Mining the Archive: Evaluating and Improving a Course

This classroom note demonstrates that a course may be improved by paying specific attention to Elliot Eisner’s distinction between a course’s explicit, implicit and null criteria. In an attempt to ground and identify those notoriously slippery curricula, this paper appropriates French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concepts of practice, discourse and archival research. Having explored Foucault’s understanding of these concepts, the paper analyses the course Communication and Processes within Groups at two distinctive phases in its twenty–year history. The resulting excavation of the course’s implicit and null curricula twenty years apart shows that two different sets of facilitators teaching the same explicit curriculum to a very different student body, in vastly changed venues, are working out of two different understandings of what competence in the practice of ministry entails, two very different ministerial education discourses. This paper demonstrates that with students’ questions, a teacher’s intentional probing and Foucault’s framework in hand, it is possible to access and articulate a course’s hidden curricula. In such ways, the practice of mining the archive offers an imaginative way of both evaluating and improving a course that has been taught for many years.     

The effects of early relational antecedents and other factors on the parental sensitivity of mothers and fathers

This study examines the effect of early relational antecedents (ERA, i.e. the quality of parenting parents recalled receiving as children), parenting stress, marital stress, socio‐economic factors and children's characteristics (gender and disability condition) on the parental sensitivity of mothers and fathers. The sample consisted of 116 mothers and 84 fathers of 117 eighteen month old children drawn from a larger longitudinal study on the adaptation of parents to a child with a disability. Thirty‐four children were diagnosed with Down syndrome (DS), 51 with a cleft lip and/or palate (CLP), and 32 were non‐disabled children. Multiple regression analyses reveal that mothers' sensitivity is best predicted by her level of education and family income, whereas fathers' sensitivity is best predicted by their ERA, marital stress, family income and the child's disability condition. Mothers with more education and a greater family income displayed a greater sensitivity to their children, as did fathers who perceive less marital stress, those with a greater family income and those who perceived their parents as less controlling. Also, fathers of children with DS displayed less sensitivity for their children than fathers of children with CLP or fathers of non‐disabled children. These results concord with many studies about the importance of socio‐economic factors, ERA, marital stress, parent's gender and children's factors in the understanding of parental sensitivity. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

National personality characteristics: II. Adaption-innovation in Canadian,American, and British samples

On the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory 1,106 Canadians scored as more adaptive than American and British standardization samples. Means for Canadian females and males were congruent with those in national samples from six other countries.     

Asymmetric interference in implicit memory: effects of study-test awareness and stimulus order

This study examined the extent to which fragment completion performance is susceptible to the effects of two different forms of interference (proactive and retroactive) and whether any of these effects depend on participants' awareness of the relationship between study and test. Unaware participants were found to be susceptible to proactive but not retroactive interference. Aware participants did not show evidence of susceptibility to either form of interference. These results contribute to the debate about whether implicit memory is immune to interference effects by demarcating the limits of such an immunity.     

Once a French Speaker,Always a French Speaker? Bilingual Children's Thinking About the Stability of Language

Despite early emerging and impressive linguistic abilities, young children demonstrate ostensibly puzzling beliefs about the nature of language. In some circumstances monolingual children even express the belief that an individual's language is more stable than her race. The present research investigated bilingual children's thinking about the relative stability of language and race (Kinzler & Dautel, 2012). Five‐to six‐year‐old bilingual children were asked to judge whether a target child who varied in race (White or Black) and language (English or French) would grow up to be an adult who maintained the target child's race or her language. Similar to many monolingual children, a heterogeneous group of bilingual children on average chose the language‐match. Yet French‐English bilingual children were relatively more likely to choose the race‐match, especially when tested in their non‐dominant language. Specific experience with relevant languages, and communicating in a non‐dominant language, may contribute to children's developing metalinguistic success and their thinking about social categorization.     

Feedforward and feedback consistency effects for high- and low-frequency words in lexical decision and naming

In three experiments, we examined feedforward and feedback consistency effects in word recognition. Feedforward consistency is the degree to which a word's pronunciation is consistent with that of similarly spelled words, and feedback consistency refers to whether there is more than one way to spell a pronunciation. Previously, Stone, Vanhoy, and Van Orden (1997) reported feedforward and feedback consistency effects for low-frequency words in a lexical decision task. We investigated the effect of feedforward and feedback consistency for both high- and low-frequency words in lexical decision and naming. In both tasks, we found that feedforward and feedback inconsistent words were processed more slowly than consistent words, regardless of word frequency. These findings indicate that both types of consistency are involved in visual word recognition.