English as a foreign language (EFL) homework diaries: evaluating gains and constraints for self-regulated learning and achievement

Although homework completion is said to be rather important to achievement, nowadays there is a growing concern of educators about the increasing number of students who do not engage properly on doing the homework tasks and the subsequent impact on school failure rates. Focusing on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and using a sample of 591 Portuguese fifth and sixth graders, the present study analyses the role played by a number of homework variables on students' achievement (proximal and distal), and their mediating role on the use of self-regulated learning strategies and perceived self-efficacy in the domain. Data confirm the indirect effect of homework on school achievement, by means of the referred cognitive and motivational variables (use of self-regulated learning strategies and self-efficacy). These findings are further discussed in order to highlight the significant role homework completion can play on fighting school failure.     

Prevalence, symptoms and distribution of oppositional defiant disorder

The purpose of this work was to determine the epidemiological evolution of the Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) in adolescents, using a sample of Secondary School students of the region of Campo de Gibraltar (Cadiz). The students' age ranged from 12 to 16 years old. Two evaluations were completed, the first one during the school year 2001-2002 and the second one in the school year 2006-2007. The sample comprised 2310 students in the first study and 2351 students in the second one. We used a comparative-selective approach. The results of the comparison revealed a prevalence ranging from 3.77% to 3.83% of students with this disorder, maintaining the main symptoms and with some changes in its distribution as a function of the school grade. Indeed, the data showed more cases in the final courses (1st study) in contrast with a higher concentration of cases in the initial courses (2nd study). With regard to the frequency of ODD by sex, we found that whereas in the earlier study (2001-2002), the relationship between boys and girls was 3.5:1, in the school year 2006/2007, the number of boys with ODD quadrupled the number of girls.     

Exposure to severe urban air pollution influences cognitive outcomes, brain volume and systemic inflammation in clinically healthy children

Exposure to severe air pollution produces neuroinflammation and structural brain alterations in children. We tested whether patterns of brain growth, cognitive deficits and white matter hyperintensities (WMH) are associated with exposures to severe air pollution. Baseline and 1 year follow-up measurements of global and regional brain MRI volumes, cognitive abilities (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised, WISC-R), and serum inflammatory mediators were collected in 20 Mexico City (MC) children (10 with white matter hyperintensities, WMH⁺, and 10 without, WMH⁻) and 10 matched controls (CTL) from a low polluted city. There were significant differences in white matter volumes between CTL and MC children - both WMH⁺ and WMH⁻ - in right parietal and bilateral temporal areas. Both WMH⁻ and WMH⁺ MC children showed progressive deficits, compared to CTL children, on the WISC-R Vocabulary and Digit Span subtests. The cognitive deficits in highly exposed children match the localization of the volumetric differences detected over the 1 year follow-up, since the deficits observed are consistent with impairment of parietal and temporal lobe functions. Regardless of the presence of prefrontal WMH, Mexico City children performed more poorly across a variety of cognitive tests, compared to CTL children, thus WMH⁺ is likely only partially identifying underlying white matter pathology. Together these findings reveal that exposure to air pollution may perturb the trajectory of cerebral development and result in cognitive deficits during childhood.     

Effects of training condition on the contribution of specific items to relational processing in baboons (Papio papio)

Relational processing involves learning about the relationship between or among stimuli, transcending the individual stimuli, so that abstract knowledge generalizable to novel situations is acquired. Relational processing has been studied in animals as well as in humans, but little attention has been paid to the contribution of specific items to relational thinking or to the factors that may affect that contribution. This study assessed the intertwined effects of item and relational processing in nonhuman primates. Using a procedure that entailed both expanding and contracting sets of pictorial items, we trained 13 baboons on a two-alternative forced-choice task, in which they had to distinguish horizontal from vertical relational patterns. In Experiment 1, monkeys engaged in item-based processing with a small training set size, and they progressively engaged in relation-based processing as training set size was increased. However, in Experiment 2, overtraining with a small stimulus set promoted the processing of item-based information. These findings underscore similarities in how humans and nonhuman primates process higher-order stimulus relations.     

Spirituality in Occupational Therapy: Do We Practice What We Teach?

This mixed-method study examined the responses of 97 occupational therapists on the subject of spirituality in occupational therapy practice. The inclusion of spirituality into the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework (2008) implies that clinicians address spirituality as a component of client-centered practice. This research revealed a gap between education, theory, and practice as evidenced in the quantitative and qualitative data. Although occupational therapy is intended to be holistic, therapists require a more complete understanding of what spirituality is and what the role of the occupational therapist is when addressing spirituality in evaluation or treatment. The discussion of this research provides information for future occupational therapy educators and educational programs as they seek to incorporate the construct of spirituality into curricula.     

Religious Beliefs or Physicians’ Behavior: What Makes a Patient More Prone to Accept a Physician to Address His/Her Spiritual Issues?

The present study aims to understand the relation between religious beliefs, physicians’ behavior and patients’ opinions regarding “Spirituality, religiosity and health (S/R)” issues, and what makes a patient more prone to accept a physician to address his/her spiritual issues. A cross-sectional study was carried out in outpatients from a tertiary hospital, and a path analysis was used to examine the direct and indirect relationships between the variables. For the final analysis, 300 outpatients were evaluated. Most patients would like their doctors to address S/R issues but did not feel comfortable to ask them. In contrast, they reported most doctors have never addressed S/R issues, and they believe doctors are not prepared to address these issues. The path analysis revealed that patients’ previous experiences with their doctors may be as important as their religious/spiritual beliefs in proneness to accept a physician to address his/her spiritual issues.     

Effect on Comprehension of Preposed versus Postposed Adverbial Phrases

A challenge for psycholinguistics is to describe how linguistic cues influence the construction of the mental representation resulting from the comprehension of a text. In this paper, we will focus on one of these linguistic devices: the sentence-initial positioning of spatial adverbials such as In the park.... Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted to test the ‘Discourse Framing Hypothesis’ according to which preposed adverbials can be seen as frame builders announcing that incoming contents satisfy the same informational criterion specified by the adverbial. Our results indicate that spatial adverbials do not play the same role when they are in sentence-initial and in sentence-final position. These results are discussed in the framework of Zwaan’s Event Indexing Model.     

Assessment of cognitive function across pregnancy using CANTAB: A longitudinal study

Significant changes in endogenous plasma hormone levels are required to sustain pregnancy which provides a unique opportunity to study their effect on cognitive function.