A touch-detecting teaching machine with auditory reinforcement

This teaching machine has been designed and used to train reading and other visual discrimination skills with normal and retarded children. On each frame the subject responds by touching one of three response panels on which are projected the multiple-choice alternatives. The response panels are coated with a transparent conducting film which allows electronic detection of this simple and direct response. Correct responses are reinforced by the machine naming the stimulus, while auditory reinforcement is absent for an incorrect response. The subject's performance level is continuously computed as an exponentially weighted moving average. The measure is weighted so that it rapidly follows recent changes in performance.     

History,philosophy, and science teaching: A brief review

School science education is currently the subject of much debate. Historians and philosophers of science should play a role in this debate. Since the late nineteenth century there has been a persistent, if minor, tradition arguing for the incorporation of historical and philosophical dimensions in the teaching of school science. With the current crisis in science teaching, there are encouraging signs that more attention is being paid to this tradition. What is required is much greater collaboration between philosophers, historians, and science educators, particularly in the training of teachers.This article is a shortened version of my 1988, A Role for History and Philosophy in Science Teaching, inEducational Philosophy and Theory 20 (2). All references are to the following History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching: A Bibliography.This special number ofSynthese is part of a large international project on the place of history and philosophy in science teaching. Special issues ofEducational Philosophy and Theory, Interchange, andStudies in Philosophy and Education are being produced. An international conference on the subject will be held at Florida State University in November 1989. Details of the journals and the conference can be obtained from the author.The project commenced while the author was on leave at Florida State University in 1987. It began with a gracious invitation from Jaakko Hintikka to guest edit this number, and was furthered with the support and encouragement of David Gruender. I thank them both, and also the Philosophy Department for its hospitality. Special appreciation is due to the nearly 30 authors who have contributed papers to the project. I hope that their efforts will re-open the needed dialogue between historians, philosophers, and science educators.     

Nozick's experience machine is dead,long live the experience machine!

Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment (Nozick's scenario) is widely used as the basis for a “knockdown” argument against all internalist mental state theories of well-being. Recently, however, it has been convincingly argued that Nozick's scenario should not be used in this way because it elicits judgments marred by status quo bias and other irrelevant factors. These arguments all include alternate experience machine thought experiments, but these scenarios also elicit judgments marred by status quo bias and other irrelevant factors. In this paper, several experiments are conducted in order to create and test a relatively bias-free experience machine scenario. It is argued that if an experience machine thought experiment is used to evaluate internalist mental state theories of well-being, then this relatively bias-free scenario should be used over any of the existing scenarios. Unlike the existing experience machine scenarios, when this new scenario is used to assess internalist mental state theories of well-being, it does not provide strong evidence to refute or endorse them.     

Ruminations on teaching projective assessment: an ideology, specific usages, teaching practices

Summary: This paper was written in reaction to current dissatisfaction with projective techniques. A credo for use of projective techniques emphasizes accountability, phenomeno-logical equality, and an eventual "giving-away" of assessment procedures through education. The primary legitimate usage is nonpsychometric; an interview focused on growth in various contexts. Secondary usages include examples of procedural or methodological effects to provide specific information. Training practices germane to the credo and legitimate usages are presented.     

A behavioral perspective on college teaching

Much of the subject matter learned in college, particularly during the first two years, is taught in relatively large classes with text and lecture as the primary source of the information being learned. If students make effective and prolonged contact with these sources, they can acquire extensive verbal repertoires in many areas of knowledge. Unfortunately there are many other activities that compete for the typical student's study time. Several factors are often cited as variables that will support study behavior in competition with other activities, but the only powerful one available to the teacher is the exam grade, as it is related to the course grade. However, unless exams are clearly related to appropriate study behavior, require through and extensive coverage of the subject matter, occur frequently (preferably no less often than once a week), and are also clearly related to the course grade, even this factor will not generate prolonged and effective study behavior. Effective college teaching is essentially a form of aversive control, but if done properly the aversiveness is quite mild, and such aversive control can be responsible for the development of large and valuable intellectual repertoires.     

A model for teaching research ethics

A model is described for implementing a program in research ethics education in the face of federal and institutional mandates and current resource, disciplinary, and infrastructure limitations. Also discussed are the historical background, content and evaluation process of the workshop at the heart of the program, which reaches a diverse group of over 250 students per year—from first-year graduate students in basic research labs to clinical fellows. The workshop addresses central issues in both everyday laboratory ethics and in larger societal questions. Goals include improving overall awareness of ethics guidelines and philosophy and enhancing skills in identifying and then analyzing the ethical components of situations. Pedagogies used and their effectiveness and that of the overall workshop and extended program are addressed. Programs like these have initiated a shift in the culture of basic research, which is a critical need given the current atmosphere.     

A model for teaching research ethics

A model is described for implementing a program in research ethics education in the face of federal and institutional mandates and current resource, disciplinary, and infrastructure limitations. Also discussed are the historical background, content and evaluation process of the workshop at the heart of the program, which reaches a diverse group of over 250 students per year—from first-year graduate students in basic research labs to clinical fellows. The workshop addresses central issues in both everyday laboratory ethics and in larger societal questions. Goals include improving overall awareness of ethics guidelines and philosophy and enhancing skills in identifying and then analyzing the ethical components of situations. Pedagogies used and their effectiveness and that of the overall workshop and extended program are addressed. Programs like these have initiated a shift in the culture of basic research, which is a critical need given the current atmosphere.     

Cognition,construction of knowledge,and teaching

The existence of objective knowledge and the possibility of communicating it by means of language have traditionally been taken for granted by educators. Recent developments in the philosophy of science and the historical study of scientific accomplishments have deprived these presuppositions of their former plausibility. Sooner or later, this must have an effect on the teaching of science. In this paper I am presenting a brief outline of an alternative theory of knowing that takes into account the thinking organism's cognitive isolation from reality. This orientation was proposed by Vico at the beginning of the 18th century, disregarded for two hundred years, and then propounded independently by Piaget as a developmentally grounded constructivist epistemology. The paper focuses specifically on the adaptive function of cognition, Piaget's scheme theory, the process of communication, and the subjective perspective on social interaction. In the concluding section it then suggests some of the consequences the shift of epistemological presuppositions might have for the practice of teaching.The only truly ubiquitous factor in cognitive developments — be it in the history of science or in the ontogeny of mind — are of a functional, not a structural kind.Piaget and Garcia, 1983, p. 38I am indebted to Jack Lochhead and John Clement for their helpful critical comments on the draft of this paper. The work that led to it was supported in part by NSF Grants to IBR. University of Georgia, and SRRI, University of Massachusetts.     

The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model

It is proposed that the human sentence parsing device assigns phrase structure to word strings in two steps. The first stage parser assigns lexical and phrasal nodes to substrings of roughly six words. The second stage parser then adds higher nodes to link these phrasal packages together into a complete phrase marker.This model of the parser is compared with ATN models, and with the two-stage models of Kimball (1973) and Fodor, Bever and Garrett (1974). Our assumption that the units which are shunted from the first stage to the second stage are defined by their length, rather than by their syntactic type, explains the effects of constituent length on perceptual complexity in center embedded sentences and in sentences of the kind that fall under Kimball's principle of Right Association. The particular division of labor between the two parsing units allows us to explain, without appeal to any ad hoc parsing strategies, why the parser makes certain ‘shortsighted’ errors even though, in general, it is able to make intelligent use of all the information that is available to it.     

Varisim: A new machine method for orthogonal rotation

The derivative of Kaiser's Varimax criterion, if set to zero, yields a set of equations which are quite similar to those obtained for a least-squares problem of the Procrustes type. This similarity suggested an iterative technique for orthogonal rotation, dubbed Varisim, which was programmed for the IBM 7094 in FORTRAN. An empirical comparison between Varimax and Varisim, which was based on a number of data sets taken from the literature yielded three major results so far: (i) Varisim is slower than Varimax, roughly by a factor of 3, (ii) Varisim yields factors which in general contribute more evenly to the common test variance than Varimax factors, and which (iii) line up more closely with oblique configurations obtained with Binormamin than Varimax factors.This paper is based on parts of a thesis submitted to the Graduate College of the University of Illinois in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree in Psychology. Some of its contents were read at the joint meeting of the Psychonomic and the Psychometric Society, Niagara Falls, Ontario, 1964. Most of the computer-bound work was carried out while the author was employed by the Statistical Service Unit, University of Illinois; it was written up while the author held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Psychometric Laboratory of the University of North Carolina. Although space limitations forbid more complete acknowledgments, I am bound to record my deep gratitude to my advisor, Prof. H. F. Kaiser.