Peer review of teaching (PRoT) in higher education – a practitioner’s reflection

Peer review of teaching (PRoT) is recommended to both develop and assure the quality of teaching practices in Higher Education. An institutional implementation of a peer review process can be viewed as a genuine desire to improve teaching quality or as an instrument of accountability and performativity. There are many approaches to the peer review of teaching operating. This article documents the impact, advantages and disadvantages of direct participation in three peer review of teaching processes.     

A case for taking the dual role of counsellor-researcher in qualitative research

There is ongoing debate about whether the challenges of practice-based research in counselling, with clients’ discourses providing the raw data, can be overcome. This article begins by considering the argument of whether taking a dual role of counsellor-researcher within case study research is a legitimate qualitative approach. A case example using sand-tray in short-term therapy with adults from a pluralistic perspective is provided to demonstrate how the challenges of the dual role can be managed to produce effective research findings. It is suggested that this approach closes the gap between research and practice to produce findings that are highly relevant to the counselling context. The ethical considerations of taking a dual role of counsellor-researcher are considered, and opportunities and challenges when adopting this approach are identified.     

Response of colony mice to intruders with different fighting experience

Six male mice placed in a large, moderately complex enclosure formed a stable dominance hierarchy in which two mice defended adjacent floor areas and the remaining four mice were subordinate and did not form territories. Intruder mice with winning or losing experience in prior paired encounters, or those with no fighting experience, were introduced individually into the colony for 30 minute periods. These intruders were attacked by the dominant members of the colony, and the fighting outcomes were strongly dependent upon the fighting experience of the intruder. Intruders with losing or no fighting experience engaged in little mutual fighting with residents, were easily defeated, and terminated attacks by engaging in subordinate behaviors. Intruders with winning experience fought vigorously with residents, attacked and, in many cases, defeated residents. These results suggest that relatively little winning experience gained in earlier paired encounters may be sufficient to overcome the various fighting advantages enjoyed by a dominant territorial holding member of a colony.     

An ecological analysis of knowing by wielding.

The ecological approach to perception, as developed by James Gibson, is described and applied to how one knows, by means of the haptic perceptual system, various properties of hand-held objects. Four sets of experiments are reviewed in which subjects reported on the extent, orientation, shape, and fractional components of unseen objects wielded freely. For each task, an invariant specific to the object property in question is identified in the structured arrays of rotational moments and strains produced by the act of wielding. Results are discussed in relation to the concepts of attention and stimulation, as reformulated by the ecological approach, and the general theory of perception as information pickup.     

Sex differences in the lateralized processing of facial emotion

Two reaction time tasks were administered to male and female normal subjects, involving judgments of facial emotion. In the Word-Face task, judgments of similarity or difference of a centrally presented emotion word and an emotional face presented in the left or right visual field were required, and in the Face-Face task, comparisons of a centrally presented and a laterally presented emotional face were required. Results were significant for the matching trials only. Reaction times to negative emotions were faster overall than to positive emotions, and an Emotional Valence by Visual Field interaction was found such that reaction times were faster for negative emotions in the left visual field and for positive emotions in the right visual field. This interaction was significant for the female but not the male subjects, although similar patterns were observed in both sexes. Further, an interaction of Gender, Task, and Emotional Valence was found, such that the two tasks had opposite effects for the two sexes. The Face-Face task appeared to inhibit the performance of the male subjects and facilitate the performance of the female subjects in terms of reaction time. It was suggested that specifying the target emotion by an emotional face elicits a greater emotional response on the part of the subject than specification by a word, and that this emotional elicitation may result in a reactive inhibition in the male subjects and in an elaboration of the emotional response in the female subjects.     

The importance of ‘mass’ in line drawings of faces

Previous research (Davies, Ellis and Shepherd, 1978; Rhodes, Brennan and Carey, 1987) has shown that accurate line drawings of familiar faces are identified rather poorly. However, artists can produce lifelike portraits with pen and ink, and Pearson and Robinson (1985) described an automatic method for producing computer-drawn sketches (‘cartoons’) of faces which appear very similar to those produced by a human artist. In this paper we show that subjects can identify famous faces depicted in such computer-drawn ‘cartoons’ almost as well as full grey-scale images. The cartoon algorithm comprises two components. One component draws lines at the locations of intensity changes corresponding to luminance valleys and edges (the ‘valledge’ detector). The other component applies a ‘threshold’ to the original intensity distribution, and replaces any area darker than threshold with black. Thus the full cartoon contains both ‘line’ and ‘mass’. Neither the valledges nor the threshold components alone were as well identified as full cartoons containing both components. The results suggest that the addition of the threshold component adds significantly to the identifiability of line drawings of faces.     

Prime time advertisements: Repetition priming from faces seen on subject recruitment posters

Repetition priming is defined as a gain in item recognition after previous exposure. Repetition priming of face recognition has been shown to last for several months, despite contamination by everyday exposure to both experimental and control faces in the interval. Here we show that gains in face recognition in the laboratory are found from faces initially seen in a rather different context— on subject recruitment posters, even when the advertisements make no specific mention of experiments involving face recognition. The priming was greatest when identical pictures were shown in the posters and in the test phase, although different views of faces did give significant priming in one study. Follow-up studies revealed poor explicit memory for the faces shown on the posters. The results of these experiments are used to develop a model in which repetition priming reflects the process of updating representations of familiar faces.     

Hospitalized psychiatric and medical patients and the clergy

Earlier research suggested that persons in a community with significant psychiatric disorders seek relief from their clergy as often as from trained mental-health professionals. In this research, contacts with clergy about current hospitalization by matched samples of inpatient psychiatric (N=51) and medical/surgical (N=50) patients were compared, as were responses to structured interviews about the importance of religion, religious affiliation, and participation, spiritual needs, and spiritual well-being. The findings suggest that the two groups were similar in demographics, the degree to which religion was a source of strength and comfort in their lives, and percentages reporting as having a clergy person; the group of hospitalized psychiatric patients was significantly less likely, however, than the sample of medical/surgical patients to have discussed their current hospitalization with their clergy persons. Possible causes for this difference as well as areas of further research are discussed.     

Selective perception by dynamic touch

Perceiving the length of a rod by dynamic touch is tied to the inertia tensorIij, a quantification of its resistance to rotational acceleration. Perception of the portion extending in front of the grasp has previously been ascribed to decomposing one component ofIij by attention. The tensorial nature of dynamic touch suggests that this ability must be anchored wholly in the tensor. Three experiments show that perceived partial length is a function of two components of the tensor, one tied primarily to magnitude and the other tied primarily to direction, whereas perceived whole length is a function of a magnitude component alone. Dynamic touch is characterized in terms of a haptic perceptual instrument that softly assembles to exploitIij differently depending on the intention, producing 1:1 maps that are appropriately scaled for each intention.