Academic achievement in first-year Portuguese college students: the role of academic preparation and learning strategies

This paper analyses the role of academic preparation and learning strategies in the prediction of first-year Portuguese college students' academic achievement, considering students' sex and academic field attended. A sample of 445 first-year college students (68.5% female) from the University of Minho (25.8% enrolled in economics, 35.3% in science/technology, and 38.9% in humanities degrees) participated in the study. Students answered a questionnaire on learning strategies in the classroom at the end of the first semester, which consisted of 44 items organized in five dimensions: comprehensive approach, surface approach, personal competency perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and organization of study activities. Academic achievement (grade point average at the end of first year) and academic preparation (students' higher education access mark) were obtained through the academic records of the university. Results showed that academic preparation was the strongest predictor of first-year academic achievement, and only marginal additional variance was explained by learning strategies as assessed by the self-reported questionnaire. There were sex and academic field differences, but these variables do not seem strong enough to affect the results, although the different percentages of variance captured by each model and the different weights associated to higher education access mark, stimulate the use of these and/or other personal and contextual variables when analysing the phenomenon.     

Sara Protasi: The Philosophy of Envy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Hardback (ISBN 978-1-316-51917-2), £75. 260 pp

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - Envy is a complex and intriguing emotion that has received too little philosophical attention in recent years. Sara Protasi has come to remedy that gap with an...     

Defeasibility and Gettierization: A Reminder

For some of us, the defeasibility theory of knowledge remains the most plausible approach to the Gettier Problem. Epistemological fashion and faded memories notwithstanding, persuasive objections to the theory are very hard to find. The most impressive of those objections to the theory that have hitherto gone unanswered are examined and rejected here. These are objections put forward by Richard Feldman, Richard Foley, and John Turri. While these are all interesting, the objection recently put forward by Turri is, we think, by far, the most serious threat to the theory that we have seen in a long time. A successful reply to it requires a surprising amount of care, as it turns out. If tenable, Turri's objection deals a devastating blow to the theory developed by Roderick Chisholm, Keith Lehrer, Peter Klein, Marshall Swain, Risto Hilpinen, John Pollock, and Paul Moser, among others. Under scrutiny, however, the threat proves illusory. It results from inattention to a crucial, but relatively subtle, aspect of the theory. Interestingly, there is only one source in the defeasibilist literature for a precise account of this crucial feature of the theory: one of the most neglected passages in Peter Klein's work on the issue. That crucial feature is put under the spotlight here. Our response to three major objections to the defeasibility theory requires a brief introduction to the theory as an anti-Gettier weapon, an introduction aimed at countering the numbing simplicity that characterizes most introductions to the topic. Following this brief introduction, those three objections are tackled. We conclude, on that basis, that anybody who fails to notice how resilient the defeasibility theory has proven to be for the last fifty years has a seriously deficient understanding of the current state of play in the debate over the Gettier Problem.     

Immigration, suicidal ideation and deliberate self-injury in the Boston youth survey 2006

The prevalence and immigration-related correlates of deliberate self-injury (DSI) and suicidal ideation (SI) were estimated in a sample of Boston public high school students in 2006. Compared with U.S.-born youth, immigrant youth were not at increased risk for DSI or SI, even if they had experienced discrimination due to their ancestry. By contrast, U.S.-born youth who reported having been discriminated against because of their ancestry had an increased risk of deliberate self-injury (odds ratio [OR] = 3.1, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.6-5.9) and suicidal ideation (OR = 2.1, 95% CI = 1.2-3.8). The combination of being U.S.-born and experiencing ancestry-based discrimination identifies youth at increased risk for suicidal behavior.     

The influence of semantic and morphological complexity of verbs on sentence recall: Implications for the nature of conceptual representation and category-specific deficits

One hundred and forty normal undergraduate students participated in a Proactive Interference (PI) experiment with sentences containing verbs from four different semantic and morphological classes (lexical causatives, morphological causatives, and morphologically complex and simplex perception verbs). Past research has shown significant PI build-up effects for semantically and morphologically complex verbs in isolation (de Almeida & Mobayyen, 2004). The results of the present study show that, when embedded into sentence contexts, semantically and morphologically complex verbs do not produce significant PI build-up effects. Different verb classes, however, yield different recall patterns: sentences with semantically complex verbs (e.g., causatives) were recalled significantly better than sentences with semantically simplex verbs (e.g., perception verbs). The implications for the nature of both verb-conceptual representations and category-specific semantic deficits are discussed.     

Do you see what I see? Testing horses’ ability to recognise real-life objects from 2D computer projections

Animal Cognition - The use of 2-dimensional representations (e.g. photographs or digital images) of real-life physical objects has been an important tool in studies of animal cognition. Horses are...     

School Context and Genetic Influences on Aggression in Adolescence

Genetic and environmental contributions to variation in aggression were examined using adolescents' self-reports of aggressive behavior. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health provided a sample of 1,515 pairs of adolescents in five genetically informative groups (i.e., monozygotic twins, dizygotic twins, full siblings, half siblings, and unrelated siblings reared together). The analysis, a DeFries-Fulker regression within a hierarchical linear model, yielded findings on individual-level heritability (h2), shared environmental effects (c2), school-level effects, and school-level moderation of h2 and c2. The estimate of h2 for aggression in the full sample was .32, and c2 was .05. In the moderating effect, h2 increased and c2 decreased with greater school-level family warmth. Two effects on school means were found: Those schools with greater ethnic-racial heterogeneity had higher mean levels of aggression, and schools where students perceived greater family warmth had lower mean levels of aggression.     

Ambiguous novel compounds and models of morphological parsing.

This paper reports on two experiments that investigated the activation of morphemes in English novel compounds. All experiments employed stimuli that we have called "ambiguous novel compounds." These words (e.g., clamprod) have two interpretable parses (e.g., clam + prod or clamp + rod) and thus offer an opportunity to investigate which parses are preferred, whether both possible parses are computed, and whether parsing procedures "divide" words into their morphological constituents or "extract" constituent representations. The results suggest that morphological parsing does not simply divide a word into its constituents, but rather generates multiple representations that are subsequently evaluated.