The effects of adapting a writing course to students' writing strategies

Background. When writing a text, students are required to do several things simultaneously. They have to plan, translate and review, which involve demanding cognitive processes. In order to handle this complexity, writers need to develop a writing strategy. The two most well‐defined writing strategies that have been identified, are those of a planning strategy and a revising strategy. Aims. To establish whether students will be more competent in managing the complexity of writing when writing instruction is adapted to their habitual writing strategy, thus resulting in better texts. Sample. 113 high school students (10th grade). Method. Students were randomly assigned to either the planning or the revising condition. To identify writing strategies, students completed a questionnaire concerning their planning and revising tendencies. To measure the level of writing skill, students' texts written during pre‐test and post‐test were analysed. Results. The effect of instruction based on a planning strategy interacted with the level of planning or revising strategy: the greater the use of such a strategy, the larger the effect on writing skill. In contrast, the effect of instruction based on a revising writing strategy did not interact with the level of planning or revising strategy. Results imply that students with strong tendencies to plan or revise profited from writing instruction based on a planning strategy, while students with a low tendency to plan or revise profited more from instruction based on a revising strategy. Conclusion. Adapting writing instruction to students' level of writing strategy, is an effective approach for learning to write.     

Kenyan students' expectations upon beginning a master's course in counselling studies

A sample of 23 students - 12 women, 11 men - enrolled on a two-year part-time master's course in counselling studies in Nairobi, Kenya, took part in a focus group discussion about their expectations of the course. The key themes that emerged were: adding to their skills and status and challenges to the counsellors. The findings are discussed within the context of counselling and culture.     

A critical analysis of students' teacher ratings

Analysis of data obtained from 258 second-year undergraduate students revealed that sex differences are not associated with differences in students' teacher ratings. Significant differences in ratings were found to be associated with differences in academic performance and with differences in preference for anonymity when submitting ratings. These findings suggest that students' ratings of teaching performance suffer from significant validity problems and that such ‘performance indicators’ are likely to provide misleading information.     

Measuring the time course of selection during visual search

In visual search tasks, observers can guide their attention towards items in the visual field that share features with the target item. In this series of studies, we examined the time course of guidance toward a subset of items that have the same color as the target item. Landolt Cs were placed on 16 colored disks. Fifteen distractor Cs had gaps facing up or down while one target C had a gap facing left or right. Observers searched for the target C and reported which side contained the gap as quickly as possible. In the absence of other information, observers must search at random through the Cs. However, during the trial, the disks changed colors. Twelve disks were now of one color and four disks were of another color. Observers knew that the target C would always be in the smaller color set. The experimental question was how quickly observers could guide their attention to the smaller color set. Results indicate that observers could not make instantaneous use of color information to guide the search, even when they knew which two colors would be appearing on every trial. In each study, it took participants 200–300 ms to fully utilize the color information once presented. Control studies replicated the finding with more saturated colors and with colored C stimuli (rather than Cs on colored disks). We conclude that segregation of a display by color for the purposes of guidance takes 200–300 ms to fully develop.     

The course of 253 analyses from selection to outcome

Two studies of the clinical work of experienced psychoanalysts are presented. Study I is a retrospective study of all the analytic work--161 cases--of sixteen analysts from 1973 to 1977, including their evaluations of the treatments at outcome. Study II is a prospective study of the ninety-two cases started in analysis by a group of twenty analysts between 1984 and 1989 and followed to termination, including their reports. The history of each treatment as reported and evaluated by the analyst is examined in terms of: nature of the population, the analyst's view of the case when the initial recommendation was made, duration of treatment, therapeutic benefit, rating of analyzability at termination of treatment, nature of the termination, and cases changed to psychotherapy. Some old shibboleths are challenged as perspective on both the limitations and achievements of psychoanalysis emerges from the findings of the study.     

Taiwanese junior college students' needs for and perceptions of a career planning course

A 30-item survey was developed to assess the career planning needs of junior college students in Taiwan. 159 men and 493 women were surveyed about career planning needs and perceptions of a proposed course model to answer whether women differ from men in such needs and upper and lower division students differ. A series of two-way analyses of variance identified 7 items on which the women expressed needs more strongly than the men and another 8 items on which the responses of lower division students were significantly different from those of upper division students. Students' perceptions of a course model provided recommendations for a course in career education.     

Psychological hardiness predicts successful selection in a law enforcement special operations assessment and selection course

We studied the predictive effects of psychological hardiness on successful selection in a United States federal tactical law enforcement assessment and selection (A&S) program. Seventy‐one male experienced law enforcement personnel participated in a week‐long, physically and psychologically rigorous A&S course. Dispositional Resilience Scale (DRS‐15) Total Hardiness scores predicted selection in this select sample. Age and cognitive ability moderated the predictive effects of psychological hardiness such that hardiness predicted selection in younger candidates and candidates with higher cognitive ability. Similar findings were obtained for DRS Commitment. DRS‐15 Control facet also differentiated selection in this sample but the predictive effects did not hold when age and cognitive ability were controlled. Findings extend the application of the DRS‐15 to law enforcement personnel selection and highlight the importance of examining moderating effects of psychological hardiness.     

College students' study time: course level, time of semester, and grade earned

The association of total study time, number of events, time per event ratio, study strategies, and course grades across the semester were examined by linking students' study logs to course performance. There were 37 upper-division and 109 lower-division participants. Students earning As and Bs studied more frequently at the end of the semester but for shorter periods of time than students earning lower grades. Results are discussed in terms of providing college students and faculty with recommendations about learning strategies and time spent studying.     

Cluster analysis of depressed college students' social behaviors.

Measures of interpersonal behaviors exhibited by depressed college students toward their dormitory roommates were cluster analyzed, and this procedure produced 2 relatively distinct subgroups: a dependent, friendly, overgenerous type and an autocratic, competitive, aggressive, mistrustful type. These 2 groups were studied over a 9-month period; findings revealed that behaviors associated with each cluster were relatively stable and unrelated to gender or initial symptom severity. In longitudinal analyses, depressives in one group showed symptom abatement across time, whereas symptoms of the other group remained elevated. The roommates of depressives exhibited relatively high levels of hostility and a progressive decline in social contact and satisfaction with their depressed cohabitant. The results are discussed in relation to other typological approaches to unipolar depression.     

A metaphoric evaluation: students' self‐appraisal at the end of the course year

This article focuses on an exercise to facilitate students' self‐evaluation at the end of a course year. It describes an externalizing technique using objects as metaphors . Although developed in the context of a foundation level course, it is equally relevant for evaluating learning at any stage.     

Choice of medical specialty: analysis of students' needs.

The purposes of this study were to assess the career development needs of entering medical students as measured by the Medical Career Development Inventory and to examine gender differences in responses to the inventory. A total of 115 entering medical students (representing two entering classes) took the inventory two months prior to matriculation. Analysis suggested that this sample of entering students had formed a vocational identity and that they had evaluated the suitability and viability of a commitment to a physician's career. However, the participants had not formed a clear picture of their specialty interest and goals. No significant gender differences were indicated. A recommended career assistance workshop is presented as appropriate for these students' needs.     

Experimental tests of the mean-variance model for portfolio selection

Statistically knowledgeable male and female undergraduate students participated in 40 portfolio selection problems with monetary payoff contingent on performance. The portfolio selection task included two independent risky assets with normally distributed returns. It provided access to information about previous returns, allowed borrowing and lending at a fixed interest rate, and forced on each decision period a choice between the two risky assets. The findings show a high percentage of inefficient mean-variance portfolios which does not decrease with practice, a high rate of requests for useless information, a large frequency of switches between the two risky assets, and sequential dependencies. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are briefly discussed.     

Effect of uncertainty on the time course for selection of verbal name codes

Response selection takes time. Hick's law (Hick, 1952) predicts that the time course of response selection is a logarithmic function of the number of equally likely response alternatives. However, recent work has shown that oculomotor responses constitute noteworthy exceptions in that the latencies of saccades (Kveraga, Boucher, & Hughes, 2002) and smooth pursuit movements (Berryhill, Kveraga, Boucher, & Hughes, 2004) are completely independent of response uncertainty. This finding extends to the case in which the required response was known in advance (i.e., simple reaction times [RTs] were equivalent to choice RTs). In view of these results, we reevaluated reports that latencies to name visually presented digits (Experiment 1) and/or repeat aurally presented digits (Experiment 2) are similarly independent of the size of the response set. We found that naming latencies were equivalent for response set sizes from one to eight, but simple RTs (response set of one) were faster. Thus, the overlearned task of digit naming is indeed highly automatic but has not reached the level of automaticity characteristic of the oculomotor system.     

Time course of movement planning: selection of handgrips for object manipulation.

A goal of research on the cognitive control of movement is to determine how movements are chosen when many movements are possible. We addressed this issue by studying how subjects reached for a bar to be moved as quickly as possible from a home location to a target location. Ss generally grabbed the bar in a way that afforded a comfortable posture at the target location (the end-state comfort effect) and with the thumb toward the end of the bar that would be aligned with the target (the thumb-toward bias). The data suggested that subjects chose handgrips by retrieving instances of previous reaches, not by carrying out computations that treated candidate reaches as new behavioral events.     

Time course analysis of the Stroop phenomenon

Dyer (1971) investigated the response competition hypothesis of the Stroop phenomenon by temporally separating the color and word components of single stimuli (incongruent, control, and congruent). This line of research was continued in a series of five experiments that generalized Dyer's study: (a) In addition to the color-naming task, a reading task was included; (b) the irrelevant stimulus component was presented before and after the relevant one; (c) the probabilities of congruent and incongruent stimuli were varied; (d) besides color-word/color stimuli, color-color and word-word stimuli were used; and (e) the functional discrimination (color naming or reading) was compared with a sequential discrimination task. The data suggest the following temporal relations: (a) a slow facilitation due to response bias; (b) its inhibitory counterpart; and (c) a fast, strong inhibition with no facilitatory complement that seems to correspond to the usual Stroop conflict but that seems to occur earlier than the response execution stage.     

A time course analysis of enriched composition

Linguistic analyses suggest that common and seemingly simple expressions, such as began the book, cannot be interpreted with simple compositional processes; rather, they require enriched composition to provide an interpretation, such as began reading the book (Jackendoff, 1997; Pustejovsky, 1995). Recent reading time studies have supported these accounts by providing evidence that these expressions are more costly to process than are minimally contrasting controls (e.g., McElree, Traxler, Pickering, Seely, & Jackendoff, 2001). We report a response signal speed—accuracy trade-off (SAT) study in which two types of expressions that are thought to require enriched composition were examined. Analyses of the full time course SAT data indicate that these expressions were interpreted less accurately and, most importantly, more slowly than control sentences. The latter finding suggests that enriched composition requires the online deployment of complex compositional operations.     

Experimental studies of sequential selection and assignment with relative ranks

We study a class of sequential selection and assignment problems in which a decision maker (DM) must sequentially assign applicants to positions with the objective of minimizing expected cost. In modeling this class of problems, we assume that on each period the DM is only informed of the rank of the present applicant relative to the applicants that she previously observed and assigned. We first present the optimal decision policy that we subsequently use as a normative benchmark, and then report results from three experiments designed to study sequential assignment behavior. In comparing the aggregate results from all three experiments to the optimal decision policy, we identify a systematic bias, called the middleness bias, to over‐assign applicants to intermediate positions. The results also reveal a strong bias for early applicants to be over‐assigned to important positions. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Prioritizing selection of new elements: On the time course of the preview effect

The preview effect demonstrates that if observers in a visual search task are allowed a preview of a subset of elements before another subset of new elements is added, the first subset of elements does no longer compete for attentional selection. The aim of the present study was to investigate how long after the presentation of the new elements the preview effect can be preserved. Observers were presented with displays containing one set of elements (old elements) followed after a certain time interval by a second set of elements (new elements). Observers searched for the presence of a target among the new elements. The target appeared through an equiluminant colour change at varying intervals after the presentation of the new elements. The results indicated that the preview effect disappears beyond 200 ms after the presentation of the new elements. The results are discussed in terms of visual marking, temporal segregation, and onset capture.