an ecological perspective and model for campus design

Blocker's article described the implications of an ecological perspective in the elementary school setting. Banning and his colleagues at WICHE have been interested in institutional change in higher education. While this article does not describe a “program” per se, it does describe in some detail a methodology for change. After discarding traditional student personnel perspectives (unenlightened, adjustment, and developmental), Banning and Kaiser push out the frontier with their concept of “ecosystems.” An ecosystem is one in which there is a true transaction between mutually dependent partners, with the assumption that either may change so that mutual benefit may result. A model for bringing about such change is presented, and a methodology for using the model is described.     

A computational model for simulating text comprehension

In the present article, we outline the architecture of a computer program for simulating the process by which humans comprehend texts. The program is based on psycholinguistic theories about human memory and text comprehension processes, such as the construction-integration model (Kintsch, 1998), the latent semantic analysis theory of knowledge representation (Landauer & Dumais, 1997), and the predication algorithms (Kintsch, 2001; Lemaire & Bianco, 2003), and it is intended to help psycholinguists investigate the way humans comprehend texts.     

Retrieving relevant factors with exploratory SEM and principal-covariate regression: A comparison

Behavioral researchers often linearly regress a criterion on multiple predictors, aiming to gain insight into the relations between the criterion and predictors. Obtaining this insight from the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression solution may be troublesome, because OLS regression weights show only the effect of a predictor on top of the effects of other predictors. Moreover, when the number of predictors grows larger, it becomes likely that the predictors will be highly collinear, which makes the regression weights’ estimates unstable (i.e., the “bouncing beta” problem). Among other procedures, dimension-reduction-based methods have been proposed for dealing with these problems. These methods yield insight into the data by reducing the predictors to a smaller number of summarizing variables and regressing the criterion on these summarizing variables. Two promising methods are principal-covariate regression (PCovR) and exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM). Both simultaneously optimize reduction and prediction, but they are based on different frameworks. The resulting solutions have not yet been compared; it is thus unclear what the strengths and weaknesses are of both methods. In this article, we focus on the extents to which PCovR and ESEM are able to extract the factors that truly underlie the predictor scores and can predict a single criterion. The results of two simulation studies showed that for a typical behavioral dataset, ESEM (using the BIC for model selection) in this regard is successful more often than PCovR. Yet, in 93% of the datasets PCovR performed equally well, and in the case of 48 predictors, 100 observations, and large differences in the strengths of the factors, PCovR even outperformed ESEM.     

Teaching ethics and technology with <Emphasis Type="Italic">Agora</Emphasis>, an electronic tool

Courses on ethics and technology have become compulsory for many students at the three Dutch technical universities during the past few years. During this time, teachers have faced a number of didactic problems, which are partly due to a growing number of students. In order to deal with these challenges, teachers in ethics at the three technical universities in the Netherlands — in Delft, Eindhoven and Twente — have developed a web-based computer program called Agora (see www.ethicsandtechnology.com). This program enables students to exercise their ethical understanding and skills extensively. The program makes it possible for students to participate actively in moral reflection and reasoning, and to develop the moral competencies that are needed in their later professional practice. The developers of the program have tried to avoid two traps. Firstly, they rejected, from the outset, a cookbook style of dealing with ethical problems that applied ethics is often taken to be and, secondly, they wanted to design a flexible program that respects the student’s as well as the teacher’s creativity, and that tries to engage students in moral reflection. Agora meets these requirements. The program offers possibilities that extend beyond the requirements that are usually accepted for case-exercises in applied ethics, and that have been realised in several other computer models for teaching ethics. In this article, we describe the main considerations in the development of Agora and the features of the resulting program.     

Track-draw: A graphical interface for controlling the parameters of a speech synthesizer

In this report we describe a graphical interface for generating voiced speech using a frequency-domain implementation of the Klatt (1980) cascade formant synthesizer. The input to the synthesizer is a set of parameter vectors, calledtracks, which specify the overall amplitude, fundamental frequency, formant frequencies, and formant bandwidths at specified time intervals. Tracks are drawn with the aid of a computer mouse that can be used either inpoint-draw mode, which selects a parameter value for a single time frame, or inline-draw mode, which uses piecewise linear interpolation to connect two user-selected endpoints. Three versions of the program are described: (1) SYNTH draws tracks on an empty time-frequency grid, (2) SPECSYNTH creates a spectrogram of a recorded signal upon which tracks can be superimposed, and (3) SWSYNTH is similar to SPECSYNTH, except that it generatessine-wave speech (Remez, Rubin, Pisoni, & Carrell, 1981) using a set of time-varying sinusoids rather than cascaded formants. The program is written for MATLAB, an interactive computing environment for matrix computation. Track-Draw provides a useful tool for investigating the perceptually salient properties of voiced speech and other sounds.     

VSearch: Macintosh software for experiments in visual search

In this paper, we describe software that turns a Macintosh computer into an off-the-shelf tool for experiments on visual search. Our design goals included portability (between members of the Macintosh computer family and between various research settings), user-friendliness (equivalent to Macintosh programming standards), flexibility (to allow replication and extension of important experiments on visual search), and adaptability (very short design-to-data and data-to-analysis turnaround times). We describe how the software meets these goals in three major phases of an experiment: stimulus construction, experimental control, and statistical analysis. We then list several landmark studies of visual search that can be easily designed and extended with the software. Finally, we outline plans for expanding the experimental variations that will be supported in future versions of the software.     

A procedure for studying online conversational processing using a chat bot

This article reports the development of a tool for examining the social and cognitive processes of people involved in a conversational interaction. Research on how people process utterances while they are actually engaged in an interaction has been extremely rare. To that end, we have developed a conversational bot (computer program designed to mimic human communication) with which participants can chat in a format similar to instant messaging. This program allows for the recording of comprehension speed, and it can be interfaced with secondary tasks (e.g., lexical decisions) in order to examine online conversational processing. Additional research possibilities with this program are discussed.     

ConceptBuilder: An open-source software tool for measuring,depicting, and quantifying causal models

Measurements of people’s causal and explanatory models are frequently key dependent variables in investigations of concepts and categories, lay theories, and health behaviors. A variety of challenges are inherent in the pen-and-paper and narrative methods commonly used to measure such causal models. We have attempted to alleviate these difficulties by developing a software tool, ConceptBuilder, for automating the process and ensuring accurate coding and quantification of the data. In this article, we present ConceptBuilder, a multiple-use tool for data gathering, data entry, and diagram display. We describe the program’s controls, report the results of a usability test of the program, and discuss some technical aspects of the program. We also describe ConceptAnalysis, a companion program for generating data matrices and analyses, and ConceptViewer, a program for viewing the data exactly as drawn.     

Revealing Hidden Curvilinear Relations Between Work Engagement and Its Predictors: Demonstrating the Added Value of Generalized Additive Model (GAM)

Previous studies measuring different aspects of the quality of life have, as a rule, presumed linear relationships between a dependent variable and its predictors. This article utilizes non-parametric statistical methodology to explore curvilinear relations between work engagement and its main predictors: job demands, job control and social support. Firstly, the study examines what additional information non-linear modeling can reveal regarding the relationship between work engagement and the three predictors in question. Secondly, the article compares the explanatory power of non-linear and linear modeling with regard to work engagement. The generalized additive model (GAM), that makes possible non-linear modeling, is compared with the widely used simply linear generalized linear model (GML) procedure. Based on the survey data (N = 7,867) collected in eight European countries in 2007, the article presents the following main results. GAM clearly fitted the data better than GLM. All investigated job characteristics had curvilinear relationships with work engagement, although job demands and job control relationships were almost linear. Social support had a clear U-shaped curvilinear connection to work engagement. Interactions between the three job characteristics were also found. Interaction between job demands and social support was curvilinear in shape. Finally, GAM proved to be a more practical and efficient tool of analysis than GLM in situations where there are reasons to assume curvilinear relationships, complex interactions effects between predictors.     

When I Became a Refugee,This Became My Refuge: A Proposal for Implementing a Two-Generation Intervention Using Yoga and Narrative to Promote Mental Health in Syrian Refugee Caregivers and School Readiness in Their Preschool Children

ABSTRACT

This article represents our attempt to establish a blueprint for a comprehensive refugee intervention program to be disseminated across the globe. Specifically, we describe a proposal to conduct a two-generation intervention program that addresses the socioemotional needs of both Syrian caregivers and their preschool children who have fled the atrocities of their home country and have settled in Turkey. The goal is to improve the school readiness skills of preschool children ravaged by war, dislocation, and poverty. First, we describe a caregiver intervention, which consists of trauma-sensitive yoga; second, we describe a child intervention, which consists of a storytelling and story-acting activity. Finally, we discuss how to assess the effectiveness of this two-generation intervention program. Our hope is that this novel intervention program will be implemented in other regions experiencing an influx of refugee families who need immediate psychological services.     

Understanding and solving arithmetic word problems: A computer simulation

In this paper, I describe a computer program, WORDPRO, which simulates the psychological processes involved when third-grade children understand and solve simple arithmetic word problems. Both the implementation of the program and its performance on a set of sample problems are presented. WORDPRO is a useful research tool in that it demonstrates the sufficiency of the theory upon which it is based, assists in communicating that theory to other researchers, and provides a sources of empirical predictions for experimental tests of the theory.     

A SAS/IML program using the Kalman filter for estimating state space models

To help disseminate the knowledge and software implementation of a state space model (SSM), this article provides a SAS/IML (SAS Institute, 2010) program for estimating the parameters of general linear Gaussian SSMs using the Kalman filter algorithm. In order to use this program, the user should have SAS installed on a computer and have a valid license for SAS/IML. Since the code is completely open, it is expected that this program can be used not only by applied researchers, but also by quantitative methodologists who are interested in improving their methods and promoting SSM as a research instrument.     

Collecting and analyzing on-line protocols from novice programmers

Methodology for collecting and analyzing on-line protocols from novice programmers is described. On-line protocols are copies of all syntactically correct programs that students have written using an interactive computer system. Since the number of on-line protocols collected is quite large, we have developed a computer program, called the Bug Finder, which can auto-matically identify semantic and pragmatic bugs in subjects’ programs. In this paper, we describe the theory upon which the Bug Finder is built and provide an example of the Bug Finder in operation.     

Making Sense of Groups,Computers, and Mathematics

In this article, we report the findings of research that was designed to identify factors associated with learning mathematics in groups with computers. The study was influenced by different theoretical perspectives on social interaction and learning mathematics, and we describe how we attempted to integrate these approaches into the research design. To cope with complex data based on eight groups of six students (aged 9-12 years), we developed a methodology that involved moving between quantitative and qualitative approaches in an iterative spiral. In this article, we focus on the patterns of learning associated with two group tasks incorporating the use of Logo. Quantitative analysis of learning measures indicated positive learning gains as a result of the groupwork, with no differences across gender or ability; qualitative and quantitative analysis of process factors pointed to explanations for the differing profiles of success across groups. Although balanced coconstruction at the computer, coupled with the coordination of others' perspectives, was most advantageous for learning conceptually based mathematics, this was not the case with "technology-driven" mathematics, where fragmentation and concentrated work at the computer proved to be more efficient. These findings suggest that detailed specification of the learning goal is crucial when evaluating groupwork within educational settings.     

A program for assessing body image disturbance using adjustable partial image distortion

Body image disturbance has been one of the most widely studied areas in the literature on eating disorders. Some of the tasks designed to assess it have been used to estimate the sizes of specific parts of the body, whereas others have served to make estimations of overall body size. In recent years, the introduction of innovative computing procedures has allowed the two approaches to be combined and has made their application more straightforward. The program we describe here (Body Image Assessment Software, or BIAS) evaluates body image distortions and body dissatisfaction via the on-screen presentation of a scale image, the different components of which can be modified by the patient. The program was developed using Microsoft Access 2000 and Visual Basic for applications. It can be run on any computer with Windows and Microsoft Access 2000 or Microsoft Access 2000 RunTime, which makes it particularly easy to use and enables direct analysis of the recorded data through the use of applications such as SPSS.     

Testing the race model inequality: An algorithm and computer programs

In divided-attention tasks, responses are faster when two target stimuli are presented, and thus one is redundant, than when only a single target stimulus is presented. Raab (1962) suggested an account of this redundant-targets effect in terms of a race model in which the response to redundant target stimuli is initiated by the faster of two separate target detection processes. Such models make a prediction about the probability distributions of reaction times that is often called the race model inequality, and it is often of interest to test this prediction. In this article, we describe a precise algorithm that can be used to test the race model inequality and present MATLAB routines and a Pascal program that implement this algorithm.     

Martin Mayman's early memories technique: bridging the gap between personality assessment and psychotherapy

In this article, we describe Martin Mayman's approach to early childhood memories as a projective technique, beginning with his scientific interest in learning theory, coupled with his interest in ego psychology and object relations theory. We describe Mayman's contributions to the use of the early memories technique to inform the psychotherapy process, tying assessment closely to psychotherapy and making assessment more useful in treatment. In this article, we describe a representative sample of research studies that demonstrate the reliability and validity of early memories, followed by case examples in which the early memories informed the therapy process, including issues of transference and countertransference.     

Demonstration and evaluation of a method for assessing mediated moderation

Mediated moderation occurs when the interaction between two variables affects a mediator, which then affects a dependent variable. In this article, we describe the mediated moderation model and evaluate it with a statistical simulation using an adaptation of product-of-coefficients methods to assess mediation. We also demonstrate the use of this method with a substantive example from the adolescent tobacco literature. In the simulation, relative bias (RB) in point estimates and standard errors did not exceed problematic levels of ±10%, although systematic variability in RB was accounted for by parameter size, sample size, and nonzero direct effects. Power to detect mediated moderation effects appears to be severely compromised under one particular combination of conditions: when the component variables that make up the interaction terms are correlated and partial mediated moderation exists. Implications for the estimation of mediated moderation effects in experimental and nonexperimental research are discussed.     

Predicting danger: the nature, consequences, and neural mechanisms of predictive fear learning

The ability to detect and learn about the predictive relations existing between events in the world is essential for adaptive behavior. It allows us to use past events to predict the future and to adjust our behavior accordingly. Pavlovian fear conditioning allows anticipation of sources of danger in the environment. It guides attention away from poorer predictors toward better predictors of danger and elicits defensive behavior appropriate to these threats. This article reviews the differences between learning about predictive relations and learning about contiguous relations in Pavlovian fear conditioning. It then describes behavioral approaches to the study of these differences and to the examination of subtle variations in the nature and consequences of predictive learning. Finally, it reviews recent data from rodent and human studies that have begun to identify the neural mechanisms for direct and indirect predictive fear learning.