Scheduling Scaffolding: The Extent and Arrangement of Assistance During Training Impacts Test Performance

Various kinds of assistance, including prompts, worked examples, direct instruction, and modeling, are widely provided to learners across educational and training programs. Yet, the effectiveness of assistance during training on long-term learning is widely debated. The authors examined how the extent and schedule of assistance during training on a novel mouse movement task impacted unassisted test performance. Learners received different schedules of assistance during training, including constant assistance, no assistance, probabilistic assistance, alternating assistance, and faded assistance. Constant assistance led to better performance during training than no assistance. However, constant assistance during training resulted in the worst unassisted test performance. Faded assistance during training resulted in the best test performance. This suggests that fading may allow learners to create an internal model of the assistance without depending on the assistance in a manner that impedes successful transfer to unassisted circumstances.     

Feed My Sheep: An Analysis of the Black–White Biblical Academic Achievement Gap

Secular academic achievement gap analyses consistently hold that Blacks perform worse than their White counterparts. Although gaps are closing, significant variances remain; sadly, poor performance isn’t limited to secular academics. Analysis of Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s 2010 U.S. Religious Knowledge survey holds that although African-American Christians are more likely to attend church more frequently than other ethnicities, they are significantly more likely to know the least about the Bible. Unfortunately, the literature does not address the biblical racial achievement gap; we seek to correct this deficiency. We explored the extent of the Black–White biblical academic achievement gap and identified variables which exacerbate it. Linear regression analysis reveals that Blacks actualize a negative impact to biblical literacy engendered by their race: regardless of attendance frequency, the total number of questions answered correctly (μ = 4.337 out of 8) is reduced by 0.705. This impact is (a) not experienced by Whites and (b) larger than the church attendance benefit (0.228).     

Category-theoretic structure and radical ontic structural realism

Radical ontic structural realism (ROSR) claims that structure exists independently of objects that may instantiate it. Critics of ROSR contend that this claim is conceptually incoherent, insofar as, (i) it entails there can be relations without relata, and (ii) there is a conceptual dependence between relations and relata. In this essay I suggest that (ii) is motivated by a set-theoretic formulation of structure, and that adopting a category-theoretic formulation may provide ROSR with more support. In particular, I consider how a category-theoretic formulation of structure can be developed that denies (ii), and can be made to do work in the context of formulating theories in physics.     

Metacognition of the testing effect: Guiding learners to predict the benefits of retrieval

If the mnemonic benefits of testing are to be widely realized in real-world learning circumstances, people must appreciate the value of testing and choose to utilize testing during self-guided learning. Yet metacognitive judgments do not appear to reflect the enhancement provided by testing Karpicke & Roediger (Science 319:966–968, 2008). In this article, we show that under judicious conditions, learners can indeed reveal an understanding of the beneficial effects of testing, as well as the interaction of that effect with delay (Experiment 1). In that experiment, subjects made judgments of learning (JOLs) for previously studied or previously tested items in either a cue-only or a cue–target context, and either immediately or after a 1-day delay. When subjects made judgments in a cue-only context, their JOLs accurately reflected the effects of testing, both immediately and at a delay. To evaluate the potential of exposure to such conditions for promoting generalized appreciation of testing effects, three further experiments elicited global predictions about restudied and tested items across two study/test cycles (Experiments 2, 3, and 4). The results indicated that learners’ global naïve metacognitive beliefs increasingly reflect the beneficial effects of testing when learners experience these benefits with increasing external support. If queried under facilitative circumstances, learners appreciate the mnemonic enhancement that testing provides on both an item-by-item and global basis but generalize that knowledge to future learning only with considerable guidance.     

Influences of culture and visual context on real-time social categorization

Social categorization is often thought to be based on facial features and immune to visual context. Moreover, East Asians have been argued to attend to context more than Westerners. American and Chinese participants were presented with faces varying along a White-Asian morph continuum either in American, neutral, or Chinese contexts. American contexts made White categorizations more likely, and Chinese contexts made Asian categorizations more likely. Further, the compatibility between facial and contextual cues influenced the directness of participants' hand trajectories en route to selecting a category response. Even when an ultimate response was not biased by context, the trajectory was nevertheless partially attracted to the category response associated with the context. Importantly, such partial attraction effects in hand trajectories revealed that the influence of context began earlier in time for Chinese relative to American participants. Together, the results show that context systematically influences social categorization, sometimes altering categorization responses and other times only temporarily altering the process. Further, the timing of contextual influences differs by culture. The findings highlight the role of contextual and cultural factors in social categorization.     

A New Perspective Concerning Experiments on Semantic Intuitions

Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich [2004; forthcoming] use experimental methods to raise a spectre of doubt about reliance on intuitions in developing theories of reference which are then deployed in philosophical arguments outside the philosophy of language. Machery et al. ran a cross-cultural survey asking Western and East Asian participants about a famous case from the philosophical literature on reference (Kripke's Gödel example). They interpret their results as indicating that there is significant variation in participants' intuitions about semantic reference for that case. We argue that this interpretation is mistaken. We detail a type of ambiguity found in Machery et al.'s probe but not yet noted in the response literature. We argue that this epistemic ambiguity could have affected their results. We do not stop there, however: Rather than rest content with a possibility claim, we ran four studies to test the impact of this ambiguity on participants' responses. We found that this accounts for much of the variation in Machery et al.'s original experiment. We conclude that in the light of our new data, their argument is no longer convincing.     

Geometric cues,reference frames,and the equivalence of experienced-aligned and novel-aligned views in human spatial memory

Spatial memories are often organized around reference frames, and environmental shape provides a salient cue to reference frame selection. To date, however, the environmental cues responsible for influencing reference frame selection remain relatively unknown. To connect research on reference frame selection with that on orientation via environmental shape, we explored the extent to which geometric cues were incidentally encoded and represented in memory by evaluating their influence on reference frame selection. Using a virtual environment equipped with a head-mounted-display, we presented participants with to-be-remembered object arrays. We manipulated whether the experienced viewpoint was aligned or misaligned with global (i.e., the principal axis of space) or local (i.e., wall orientations) geometric cues. During subsequent judgments of relative direction (i.e., participants imagined standing at one object, facing a second object, and pointed toward a third object), we show that performance was best when imagining perspectives aligned with these geometric cues; moreover, global geometric cues were sufficient for reference frame selection, global and local geometric cues were capable of exerting differential influence on reference frame selection, and performance from experienced-imagined perspectives was equivalent to novel-imagined perspectives aligned with geometric cues. These results explicitly connect theory regarding spatial reference frame selection and spatial orientation via environmental shape and indicate that spatial memories are organized around fundamental geometric properties of space.     

Religion,Volunteering, and Educational Setting: The Effect of Youth Schooling Type on Civic Engagement

Research on civic engagement shows that volunteering rates decline as young people move from adolescence into emerging adulthood. Using panel data spanning this period of the life course, we examine the impact of secondary schooling type—public, Catholic, Protestant, private nonreligious, and homeschool—on sustaining volunteering into emerging adulthood. We apply a framework that posits pathways between secondary schooling and sets of opportunities to volunteer embedded in institutions and social networks. We also posit a link between schooling type and durable motivational dispositions to volunteer. Results indicate substantial differences by schooling type, although our measures of opportunity structure and motivation do not adequately account for these differences. Those educated in Protestant secondary schools are considerably more likely than other young people to continue to volunteer, even accounting for potential spurious influences. Those schooled at home or in private nonreligious settings are significantly less likely to continue volunteering. We conclude by discussing two alternative accounts that should be addressed in further research: one focused on the role of habituated social practices and the other focused on differences in organizational efforts to link adolescent volunteering to emerging adult volunteering.