Priming productive study strategies with preparatory quizzes in an engineering course

One approach to encourage productive study strategies is to incorporate preparatory quizzes (or pre‐quizzes) in which students are required to submit answers to questions before the underlying material is covered in class. In the present study, students took an introductory mechanical engineering class that either included pre‐quizzes (treatment group) or did not (control group). Students in the treatment group visited the online textbook more often and earlier in advance of deadlines, indicating better management of their study time—behaviors that have been shown to be productive study strategies. They also performed better in the course, indicating that techniques intended to prime productive study strategies can pay off. Finally, measures of productive learning strategies correlated with measures of course performance for both groups. These findings support the pretesting principle, which holds that students study more effectively and learn better when they take practice tests before a lesson.     

Picture naming in young children: a developmental study on interhemispheric collaboration

The aim of the present study was to determine how interhemispheric collaboration and visual attention in basic lexical tasks develop during early childhood. Two- to 6-year-old children were asked to name two different pictures presented simultaneously either one in each visual hemifield (bilateral condition) or both in a single hemifield (either right or left, unilateral condition). In the bilateral condition, children were overall more accurate in naming right visual field than left visual field pictures. This difference was significant for 2- and 3- to 4-year-old children, but not for 5- to 6-year-old children. These results show that the right and left cerebral hemispheres do not develop naming competencies equally well in early childhood. A second analysis, based on the order of report, showed that when 2- and 3- to 4-year-old children named both the left and the right visual field pictures, they named the right visual field picture first. In contrast, at the age of 5-6 years, children named the left visual field picture first and overall naming performance reached a ceiling level. Several interpretations are proposed to explain this shift of visual attention at the age of 5-6 years. In the unilateral condition, no difference was found between naming accuracy in the right and left visual fields, presumably because interhemispheric pathways are functional: visual stimuli presented to the right hemisphere can be processed by the most competent left hemisphere without degradation of information. This result confirms previous findings on the development of interhemispheric collaboration.     

Experimental study of simple structure

A battery of thirty-six tests was given to a group of high-school seniors. The factorial analysis reveals essentially the same primary factors that were found in previous studies. The test battery reveals a simple structure.     

The Small Worlds and Floyd's algorithms: a way to study scientific collaboration

Many proposals from the analysis of social networks focused on the study of scientific collaboration have been made recently. The Small Worlds theory seems to be the most efficient to study the inner features of the scientific community. Those researches have demonstrated that small communities are based on some key individuals who connect some groups which, on the contrary, would be disconnected. One of the disadvantages from the perspective of the analysis of networks is the lack of researches of particular nodes. With the implementation of a pseudocode algorithm of Floyd, we try to avoid this. To study how a small community is formed and, as a research of one case, we observe the invisible college which is formed when connecting the fifteen most productive authors of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology .     

Ethical leadership,person-organizational fit,and productive energy: a South African sectoral comparative study

ABSTRACT

Research suggests that ethical leadership (EL) affects employee behavior and organizational functioning. This study aimed to determine the relationship between EL and productive energy (PE), as mediated by person-organizational fit (POF). The study used assumptions of the social learning and social exchange theories that posit that leadership has a direct impact on employee behavior, mainly through role modeling and the reciprocal nature thereof. An empirical paradigm using a cross sectional quantitative design was used. The PE instrument (developed in the USA) was assessed for construct validity within the South African context (exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis). The analysis included a comparison between the private and public sectors, emphasizing the importance of context as differentiator. Relatively high, statistically significant correlations were found between the variables for both sectors and the combined sample. The hierarchical regression analysis indicated that 18% of the variance in PE is explained by EL. This model was improved by the inclusion of POF (total variance of 32% explained). The conceptual model was confirmed with structural equation modeling (SEM). The findings of this study suggest that EL has a significantly positive effect on PE and POF, which mediates the relationship between EL and PE. Sectoral differences were reported.     

Effects of pair collaboration and word-frequency in recognition memory: a study with the remember-know procedure

The present study investigated the effects of pair collaboration and word-frequency on recognition memory, using the "remember-know" procedure. The aim was to test the predictions of the information-exchange hypothesis (Clark, Hori, Putnam & Martin, 2000), which states that collaborative facilitation occurs when participants are able to share their recollective memories with other members of the group. Results showed that recognition performance was significantly better in the collaborative than in the individual condition, and better for low-frequency than for high-frequency words. The advantage of collaborating dyads was produced by an increase of correct hits, coupled with a significant reduction of false alarms. Furthermore, the analysis of the "remember" (R) and "know" (K) responses indicated that the effects of both pair collaboration and word-frequency were larger on recollection than on familiarity processes. It is concluded that, in a collaborative condition, arguments based on the retrieval of the contextual details associated with the target words are more effective than those based on familiarity in increasing the proportions of correct hits. In addition, it is proposed that collaboration may lead to a reduction of the probability to accept new items on the basis of familiarity (K) responses.     

A case study of institutional collaboration to enhance knowledge use: Restructuring practitioner-researcher dialogue in education

The research reported herein was supported by funds from The National Science Foundation. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the National Science Foundation and no official endorsement should be inferred.     

Group collaboration in recognition memory

Group collaboration was examined in item and associative recognition. The present study distinguishes between group effects versus collaborative processes and defines the latter as interactive information exchange among group members. By that definition, many group effects do not involve collaboration. For example, group performance can exceed individual performance by pooling the increased resources of the group. Specifically, a group advantage can be obtained by deferring to a majority vote or to the group's best member. For both item and associative recognition, a group advantage was obtained that could not be accounted for by resource pooling. Collaborative facilitation was shown reliably in recognizing targets but not for rejecting distractors.     

Turning stressors into something productive: an empirical study revealing nonlinear influences of role stressors on self‐efficacy

This study suggests that stressors can be productive for self‐efficacy and that the influence of stressors on self‐efficacy is nonlinear. Analyses were conducted with ordinary least squares regression on a dataset covering responses from 311 deans in Swedish secondary schools. Results support the hypothesized U‐shape relationship between role conflict and self‐efficacy and the inverted U‐shape relationship between role ambiguity and self‐efficacy. Thus, findings offer evidence for nonlinear effects of stressors on the level of incumbents' self‐efficacy. This research has implications for further research focused on the association between role stressors and self‐efficacy.     

竞争情境下社会比较认知偏差实验研究

本文以在校大学生为被试,考察社会比较的一个重要领域—学业竞争中的比较偏差。通过操纵竞争双方的实力(强VS.弱)以及竞争对手的信息清晰度(清晰VS.模糊)来考察不同的任务类型与信息清晰度对竞争中认知偏差的影响,以及探讨认知偏差对决策者决策意图的影响。结果发现,在社会比较中,面对不同类型的问题,会出现不同的认知偏差;竞争双方信息清晰时优于常人效应会减弱;认知偏差会影响个体的决策意图和决策行为。     

Time-informed task planning in multi-agent collaboration

Human-robot collaboration requires the two sides to coordinate their actions in order to better accomplish common goals. In such setups, the timing of actions may significantly affect collaborative performance. The present work proposes a new framework for planning multi-agent interaction that is based on the representation of tasks sharing a common starting and ending point, as petals in a composite daisy graph. Coordination is accomplished through temporal constraints linking the execution of tasks. The planner distributes tasks to the involved parties sequentially. In particular, by considering the properties of the available options at the given moment, the planner accomplishes locally optimal task assignments to agents. Optimality is supported by a fuzzy theoretic representation of time intervals which enables fusing temporal information with other quantitative HRI aspects, therefore accomplishing a ranking of the available options. The current work aims at a systematic experimental assessment of the proposed framework is pursued, verifying that it can successfully cope with a wide range of HRI scenarios.