists can benefit from engaging with historical sources by being able to contextualise their findings and enrich their theoretical models. It is not only that all social and psychological phenomena have a history but this history is very much part of present-day and future developments. On the other hand historians can enhance their analysis of historical sources by drawing upon the conceptual tools developed in social psychology. They can ??test?? these tools and contribute to their validation and enrichment from completely different perspectives. Most important, as contributions to this special issue amply demonstrate, psychology??s ??historical turn?? has the potential to shed a new light on striking, yet underexplored, similarities between contemporary public spheres and their pre-modern counterparts. This issue thereby calls into question the dichotomy between traditional and de-traditionalized societies??a distinction that lies at the heart of many social psychology accounts of the world we live in. The present editorial will introduce and consider this act of bridging history and social psychology by focusing on three main questions: What is the bridge made of? How can the two disciplines be bridged? and Why we cross this interdisciplinary bridge? In the end a reflection on the future of this collaboration will be offered.     

Direct instruction: What it is and what it is becoming

This essay describes the principles of Direct Instruction design and delivery used to establish clear, unambiguous communication and maximize student responding. Direct Instruction research findings are summarized: achievement of low-income students in Follow Through, longitudinal results, and the effectiveness of Direct Instruction for students with handicaps. Finally, new directions for Direct Instruction, technological applications and instruction of higher-order skills, are discussed.     

Grassroots spirituality: What it is,why it is here,where it is going,by Robert K. Forman

Among Asian Americans, particularly within immigrant communities, religious leaders are respected and sought out for support and guidance. There is a need to examine how religious leaders, especially within non-Christian faiths, identify persons and ascribe meaning and attributions to mental health concerns. The aim of this paper was to address this knowledge gap by exploring the perceptions of five Vietnamese American Buddhist leaders in regards to mental illness. Using qualitative analytic techniques we identified appearance, behaviours, and cognitive impairments that leaders interpreted as indicators of a mental health condition. Religious leaders cited messy and overly adorned outer appearance, aggressive and violent behaviours, and abnormal cognitive functioning as indicative of mental health problems. They attributed mental illness to a variety of causes: daily stressors, mind-body imbalance, karma, virtuous deeds, and spiritual possession. Findings inform strategies for faith-based initiatives and mental health service delivery to religiously affiliated Asian Americans.     

Parent group education: What does it do for the children

The Downing Program for Parent Training in Family Relationship and management Skills was introduced to the parents of students attending an alternative education school at the secondary level. With 58 parents completing all phases of the program, the results indicated that students with parents completing the Dowing program were significantly or markedly different from students whose parents did not participate in the Dowing program, using two measures of classroom behavior.     

Grafting Orchids and Ugly: Theatre, Disability and Arts-Based Health Research

Theatre-based health policy research is an emerging field, and this article investigates the work of one of its leaders. In 2005, prominent medical geneticist and playwright Jeff Nisker and his collaborators produced Orchids, his play concerning pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, to research theatre as a tool for engaging citizens in health policy development. Juxtaposing Orchids with a concurrent disability theatre production in Vancouver entitled Ugly, I argue that disability theatre suggests important means for building inclusiveness in this kind of research and complicates Nisker’s own call for international guidelines to delimit how journalists, playwrights, filmmakers, physicians and other media authors share genetics-based narratives in public.     

Animal Pain: What It is and Why It Matters

The basis of having a direct moral obligation to an entity is that what we do to that entity matters to it. The ability to experience pain is a sufficient condition for a being to be morally considerable. But the ability to feel pain is not a necessary condition for moral considerability. Organisms could have possibly evolved so as to be motivated to flee danger or injury or to eat or drink not by pain, but by “pangs of pleasure” that increase as one fills the relevant need or escapes the harm. In such a world, “mattering” would be positive, not negative, but would still be based in sentience and awareness. In our world, however, the “mattering” necessary to survival is negative—injuries and unfulfilled needs ramify in pain. But physical pain is by no means the only morally relevant mattering—fear, anxiety, loneliness, grief, certainly do not equate to varieties of physical pain, but are surely forms of “mattering.” An adequate morality towards animals would include a full range of possible matterings unique to each kind of animal, what I, following Aristotle, call “telos”. Sometimes not meeting other aspects of animal nature matter more to the animal than does physical pain. “Negative mattering” means all actions or events that harm animals—from frightening an animal to removing its young unnaturally early, to keeping it so it is unable to move or socialize. Physical pain is perhaps the paradigmatic case of “negative mattering”, but only constitutes a small part of what the concept covers. “Positive mattering” would of course encompass all states that are positive for the animal. An adequate ethic for animals takes cognizance of both kinds. The question arises as to how animals value death as compared with pain. Human cognition is such that it can value long-term future goals and endure short-run negative experiences for the sake of achieving them. In the case of animals, however, there is no evidence, either empirical or conceptual, that they have the capability to weigh future benefits or possibilities against current misery. We have no reason to believe that an animal can grasp the notion of extended life, let alone choose to trade current suffering for it. Pain may well be worse for animals than for humans, as they cannot rationalize its acceptance by appeal to future life without pain. How can we know that animals experience all or any of the negative or positive states we have enumerated above? The notion that we needed to be agnostic or downright atheistic about animal mentation, including pain, because we could not verify it through experience, became a mainstay of what I have called “scientific ideology”, the uncriticized dogma taught to young scientists through most of the 20th century despite its patent ignoring of Darwinian phylogenetic continuity. Together with the equally pernicious notion that science is “value-free”, and thus has no truck with ethics, this provided the complete justification for hurting animals in science without providing any pain control. This ideology could only be overthrown by federal law. Ordinary common sense throughout history, in contradistinction to scientific ideology, never denied that animals felt pain. Where, then, does the denial of pain and other forms of mattering come from if it is inimical to common sense? It came from the creation of philosophical systems hostile to common sense and salubrious to a scientific, non-commonsensical world view. Reasons for rejecting this philosophical position are detailed. In the end, then, there are no sound reasons for rejecting knowledge of animal pain and other forms of both negative and positive mattering in animals. Once that hurdle is cleared, science must work assiduously to classify, understand, and mitigate all instances of negative mattering occasioned in animals by human use, as well as to understand and maximize all modes of positive mattering.     

What to do and how to do it: sequence learning of action effects and transformation rules

Many goal-oriented actions, for example in tool use, can be characterized by the involvement of two components: The effect that the acting person wants to achieve and the transformation rule that defines the relationship between a bodily movement and the associated action effect. Both in conjunction specify the concrete action that has to be executed. In our experiments, we utilized a sequence learning paradigm to investigate whether these components are represented separately or are bound together to form a more holistic representation of the action. Participants switched between different transformation rules to achieve certain action effects. In one group, there was a fixed sequence of action effects, with randomly varying transformation rules. In the other group, the sequence of transformation rules was fixed, whereas the action effects were randomly varying. Results indicate that both kinds of sequences can be learned and provide evidence for the notion that transformation rules and action effects are represented separately.     

Pray Tell: The Who, What, Why, and How of Prayer Across Multiple Faiths

Although prayer is one of the most common chaplain interventions, there is a dearth of information pertaining to prayer in the chaplaincy literature. This study was therefore conducted to obtain basic information from professional chaplains about their use of prayer with patients. Eight professional chaplains participated in a 90-min focus group to discuss, among other things, the nature of chaplain prayers, the context in which they prayed, and who should initiate prayer. They also discussed differing religious perspectives about prayer, the strengths and limitations of different types of prayers, and praying with patients from concordant or discordant faiths.     

A social-psychological perspective on tacit coordination: How it works,when it works, (and when it does not)

We present a programmatic line of experimental studies which focus on the how and when of tacit coordination (i.e., the phenomenon that people can successfully coordinate their decisions without communication). We investigated this phenomenon using different types of economic games (i.e., social dilemmas as well as coordination games). Our studies broadly cover three themes: (a) fairness as a coordination rule, (b) uncertainty and common understanding, (c) social information as a cue. By focusing on these themes we have obtained several new insights on the prerequisites and boundary conditions of tacit coordination. We conclude that tacit coordination is often facilitated by mutual adherence to social norms (e.g., fairness rules, rules of deference, etcetera), but that in order to employ such norms people need sufficient environmental and/or social information.     

What mediation analysis can (not) do

The present article is concerned with a common misunderstanding in the interpretation of statistical mediation analyses. These procedures can be sensibly used to examine the degree to which a third variable (Z) accounts for the influence of an independent (X) on a dependent variable (Y) conditional on the assumption that Z actually is a mediator. However, conversely, a significant mediation analysis result does not prove that Z is a mediator. This obvious but often neglected insight is substantiated in a simulation study. Using different causal models for generating Z (genuine mediator, spurious mediator, correlate of the dependent measure, manipulation check) it is shown that significant mediation tests do not allow researchers to identify unique mediators, or to distinguish between alternative causal models. This basic insight, although well understood by experts in statistics, is persistently ignored in the empirical literature and in the reviewing process of even the most selective journals.