Learning from text benefits from enactment

Classical studies on enactment have highlighted the beneficial effects of gestures performed in the encoding phase on memory for words and sentences, for both adults and children. In the present investigation, we focused on the role of enactment for learning from scientific texts among primary-school children. We assumed that enactment would favor the construction of a mental model of the text, and we verified the derived predictions that gestures at the time of encoding would result in greater numbers of correct recollections and discourse-based inferences at recall, as compared to no gestures (Exp. 1), and in a bias to confound paraphrases of the original text with the verbatim text in a recognition test (Exp. 2). The predictions were confirmed; hence, we argue in favor of a theoretical framework that accounts for the beneficial effects of enactment on memory for texts.     

Learning from Homeschooling Routines

This study provides a rare opportunity to look inside the homeschool and to observe the routines of homeschooling families from across the United States. With more than 1000 survey participants, and nine parents selected for interviews, the compiled data were analyzed through open coding techniques. Meaningful aspects that arose from the routines of homeschoolers included collaboration with other educational entities, the use of community resources, faith, individualized instruction, and the flexibility of school structure. The findings of this research may provide meaningful information for Christian teachers, parents, and others in our search for the optimal educational environment.     

Learning from human tutoring

Human one-to-one tutoring has been shown to be a very effective form of instruction. Three contrasting hypotheses, a tutor-centered one, a student-centered one, and an interactive one could all potentially explain the effectiveness of tutoring. To test these hypotheses, analyses focused not only on the effectiveness of the tutors' moves, but also on the effectiveness of the students' construction on learning, as well as their interaction. The interaction hypothesis is further tested in the second study by manipulating the kind of tutoring tactics tutors were permitted to use. In order to promote a more interactive style of dialogue, rather than a didactic style, tutors were suppressed from giving explanations and feedback. Instead, tutors were encouraged to prompt the students. Surprisingly, students learned just as effectively even when tutors were suppressed from giving explanations and feedback. Their learning in the interactive style of tutoring is attributed to construction from deeper and a greater amount of scaffolding episodes, as well as their greater effort to take control of their own learning by reading more. What they learned from reading was limited, however, by their reading abilities.     

Learning faces from photographs

Previous studies examining face learning have mostly used only a single exposure to 1 image of each of the faces to be learned. However, in daily life, faces are usually learned from multiple encounters. These 6 experiments examined the effects on face learning of repeated exposures to single or multiple images of a face. All experiments provided evidence for image-specific picture learning taking place over and above any invariant face learning, with recognition accuracy always highest for the image studied and performance falling across transformations between study and test images. The relative roles of pictorial and structural codes in mediating learning faces from photographs need to be reconsidered.     

Learning from Minimal Economic Models

It is argued that one can learn from minimal economic models. Minimal models are models that are not similar to the real world, do not resemble some of its features, and do not adhere to accepted regularities. One learns from a model if constructing and analysing the model affects one’s confidence in hypotheses about the world. Economic models, I argue, are often assessed for their credibility. If a model is judged credible, it is considered to be a relevant possibility. Considering such relevant possibilities may affect one’s confidence in necessity or impossibility hypotheses. Thus, one can learn from minimal economic models.

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Learning from women with psychosis

The article describes psychoanalytic reflections in the work of a consultant psychiatrist responsible for a recently developed female intensive care unit. The manifestations of aggression were observed to be different from that of male patients. The behavioural manifestation of aggression by women was linked to the themes of secrets, and of hidden aggression, which are described in the analytic literature as feminine characteristics. The relationships between women as sibling inpatients and with female staff may explain some of the difficulties in managing aggression. Hidden aggression in the dyad of female-to-female transferences and countertransference may contribute to problems in all female inpatient settings. Bringing together the themes of psychosis and of women from a psychoanalytic perspective, the author suggests that the care pathway leading to transfer to the intensive care unit may exacerbate psychotic symptoms in acute states, due to specific vulnerabilities of women. The provision of specialized inpatient services for women may be more therapeutic if female development and the nature of their relationships were better understood.     

Learning about wisdom from Lehrer

The paper discusses Lehrer??s pioneering approach to the topic of wisdom. His pithy proposal, that wisdom is preference of merit justified by an evaluation system and undefeated by error, fits well within the grand philosophical tradition of thinking about wisdom, offering a very clear and original formulation of its target. The first part of the paper puts it on a map of philosophical options concerning wisdom (anthropo-, theo- and cosmo-centric ones) and then raises questions about it: does preference have to motivate, what is the relation between factual and evaluative knowledge in the evaluation system, and how is the objectivity of merit secured? The second part briefly develops an alternative proposal inspired by Lehrer??s work. It is a two-level picture. Wisdom combines the virtues of the first-order production of decision and action (reliability and practical validity) with second-order reflective endorsement of the first-order picture. The first-order production yields phronesis-generated action-guiding desires which constitute practical wisdom in the narrow sense, and the second level the more refined and sophisticated wisdom of philosophers and their kin.     

Learning melodies from non-adjacent tones

Language acquisition might heavily rely on statistical learning mechanisms. This has led many researchers to investigate the computational constraints that limit such learning. In particular, it has been argued that statistical relations among non-adjacent items cannot be tracked, as this might lead to a “computational explosion” making statistical learning intractable. In line with this view, previous research suggests that listeners cannot track relations among non-adjacent musical tones (Creel, Newport, & Aslin, 2004). Here I show that participants readily track non-adjacent tone relations when these are implemented in a musically meaningful way. Specifically, participants readily track non-adjacent tone relations in tonal melodies, but find it more difficult to track non-adjacent tone relations in random melodies, suggesting that non-adjacent relations are easier to track when listeners face “ecological”, musically meaningful stimuli.