Translating the ICAP Theory of Cognitive Engagement Into Practice

ICAP is a theory of active learning that differentiates students’ engagement based on their behaviors. ICAP postulates that I nteractive engagement, demonstrated by co‐generative collaborative behaviors, is superior for learning to C onstructive engagement, indicated by generative behaviors. Both kinds of engagement exceed the benefits of A ctive or P assive engagement, marked by manipulative and attentive behaviors, respectively. This paper discusses a 5‐year project that attempted to translate ICAP into a theory of instruction using five successive measures: (a) teachers’ understanding of ICAP after completing an online module, (b) their success at designing lesson plans using different ICAP modes, (c) fidelity of teachers’ classroom implementation, (d) modes of students’ enacted behaviors, and (e) students’ learning outcomes. Although teachers had minimal success in designing Constructive and Interactive activities, students nevertheless learned significantly more in the context of Constructive than Active activities. We discuss reasons for teachers’ overall difficulty in designing and eliciting Interactive engagement.     

Debate,Prophecy, and Revolution: Notes on Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy Without Contempt

In Prophecy without Contempt, Cathleen Kaveny argues that prevailing scholarly approaches to religious and public discourse misunderstand the actual complexity of moral rhetoric in America. She endeavors to provide a better account through study of the role the Puritan jeremiad has played. Kaveny then offers a normative case for deliberative public moral discourse and the limited exercise of prophetic denunciation. I argue that Kaveny's distinction between deliberation and prophetic denunciation is overdrawn. They are ideal types that elide other rhetorical forms. Moreover, both deliberative discourse and prophetic denunciation assume a social contract or shared tradition. Healthy moral discourse requires revolutionary rhetoric to interrogate and break traditions that are themselves morally compromised.     

Grandiose-Manipulative,Callous-Unemotional,and Daring-Impulsive: the Prediction of Psychopathic Traits in Adolescence and their Outcomes in Adulthood

There has been much debate about how to measure psychopathic traits in adolescence. One of the main issues is whether one should focus on callous-unemotional (CU) traits alone, or CU traits in combination with Grandiose-Manipulative (GM) and Daring-Impulsive (DI) traits. The current study first investigates the extent to which youth who are high on CU traits are also high on GM and DI traits. In addition, the study investigates if being high on both CU and GM, and high on both CU and DI, identify groups that are particularly characterized by past and future impairments. To investigate this, data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) was analyzed. The CSDD is a prospective longitudinal study of 411 English boys spanning over 50 years. The information available at age 12–14 was coded on the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD). Childhood risk factors were measured at age 8–10 and later life outcomes were measured at age 32. The results indicate that being high on CU in combination with DI delineates a clinically interesting group who are characterized by high childhood risk and poorer adult life outcomes. The same applied to the high CU/high GM group, but to a lesser extent.     

Direct parameter estimation for generalised balanced power diagrams

The statistical characterisation and synthetic reproduction of a polycrystalline material's microstructure is assisted by mathematically representing its morphology by a tessellation model. The generalised balanced power diagram (GBPD) is a tessellation model that was shown in previous studies to accurately reproduce the microstructure morphology of various materials by closely matching micrographs obtained through electron microscopy. These studies employed costly optimisation procedures to determine the best-fit model parameters, limiting the scalability of the model. In this work, it is shown that setting the tessellation cell parameters to values such that the shape moments of the corresponding grains are matched results in a quality of fit that is commensurate with optimisation procedures. This fitting approach decouples the interaction among grains when fitting the tessellation parameters and, most notably, provides analytical, closed-form expressions for all the model parameters. The performance of this parameter fitting approach is demonstrated on multiple micrographs of various materials, and it compares similarly to the performance of optimisation procedures reported in recently published literature. As the fitted parameter values are obtained through trivial computations, this approach enables extensive scalability of the GBPD model such that it can be used to represent extremely large characterisation data sets.     

Children's questions about interparent conflict and violence: what's a mother to say?

This research examined the relation between mothers' responses to children's questions about interparent conflict and children's adjustment. Participants were 134 mothers and their children (70 boys, 64 girls), aged 7 to 10. In each family, an act of intimate-partner violence (IPV) had recently occurred. Mothers' responses to children's questions about interparent conflict were assessed via a semistructured interview coded to reflect the extent to which the mothers' responses addressed the content of the children's questions. Mothers and children reported on physical IPV. Mothers also reported on interparent conflict, parent-child aggression, and maternal warmth. Children's adjustment was assessed via mothers' and children's reports at two time points 6 months apart. The extent to which mothers' responses addressed the content of the children's questions about interparent conflict was negatively associated with children's adjustment problems, after accounting for the frequency of physical IPV, frequency of interparent conflict, parent-child aggression, and maternal warmth. These associations emerged cross-sectionally and prospectively. However, in those prospective analyses that accounted for children's baseline levels of adjustment, maternal responsiveness was not associated with later children's adjustment problems.     

Famous people knowledge and the right and left temporal lobes

It is generally accepted that the anterior temporal lobes support knowledge of famous people. The specific roles of the right and left temporal lobe remain a subject of debate, with some studies suggesting differential roles based on modality (visual versus verbal information) and others category (person knowledge versus general semantics). The present study re-examined performance of semantic dementia patients with predominantly right and predominantly left temporal lobe atrophy on famous face, famous name and general semantic tasks, with the specific aim of testing the hypothesis that the right temporal lobe has a privileged role for person knowledge and the left temporal lobe for general semantic knowledge. Comparisons of performance rankings across tasks showed no evidence to support this hypothesis. By contrast, there was robust evidence from naming, identification and familiarity measures for modality effects: right-sided atrophy being associated with relatively greater impairment for faces and visual tasks and left-sided atrophy for names and verbal tasks. A double dissociation in test scores in two patients reinforced these findings. The data present a challenge for the influential `semantic hub' model, which views the anterior temporal lobes as an area of convergence in which semantic information is represented in amodal form.     

The road not taken: creative solutions require avoidance of high-frequency responses

To investigate individual differences in creativity as measured with a complex problem-solving task, we developed a computational model of the remote associates test (RAT). For 50 years, the RAT has been used to measure creativity. Each RAT question presents three cue words that are linked by a fourth word, which is the correct answer. We hypothesized that individuals perform poorly on the RAT when they are biased to consider high-frequency candidate answers. To assess this hypothesis, we tested individuals with 48 RAT questions and required speeded responding to encourage guessing. Results supported our hypothesis. We generated a norm-based model of the RAT using a high-dimensional semantic space, and this model accurately identified correct answers. A frequency-biased model that included different levels of bias for high-frequency candidate answers explained variance for both correct and incorrect responses. Providing new insight into the nature of creativity, the model explains why some RAT questions are more difficult than others, and why some people perform better than others on the RAT.     

Witnesses in action: the effect of physical exertion on recall and recognition

Understanding memory performance under different operational conditions is critical in many occupational settings. To examine the effect of physical exertion on memory for a witnessed event, we placed two groups of law-enforcement officers in a live, occupationally relevant scenario. One group had previously completed a high-intensity physical-assault exercise, and the other had not. Participants who completed the assault exercise showed impaired recall and recognition performance compared with the control group. Specifically, they provided significantly less accurate information concerning critical and incidental target individuals encountered during the scenario, recalled less briefing information, and provided fewer briefing updates than control participants did. Exertion was also associated with reduced accuracy in identifying the critical target from a lineup. These results support arousal-based competition accounts proposing differential allocation of resources under physiological arousal. These novel findings relating to eyewitness memory performance have important implications for victims, ordinary citizens who become witnesses, and witnesses in policing, military, and related operational contexts.     

Identity,Individuation and Substance

The paper takes off from the problem of finding a proper content for the relation of identity as it holds or fails to hold among ordinary things or substances. The necessary conditions of identity are familiar, the sufficient conditions less so. The search is for conditions at once better usable than the Leibnizian Identity of Indiscernibles (independently suspect) and strong enough to underwrite all the formal properties of the relation. It is contended that the key to this problem rests at the level of metaphysics and epistemology alike with a sortalist position. Sortalism is the position which insists that, if the question is whether a and b are the same, it has to be asked what are they? Any sufficiently specific answer to that question will bring with it a principle of activity or functioning and a mode of behaviour characteristic of some particular kind of thing by reference to which questions of persistence or non‐persistence through change can be adjudicated. These contentions are illustrated by reference to familiar examples such as the human zygote, the Ship of Theseus and Shoemaker's Brown‐Brownson. The first example is hostage for a mass of unproblematical cases. The problems presented by the second and third sort of examples arise chiefly (it is claimed) from an incompleteness in our conceptions of the relevant sort—the what the thing in question is. That incompleteness need not prevent us from knowing perfectly well which thing we are referring to. In the concluding section, sortalism is defended against various accusations of anthropocentrism. The paper touches on the interpretation of Heraclitus, Leibniz's theory of clear indistinct ideas, the difficulties of David Lewis's ‘perdurantist’ or stroboscopic view of persistence, four‐dimensionalism, and the relation of personal identity both to experiential memory and to the particular bodily physiognomy of a subject. At some points—as in connection with the so‐called Only a and b rule—the paper corrects, supplements or extends certain theses or formulations proposed in the author's Sameness and Substance Renewed (2001).     

Models of self and others and their relation to positive and negative caregiving responses

The burden of providing informal care to a family member can lead to caregiver depression and potentially harmful caregiving behavior. Given the interpersonal nature of caregiving, the relationship between caregivers and care recipients may impact caregiver responses. We applied attachment theory to understanding caregiver depression, and both potentially harmful and exemplary caregiving responses. We present data from 430 caregivers in the Family Relationships in Late Life (FRILL 2) Project, a multisite, longitudinal study of caregiving. Age, gender, and model of self were related to caregiving responses, suggesting that model of self may help identify caregivers at risk for poor responses.