Philosophy of Education in a Poor Historical Moment: A Personal Account

Under the post-metaphysical sky “old” humanistic-oriented education is possible solely at the cost of its transformation into its negative, into a power that is determined to diminish human potentials for self-exaltation. Nothing less than total metamorphosis is needed to rescue the core of humanistic genesis: the quest for edifying Life and resistance to the call for “home-returning” into the total harmony that is promised to us within nothingness.     

Efficacy and social validity of procedures for improving conversational skills of college students with autism

Better conversational skills correspond to a higher quality of life for adults diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this study, we taught vocal–verbal responses discriminated by compound arrangements of concealed conversation partner mands to two college students with ASD. Participants learned to engage in self-questioning about their conversation partner's behavior and to reinforce three concealed mands for termination of an aversive conversation scenario. We assessed generalization to conversation probes with trained confederates and to interactions with untrained conversational partners (e.g., peers, professors). Finally, we collected peer ratings of the social validity of changes in conversational behavior as well as participants' ratings of study goals, procedures, and outcomes.     

Narrative access and production in preschoolers' false belief reasoning

False belief tests seem to show the apparent acquisition at around age 4 of an ability to understand the representational status of mind. In this article, preschoolers' performance on a false belief task was manipulated in terms of their grasp of its narrative base. Five experiments are reported in which 3-year-olds were helped to become familiar with the events that comprise the false belief procedure by going through a picture book version of the task, before being asked to judge the protagonist's mental state. In Experiment 1, children who had failed a traditional task succeeded if they narrated the book version back to the experimenter, particularly if they were fluent in their story recall. Experiment 2 showed that this success occurred either if the child recited the story or if she or he was taken through each page twice in succession. Experiment 3 combined the most effective procedures with a younger group of children (mean age 3;3) and revealed 95% success as long as they could recall the prerequisite events. Experiments 4 and 5 probed possible limiting conditions for success by inserting an extra episode in the story and changing the format of the test question. The results suggest that the structure of 3-year-olds' event memories is central to their poor performance in the traditional false belief task—a clear grasp of the false belief “narrative” is necessary for successful performance. When they are given the opportunity to link discrete events into a coherent narrative, they have no problem demonstrating an understanding of others' minds—being able to recount the narrative is sufficient for successful performance.