Using Technology to Deliver Immediate Corrective Feedback to Preservice Teachers

Teacher preparation programs are under scrutiny for their role in the troubled American educational system. If American education is to improve, teacher educators must identify and encourage teachers to use effective teaching practices. A promising technique for increasing use of teaching practices is providing feedback to teachers on newly acquired behaviors. The focus of this study was to examine the effects of immediate corrective feedback on one specific teaching behavior, use of three-term contingencies, to preservice teachers. A multiple baseline design across participants was used to evaluate the effects of immediate corrective feedback, delivered via a wireless FM listening system. Immediate corrective feedback (as compared with delayed feedback) was shown to be an effective way to increase preservice teacher completion of three-term contingency trials by all participants. These findings and other considerations for additional research using feedback are addressed.     

A multimodal data collection tool using REALbasic and Mac OS X

This project uses REALbasic 3.5 in the Mac OS X environment for development of a configuration tool that builds a data collection procedure for investigating the effectiveness of sonified graphs. The advantage of using REALbasic with the Mac OS X system is that it provides rapid development of stimulus presentation, direct recording of data to files, and control over other procedural issues. The program can be made to run natively on the new Mac OS X system, older Mac OS systems, and Windows (98SE, ME, 2000 PRO). With modification, similar programs could be used to present any number of visual/auditory stimulus combinations, complete with questions for each stimulus.     

中国香港双语儿童初步阅读能力与语音、文字加工关系的研究

采用音节检测、短时言语记忆、快速命名等语音加工任务和汉字、字母、数字等方向加工任务,探讨语音和文字加工在儿童初步阅读中的作用,116名6岁左右的香港双语儿童参加了测试。结果表明：语音加工能力是跨语言的比较稳定的因素,是预测汉语和英语阅读的较好指标;文字加工具有特异性．即汉字方向加工只能预测汉语阅读,字母方向加工则预测英语阅读。     

Chronometric comparisons of imagery to action: visualizing versus physically performing springboard dives

Motor imagery research emphasizes similarities between the mental imagery of an action and its physical execution. In this study, temporal differences between motor imagery and its physical performance as a function of performer expertise, skill complexity, and spatial ability were investigated. Physical execution times for springboard dives were compared with visualized execution times. Results indicate that physical and visualized performance times were not identical: Their relation is a function of dive complexity and diver expertise, but not their interaction. Relative to physical time, visualization time increased with increased complexity, suggesting the involvement of capacity-limited working memory. A nonmonotonic relation was found for expertise: Unlike experts or novices, visualization time for intermediates was significantly slower than physical time. These temporal differences are most consistent with schematic differences in skill representation. Intermediates may be relatively slowed by greater amounts of nonautomatized knowledge, as compared with the automatized knowledge of experts or the sparse knowledge of novices.     

Searching for a two-factor model of marriage duration: commentary on Gottman and Levenson

Gottman and Levenson (2002) report a number of post hoc ordinary least squares regressions to "predict" the length of marriage, given that divorce has occurred. We argue that the type of statistical model they use is inappropriate for answering clinically relevant questions about the causes and timing of divorce, and present several reasons why an alternative family of models called duration models would be more appropriate. The distribution of marriage length is not bimodal, as Gottman and Levenson suggest, and their search for a two-factor model for explaining marriage length is misguided. Their regression models omit many variables known to affect marriage length, and instead use variables that were pre-screened for their predictive ability. Their final model is based on data for only 15 cases, including one unusual case that has undue influence on the results. For these and other technical reasons presented in the text, we believe that Gottman and Levenson's results are not replicable, and that they should not be used to guide interventions for couples in clinical settings.     

The improved name game: better use of expanding retrieval practice

Morris and Fritz (2000) demonstrated the effectiveness of the name game as a retrieval-practice based technique for learning the names of group members. We hypothesised that a reversed version of the name game would be even more effective. Performance was contrasted with a no-retrieval condition that mimicked the name game in every way except for the retrieval of the names, allowing an estimate of the specific contribution of retrieval practice. The benefit of a few refresher rounds of the game after 2 weeks was also examined. The reversed name game was superior to the original name game and the refresher rounds benefited all groups. The very considerable superiority of the name game over the no-retrieval condition demonstrated the magnitude of the benefit of expanding retrieval practice.     

Repetition blindness occurs in nonwords

Theorists have predicted that repetition blindness (RB) should be absent for nonwords because they do not activate preexisting mental types. The authors hypothesized that RB would be observed for nonwords because RB can occur at a sublexical level. Four experiments showed that RB is observed for word-nonword pairs (noon noof), orthographically similar nonwords (glome glame), and identical repetitions (plass plass). More RB was found for words than for nonwords. Prior researchers may have failed to find RB for nonwords because display conditions that allow 2 words to be reliably encoded are insufficient for nonwords, or because observers coped with low ability to encode nonwords by using guessing strategies that do not require creating a mental type or tokenizing it.     

A brief actuarial assessment for the prediction of wife assault recidivism: the Ontario domestic assault risk assessment

An actuarial assessment to predict male-to-female marital violence was constructed from a pool of potential predictors in a sample of 589 offenders identified in police records and followed up for an average of almost 5 years. Archival information in several domains (offender characteristics, domestic violence history, nondomestic criminal history, relationship characteristics, victim characteristics, index offense) and recidivism were subjected to setwise and stepwise logistic regression. The resulting 13-item scale, the Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA), showed a large effect size in predicting new assaults against legal or common-law wives or ex-wives (Cohen's d = 1.1, relative operating characteristic area =.77) and was associated with number and severity of new assaults and time until recidivism. Cross-validation and comparisons with other instruments are also reported.     

Meaning from environmental sounds: types of signal-referent relations and their effect on recognizing auditory icons

This article addresses the learnability of auditory icons, that is, environmental sounds that refer either directly or indirectly to meaningful events. Direct relations use the sound made by the target event whereas indirect relations substitute a surrogate for the target. Across 3 experiments, different indirect relations (ecological, in which target and surrogate coexist in the world; metaphorical, in which target and surrogate have similar appearance or function, and random) were compared with one another and with direct relations on measures including associative strength ratings, amount of exposure required for learning, and response times for recognizing icons. Findings suggest that performance is best with direct relations, worst with random relations, and that ecological and metaphorical relations involve distinct types of association but do not differ in learnability.