Severe stuttering associated with right hemisphere lesion

Following a right hemisphere stroke, a right-handed, 50-year-old male experienced a permanent dysfluency characterized by phoneme and syllable reiterations and, to a lesser extent, word and phrase reiterations. The reiterations occurred in initial, medial, and final positions and for all sentence elements (e.g., subject nouns, object nouns, verbs, modifiers). There was a notable loss of verbal automatisms (poems, songs, etc.). The patient's symptoms conform to the acquired stuttering syndrome described by A. Helm, R. Butler, and D.F. Benson (1978, Neurology, 28, 1159-1165).     

Education and Understanding Structural Causes for Group Inequalities

Group inequalities in the United States are most often attributed to the characteristics of the individuals who belong to these groups; thinking about structural causes of group inequalities is rare. This paper reviews cognitive, cultural, and systemic reasons for this bias. The efficacy of education as a way to increase structural thinking was investigated in two studies of college students' causal thinking about group inequalities. Both studies involved a course on intergroup relations that covered structural sources of racial or ethnic inequalities. Results supported hypotheses that the course would increase structural thinking about racial or ethnic inequality, and that structural thinking would generalize to inequalities not explicitly covered in the course. Both course content and active learning pedagogy were related to structural thinking about inequalities. Active learning was also related to applying structural thinking to targets of change.     

Effects of behavioral training on the functioning of a profoundly retarded microcephalic teenager with cerebral palsy and without language or verbal comprehension: A case study

In previous investigations (Jacobson, Berger, Bergman, Millham and Greeson, 1971; Jacobson and Greeson, 1972), it was reported that as a result of the use of a behavior modification program, preschool children from poverty backgrounds demonstrated rapid conceptual acquisition. In addition, the Ss increased from the dull-normal to the normal range of intellectual functioning within approximately 20 hr of program participation. Since the increases in IQ found were most pronounced for children of lowest IQ (IQs = 46–83), the investigators hypothesized that the program would prove to be useful with Ss of greater cognitive and behavioral deficits than the initial population investigated.The present study reports the use of a variant of the conceptual acquisition program with an institutionalized, profoundly retarded microcephalic teenager with chronic brain syndrome and cerebral palsy. Prior to the study the boy demonstrated neither language nor an ability to comprehend and follow verbal directions.     

Cognitive Processes in Close Relationships: Recent Findings and Implications for Counseling

Coinciding with the recent growth of professional interest in relationship counseling has been the emergence of important research on the cognitive processes of persons in close relationships. In this article the author reviews selected findings from this literature, which illuminate the attributional, self-evaluation, and self-verification processes of participants in close relationships, and discusses their implications for the counseling of distressed couples.     

Braille literacy as a human right: A challenge to the “inefficiency” argument against braille instruction

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) affirms a right to education for disabled persons and aims to ensure braille instruction for blind individuals. However, there is evidence that braille instruction is often circumvented or abandoned early in CRPD nations because it is perceived as an inefficient learning medium for blind students. This perception persists despite insufficient empirical evidence and a lack of understanding of the efficiency of reading versus listening for learning in sighted individuals. We therefore investigated the efficiency of learning written versus spoken words in blind and sighted samples. Participants (23 blind, 20 sighted) studied the written definitions of 70 rare English words in successive rounds, presented in conjunction with written or spoken wordforms. Blind participants learned with equal efficiency across modalities, whereas sighted participants learned spoken words more efficiently. The findings indicate the inefficiency argument against teaching braille is groundless, both because braille word learning is not less efficient than auditory word learning for blind individuals, and because reading is valued in the education of sighted individuals despite its apparent inefficiency in that population.     

Hope and the Academic Trajectory of College Students

Previous longitudinal studies of student hope have established a connection between how people think about the future and their college achievement. This study examined the role of hope in predicting the achievement and retention of college students while controlling for educational history and two other psychological constructs, academic self-efficacy and engagement. Hope, self-efficacy, engagement were all correlated with both the number of semesters enrolled and cumulative grade point averages (GPAs) for the first 4 years of college. Hope was the only factor that had unique effects when examining predictors simultaneously and controlling for academic history. Hope uniquely predicted the number of enrolled semesters, whether students returned for the 2nd semester of college, whether students graduated in 4 years, and students’ GPAs across 4 years of college. Results therefore indicate that hope was the most robust predictor of academic achievement in college after controlling for educational history. These findings point to a need to help students develop the capacity to initiate and sustain movement toward goals in the pursuit of higher academic achievement.     

Fluency Training a Writing Skill: Editing for Concision

The Psychological Record - The goal of this study was to design and evaluate fluency-based training units to help students eliminate inconcision. Participants first completed a 1.5-hr lesson on...     

Identifying Critical Cross-Cultural School Psychology Competencies

The purpose of this study was to identify critical cross-cultural competencies for school psychologists. This study used a Delphi procedure to bring together the expertise of a national sample of cross-cultural experts, including school psychology practitioners, faculty, and supervisors/administrators of whom 62% represented a racial/ethnic minority group member. To identify the competencies, we conducted an extensive literature search about cross-cultural school psychology competencies then used a questionnaire to ask expert panelists to rate the importance of the literature based competencies and to delineate additional competencies not represented in the integrated literature but based on expert opinion. The literature yielded 185 competencies and the panelists generated 75 additional competencies. Following the second questionnaire round, 102 competencies were identified as critical cross-cultural competencies. The 102 competencies cover 14 major domains of professional activities and practices for school psychologists (e.g., Academic Interventions, Assessment, Consultation, Counseling, Culture, Language, Laws and Regulations, Organizational Skills, Professional Characteristics, Report Writing, Research Methods, Theoretical Paradigms, Working with Interpreters, and Working with Parents). Implications for research and training are discussed.     

Social cognitive career theory and the prediction of interests and choice goals in the computing disciplines

We tested the fit of the social cognitive choice model [Lent, R.W., Brown, S.D., & Hackett, G. (1994). Toward a unifying social cognitive theory of career and academic interest, choice, and performance [Monograph]. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 45, 79-122] to the data across gender, educational level, and type of university among students in a variety of computing disciplines. Participants were 1208 students at 21 historically Black and 21 predominantly White universities. They completed measures of self-efficacy, outcome expectations, interests, goals, and social supports and barriers with respect to computing majors. The SCCT model yielded adequate fit to the data across each of the grouping variables. Implications for future research on SCCT’s choice hypotheses in the context of science and engineering-related fields are discussed.