Attributional Retraining: reducing the likelihood of failure

Failing a course is an acutely negative event for first-year university students, and a major contributor to high attrition rates at North American universities. Despite its prevalence, course failure receives relatively little research attention. What can be done to reduce course failure and help first-year students remain in university? This study examined the efficacy of an Attributional Retraining treatment intervention to reduce course failure in an Introductory Psychology course. Attributional Retraining is designed to restructure students’ causal explanations of poor performance by encouraging controllable attributions such as effort and strategy in place of immutable causes such as academic ability or intelligence. Relative to students in the control group, first-year students who received Attributional Retraining were less likely to fail the Introductory Psychology course (14.6% vs. 6.4%). This finding emerged beyond the effects of several well-established predictors of academic outcomes including student background characteristics (i.e., age, gender, and past academic performance) and learning environment variables (student registration status and participation in a first-year orientation program), suggesting the utility of Attributional Retraining for students with varying backgrounds and in different educational contexts. To the extent that Attributional Retraining is effective, inexpensive, and relatively easy to administer it may be a viable option for inclusion in orientation programs designed to reduce course failure and attrition among first-year university students.     

Practice makes perfect: Training the interpretation of emotional ambiguity

The interpretation of emotionally ambiguous words, sentences, or scenarios can be altered through training procedures that are collectively called cognitive bias modification for interpretation (CBM-I). In three experiments, we systematically manipulated the nature of the training in order to discriminate between emotional priming and ambiguity resolution accounts of training effects. In Experiment 1 participants completed word fragments that were consistently related to either a negative or benign interpretation of an ambiguous sentence. In a subsequent semantic priming task they demonstrated an interpretation bias, in that they were faster to identify relatedness of targets that were associated with the training-congruent meaning of an emotionally ambiguous homograph. We then manipulated the training sentences to show that interpretation bias was eliminated when participants simply completed valenced word fragments following unrelated sentences (Experiment 2), or completed fragments that were related to emotional but unambiguous sentences (Experiment 3). Only when participants were required to actively resolve emotionally ambiguous sentences during training did changes in interpretation emerge at test. Findings suggest that CBM-I achieves its effects by altering a production rule that aids the selection of meaning from emotionally ambiguous alternatives, in line with an ambiguity resolution account.     

An eye-movement-contingent probe paradigm

A new eye-movement-contingent probe task is presented in which readers’ eye movements are monitored as they read sentences and respond to a probe word; the timing of the display of the probe word is dependent on fixation of a target word. The present study examined semantic priming effects. The target word was either related (doctor) or unrelated (lawyer) to the probe word (nurse), and the probe appeared 120, 250, 500, or 750msec after the reader first fixated on the target word. When the probe word appeared (in the location of the target word), the rest of the sentence disappeared until the participant named the probe word. Then the sentence reappeared, and the participant continued reading the sentence. Naming times to the probe word were recorded, as was sentence reading time and the eye movement behavior relative to the onset of the probe word. Priming effects were observed, since probe reaction time to related probes was faster than that to unrelated probes. Ways in which this paradigm can be used to study various issues in language processing are discussed.     

Filling gaps: Decision principles and structure in sentence comprehension

The correct grammatical characterization of sentences containing filler-gap dependencies is a topic of considerable theoretical interest in linguistics. In some grammatical frameworks, these dependencies are representef in terms of conditions on the permissible indexing of structures (or alternative structure evaluation conditions) which a representation must adhere to in order to be well-formed. In other frameworks, constraints on permissible filler-gap dependencies are simply inherent in the set of phrase structure rules contained in the grammar of a language.The processing of sentences with multiple (potential) filler-gap dependencies was investigated in two experiments. The first experiment provided evidence for three claims. First, the human sentence processor abides by a strategy of assigning the most recent potential filler to a gap. Hence, ‘recent filler’ sentences where this assignment proves to be correct takes less time to comprehend than ‘distant filler’ sentences where this decision turns out to be incorrect. Second, the recent filler strategy is itself just a special case of a more general strategy of assigning the most salient potential filler to a gap. Third, unambiguous sentences in which a filler-gap assignment is disambiguated by ‘control’ information specified by individual verbs gives rise to the same recent filler errors as ambiguous sentences. This suggests that tentative filler-gap assignments are made by the processor before all of the relevant constraints on permissible filler-gap dependencies are consulted by the processor.The second experiment tested an alternative hypothesis that the more complex ‘distant filler’ sentences took longer to comprehend in the first experiment only because these sentences often contained verbs which license two adjacent gaps. The experiment showed that there was a significant recent filler effect in sentences that did not contain adjacent gaps and that this effect did not interact with verb class.The finding that the processor delays use of verb-control information is extremely surprising. It may be explained by the fact that this information is only relevant to one type of gap (‘equi-gaps’) and what type of gap the processor is dealing with often can not be determined unambiguously at the time when it initially encounters a gap in its left-to-right processing of a sentence.If our interpretation of these findings is correct, they argue for a considerable amount of structure in the sentence comprehension system. Further, they favor a view of sentence processing in which processing operations involving constraints on the permissible indexing (or evaluation) of structures lag behind the processor's structure building operations. Hence, the results favor those grammatical theories which preserve this distinction over grammatical theories which provide a uniform characterization of all syntactic well-formedness conditions.     

The Complexity of Deviant Lifestyles

This article examines the complexity of the concept deviant lifestyle. A two-dimensional conceptual paradigm is developed. A horizontal depiction of eight deviant routines constituent to lifestyles and examples of these deviant activities is provided. The vertical dimension of the paradigm depicts five modes of frequency of occurrence of certain routine behavior.     

Visual Information and Object Size in the Control of Reaching

The role of vision in the control of reaching and grasping was investigated by varying the available visual information. Adults (N = 7) reached in conditions that had full visual information, visual information about the target object but not the hand or surrounding environment, and no visual information. Four different object diameters were used. The results indicated that as visual information and object size decreased, subjects used longer movement times, had slower speeds, and more asymmetrical hand-speed profiles. Subjects matched grasp aperture to object diameter, but overcompensated with larger grasp apertures when visual information was reduced. Subjects also qualitatively differed in reach kinematics when challenged with reduced visual information or smaller object size. These results emphasize the importance of vision of the target in reaching and show that subjects do not simply scale a command template with task difficulty.     

Student teachers’ competence and career certainty: the effects of career anxiety and perceived control

In comparison to other professional faculties, student teachers are less certain about their career decisions. Consequently, examining the factors that influence their perceptions of career competence and certainty may be beneficial for their professional development. We examined how student teachers’ (n = 194) gender, grade of instruction, practicum, career anxiety, and perceived control affected their career competence and certainty. Anxiety had large and negative effects on competence and certainty. In contrast, primary control enhanced competence whereas secondary control enhanced certainty. High-practicum ratings were also associated with greater competence and certainty; however, these effects were mediated by anxiety and perceived control. These findings help us understand the transition that student teachers make from studentship to becoming professional teachers.