Behavioral changes in teachers as a function of student feedback: A case for the achievement motivation theory?

A field experiment tested whether teachers change their behavior when they receive student ratings as feedback on their own behavior and on the behavior of a fictitious ideal teacher (from the students' perspective). Explanation of such behavioral changes in the form of theories of cognitive balance, as suggested by other authors, has been criticized. As an alternative explanation, achievement motivation theory has been considered, from which a series of hypotheses has been deduced. Overall, most of the hypotheses were not confirmed, and it was concluded that the effectiveness of feedback on behavioral changes in teachers cannot be judged to be especially high, although a number of theoretical and methodological qualifications were added.     

Is the worldview of qualitative inquiry a proper guide for psychological research?

Qualitative methods are becoming increasingly popular in psychology. Although the distinction between qualitative and quantitative often is stated in terms of methods, the real distinction is between worldviews: that favored by most qualitative methodologists, which emphasizes subjective experience and multiple realities, and that commonly accepted in science. The worldview accepted by most adherents of qualitative inquiry suggests the exclusive use of methods that include verbal reports of lived experience. Qualitative methods serve an important function in psychology, but their use as recommended by their adherents is limited in 2 respects: The adherents use a narrow and unconventional approach to qualitative methods that differs from that normally understood, and they favor use of a restricted range of qualitative methods over other qualitative methods and quantitative methods. If qualitative inquiry is to make a greater contribution to psychology, researchers in that tradition must acquire a better understanding of contemporary science, correct their misunderstandings of the rationale for quantitative methods, and address the apparent limitations of their methods emphasizing reported experience.     

What Is in a Name? Understanding the Implications of Participant Terminology

The authors discuss the history of research terminology in American psychology with respect to the various labels given to those upon whom we conduct research (“observer”–“subject”–“participant”–“client”). This history is supplemented with an analysis of participant terminology in APA manuals from four historical eras, from the 1950s to the present. The general trend in participant terminology reflects the overall trends in American psychology, beginning with a complex lexicon that admitted both the passive and the active research participant, followed by a dominance of the passive term ‘subject’ and ending with the terminological ambiguity and multiplicity reflected in contemporary psychology. This selective history serves to contextualize a discussion of the meaning, functions, and implications of the transformations in, and debates over, participant terminology.

Is all motivation good for learning? Dissociable influences of approach and avoidance motivation in declarative memory

The present study investigated the effects of approach versus avoidance motivation on declarative learning. Human participants navigated a virtual reality version of the Morris water task, a classic spatial memory paradigm, adapted to permit the experimental manipulation of motivation during learning. During this task, participants were instructed to navigate to correct platforms while avoiding incorrect platforms. To manipulate motivational states participants were either rewarded for navigating to correct locations (approach) or punished for navigating to incorrect platforms (avoidance). Participants' skin conductance levels (SCLs) were recorded during navigation to investigate the role of physiological arousal in motivated learning. Behavioral results revealed that, overall, approach motivation enhanced and avoidance motivation impaired memory performance compared to nonmotivated spatial learning. This advantage was evident across several performance indices, including accuracy, learning rate, path length, and proximity to platform locations during probe trials. SCL analysis revealed three key findings. First, within subjects, arousal interacted with approach motivation, such that high arousal on a given trial was associated with performance deficits. In addition, across subjects, high arousal negated or reversed the benefits of approach motivation. Finally, low-performing, highly aroused participants showed SCL responses similar to those of avoidance-motivation participants, suggesting that for these individuals, opportunities for reward may evoke states of learning similar to those typically evoked by threats of punishment. These results provide a novel characterization of how approach and avoidance motivation influence declarative memory and indicate a critical and selective role for arousal in determining how reinforcement influences goal-oriented learning.     

Should subjects be forewarned of the possible psychological consequences of filling out a PTSD questionnaire?

In 1993 Albach investigated the long-term consequences of sexual abuse on psychological health. A group of abused women a a control group of nonabused women were asked to fill in a questionnaire assessing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For ethical reasons, the abused women were warned that filling in the questionnaire might be emotionally stressful. The control group did not receive this warning. The abused women scored higher on the questionnaire than the nonabused women. The warning they received may have influenced their reports. Our experiment investigated this. 101 psychology students were divided into two groups, one who received a warning and a control group who did not. The hypothesis was that people who had been previously warned would score higher on a PTSD questionaire than people who had not. There were, however, no significant differences in mean PTSD scores and no known initial differences between groups.     

Is reading a feminine domain? The role of gender identity and stereotypes in reading motivation in Chile

Social Psychology of Education - In Chile, as in other countries, there are large gender gaps in reading achievement. One factor that may explain some of these results is male and female...     

Is the growth of subjective time in humans a linear or nonlinear function of real time?

The difficulties of deciding whether subjective time grows as a linear or nonlinear function of real time are discussed, and two experiments are presented to address this question. In Experiment 1, people received a 10-s standard duration and then had to judge what proportion other durations (ranging from 1 to 10 s) were of the standard. Counting was prevented by a concurrent task. The relation between judged and actual proportions was linear. In Experiment 2, people were required to average together three tone durations (mean duration 600 ms) and to judge whether subsequently presented comparisons were or were not the average. The spacing of the tone durations had no effect on judgements, suggesting a linear underlying time scale.     

Is the weber fraction a function of physical or perceived input?

It is well known that a given physical input (e.g. intensity of light or sound, length or weight of an object) does not always give rise to the same sensation. For example, arrow heads affect the perceived length of lines (Muller-Lyer illusion) and size affects the apparent weight of an object (size-weight illusion). It is generally assumed that the differential threshold is a simple function of the physical intensity of the stimulus. We may however ask whether the differential threshold is affected by illusions.

To try to answer this question we estimate differential thresholds under a pair of conditions in which the relevant input is the same but appears different. Using the size-weight illusion, we have found that the differential threshold for weight is greater for a set of small weights than for a set of larger and apparently lighter weights.     

Is the growth of subjective time in humans a linear or nonlinear function of real time?

The difficulties of deciding whether subjective time grows as a linear or nonlinear function of real time are discussed, and two experiments are presented to address this question. In Experiment 1, people received a 10-s standard duration and then had to judge what proportion other durations (ranging from 1 to 10 s) were of the standard. Counting was prevented by a concurrent task. The relation between judged and actual proportions was linear. In Experiment 2, people were required to average together three tone durations (mean duration 600 ms) and to judge whether subsequently presented comparisons were or were not the average. The spacing of the tone durations had no effect on judgements, suggesting a linear underlying time scale.     

For better or for worse? a nationwide study of the social psychological effects of gender and ability grouping in mathematics

This exploratory investigation employs the National Education Longitudinal Surveybreak(NELS:88) to examine equity in tracking from a new, less-studied angle, with the view that tracking may not be all good or all bad, but that its effects are variable. The present study considers how these variable effects might, in part, be produced through a mechanism of social comparison conceptualized by Marsh et al. as the big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE). It compares similar students, except that some are in schools that use tracking and some are in schools that do not use tracking. Unlike previous studies of between-track effects, it asks whether tracking works uniformly for males and females within the same track placement in a particular subject area. Analyses yielded significant differences in students' attitudes toward mathematics, educational aspirations, self-esteem, locus of control, and engagement in school. These systematic effects suggest the mechanisms of the BFLPE. Despite the reflected glory of being in a high ability track, when males, in contrast to females, are grouped with peers of similar high ability in a subject area that defines their competence, they seem to lose their competitive edge. Low ability males are positively affected through the mechanism of comparing with their peers because the competition to do well is relatively less keen than in high tracks.     

Is the fluency of language outputs related to individual differences in intelligence and executive function?

There has been little research on the fluency of language production and individual difference variables, such as intelligence and executive function. In this study, we report data from 106 participants who completed a battery of standardized cognitive tasks and a sentence production task. For the sentence production task, participants were presented with two objects and a verb and their task was to formulate a sentence. Four types of disfluency were examined: filled pauses (e.g. uh, um), unfilled pauses, repetitions, and repairs. Repetitions occur when the speaker suspends articulation and then repeats the previous word/phrase, and repairs occur when the speaker suspends articulation and then starts over with a different word/phrase. Hierarchical structural equation modeling revealed a significant relationship between repair disfluencies and inhibition. Conclusions focus on the role of individual differences in cognitive ability and their role in models and theories of language production.     

Passion and personality: Is passionate behaviour a function of personality ?

IntroductionPassion as a concept but also as a way of life seems to generate an ever-growing interest among researchers and even employers. The Dualistic model of Passion (Vallerand et al., 2003) has suggested that passion could take two distinct forms: harmonious or obsessive passion. However, the debate still remains open on the factors (contextual or dispositional) that are likely to influence the tendency to develop a passion for an activity.ObjectiveThis research was designed to explore the relations between passion and personality and to determine the strength of those links.MethodTo this end, 241 participants completed an online questionnaire comprising one measure of passion along with one measure of personality, namely an assessment of the Big Five dimensions.ResultsThe results show a pattern of relations between passion and personality that is consistent with previous research which highlighted the more positive/adaptive nature and consequences of harmonious passion, in comparison with obsessive passion.ConclusionThese outcomes nevertheless remain weak. More research is needed to focus on the contextual factors that could play an important role in the development of passion, mainly in its harmonious form.     

Is Humility a Virtue in the Context of Sport?

I define humility as a virtue that includes both proper self‐assessment and a self‐lowering other‐centeredness. I then argue that humility, so understood, is a virtue in the context of sport, for several reasons. Humility is a component of sportspersonship, deters egoism in sport, fuels athletic aspiration and risk‐taking, fosters athletic forms of self‐knowledge, decreases the likelihood of an athlete seeking to strongly humiliate her opponents or be weakly humiliated by them, and can motivate an athlete to achieve greater levels of excellence in her sport. In the context of team sports, humility can contribute to an athlete being a better teammate, foster unity amidst diversity within a team, and contribute to the overall moral and athletic excellence of a team. I also argue that an individual who is truly the world's greatest athlete can know and communicate this truth, while remaining humble.     

Is women's identity achievement associated with the expression of generativity? Examining identity and generativity in multiple roles

We hypothesized that the degree to which middl-aged mothers are identity-achieved is related both to their well-being and their generativity. A unique feature of this research is the examination of identity and generativity separately in the context of specific role domains. Although midlife women reported significantly lower moratorium and higher diffusion than did college women, reports of identity achievement did not differ between the two samples. Identity achievement was, however, more consistently associated with midlife women's positive well-being than foreclosure, moratorium, or diffusion. While global measures of identity and generativity were not related, significant relationships were observed when identity and generativity were measured separately in the context of specific role domains.     

Who took the "x" out of expectancy-value theory? A psychological mystery, a substantive-methodological synergy, and a cross-national generalization

Expectancy-value theory (EVT) is a dominant theory of human motivation. Historically, the Expectancy × Value interaction, in which motivation is high only if both expectancy and value are high, was central to EVT. However, the Expectancy × Value interaction mysteriously disappeared from published research more than 25 years ago. Using large representative samples of 15-year-olds (N = 398,750) from 57 diverse countries, we attempted to solve this mystery by testing Expectancy × Value interactions using latent-variable models with interactions. Expectancy (science self-concept), value (enjoyment of science), and the Expectancy × Value interaction all had statistically significant positive effects on both engagement in science activities and intentions of pursuing scientific careers; these results were similar for the total sample and for nearly all of the 57 countries considered separately. This study, apparently the strongest cross-national test of EVT ever undertaken, supports the generalizability of EVT predictions--including the "lost" Expectancy × Value interaction.