The Clicker Technique: Cultivating Efficient Teaching and Successful Learning

The clicker technique is a newly developed system that uses frequent testing in the classroom to enhance students' understanding and provide feedback to students and teachers. Using a laboratory model of the clicker technique, Experiment 1 explored the effects of the clicker technique, via its potential for compressing learning time and its partially individualized instruction, on the acquisition, retention, and generalization of knowledge at immediate and delayed tests. Results supported the clicker technique as a viable method for instructors to promote generalizable learning and to conserve teaching time. Experiment 2 examined the clicker technique in terms of its components, studying and testing, to determine which components are crucial to its effectiveness. Results indicated that the combination of studying and testing promotes superior performance only during acquisition, relative to either studying or testing alone, and neither study, test, nor the combination of study and test led to a retention advantage. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Small Unit Leader Perceptions of Managing Soldier Behavioral Health and Associated Factors

This investigation explored squad leaders’ perceptions of their roles managing subordinate soldiers’ behavioral health (BH) needs. The data were obtained through an anonymous survey of 458 squad leaders (i.e., small unit leaders who oversee 4–10 soldiers). More than 80% of squad leaders perceived management of soldier BH needs before, during, and after treatment as their responsibility, and felt comfortable and capable of executing these roles. Latent class analysis was used to determine groups of “most active,” “moderately active,” and “least active” leaders. Multinomial logistic regression was used to compare the least and most active classes. The most active leaders were more likely to report high BH knowledge, dedication to a common purpose, and low levels of “associative” stigma. These results should inform leader management of soldier BH. Future research should examine active leader characteristics and whether evidence-based training can increase support for preventing and managing BH issues.     

Self-Stigma in Substance Abuse: Development of a New Measure

Little attention has been paid to the examination and measurement of self-stigma in substance misuse. This paper aims to fill this gap by reporting on the development of a new scale to measure self-stigma experienced by people who are misusing substances, the Substance Abuse Self-Stigma Scale. Content validity and item refinement occurred through an iterative process involving a literature search, focus groups, and expert judges. Psychometric properties were examined in a cross-sectional study of individuals (n?=?352) receiving treatment for substance misuse. Factor analyses resulted in a 40-item measure with self devaluation, fear of enacted stigma, stigma avoidance, and values disengagement subscales. The measure showed a strong factor structure and good reliability and validity overall, though the values disengagement subscale showed a mixed pattern. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for studies of stigma impact and intervention.     

Fear of routine dental treatment in adults: Its nature and management

Abstract

The fear of dental treatment in adults can be characterised in several ways, loosely related, such as anticipating being afraid, avoiding dental check-ups and seeking treatment only under general anaesthesia. Defined thus, at least a quarter of adults are highly afraid of dentistry. The feared experiences are many, including most frequently, pain. Several studies have shown that anxious patients experience less pain during treatment than they expect. It remains to be confirmed that these are typical experiences because other studies show that local anaesthesia can fail to protect patients from sudden pain in 13% of treatments on average. Expectations of pain are highly resistant to change, the result probably of several influences including distortion in recall of pain-free treatment, intermittent experience of sudden severe pain, expecting pain in order to reduce its impact, and uncertainty about treatment. It has yet to be shown that experience free of discomfort can reduce these expectations. However, relaxation instructions and information about pain management and stop signals can reduce pre-treatment fear. To prevent the onset and the maintenance of anxiety: the prevention of pain is essential; controlled behavioural studies of the treatment of pain and other experiences such as panics are needed. Finally, the need for new instruments to assess all aspects of fear of dentistry is described.     

Zapotec sacred places,enduring and/or ephemeral: Reverence,realignment and commodification at an archaeological-tourist site in Southern Mexico

The abundant and rightfully famous archaeological ruins of Mexico, besides attesting to the grand achievements of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican culture, also serve as foci for the preservation and/or reaffirmation of contemporary indigenous religion and identity. Additionally, those same ancient ruins have been, in many instances, tidied up and reconfigured variously as outdoor classrooms and museums for the dissemination of a narrative of Mexican national identity, as the country's premier tourist attractions, and thus as sites eventually prized far more as engines of economic development than as educational or religious contexts. Where indigenous peoples are often imagined as passive victims in this commodification of their sacred sites, the case study featured in this article, namely, the twentieth century management of the internationally renowned Zapotec site of Mitla, Oaxaca reveals a native community playing a very active role, arguably the lead role, in the exploitation of the economic potential of its famed ruins. Indeed, the Mitleyenos' entrepreneurially astute reconfiguration of their local sacred geography, a realignment that balanced unprecedented economic challenges with on-going devotional commitments, suggests that the designation of various sites and buildings as ‘sacred’, albeit an extremely pressing matter, is also much more contingent and more transient than is generally assumed.     

Saccadic eye movements as indicators of cognitive function in older adults

Older adults appear to have greater difficulty ignoring distractions during day-to-day activities than younger adults. To assess these effects of age, the ability of adults aged between 50 and 80 years to ignore distracting stimuli was measured using the antisaccade and oculomotor capture tasks. In the antisaccade task, observers are instructed to look away from a visual cue, whereas in the oculomotor capture task, observers are instructed to look toward a colored singleton in the presence of a concurrent onset distractor. Index scores of the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) were compared with capture errors, and with prosaccade errors on the antisaccade task. A higher percentage of capture errors were made on the oculomotor capture tasks by the older members of the cohort compared to the younger members. There was a weak relationship between the attention index and capture errors, but the visuospatial/constructional index was the strongest predictor of prosaccade error rate in the antisaccade task. The saccade reaction times (SRTs) of correct initial saccades in the oculomotor capture task were poorly correlated with age, and with the neurospsychological tests, but prosaccade SRTs in both tasks moderately correlated with antisaccade error rate. These results were interpreted in terms of a competitive integration (or race) model. Any variable that reduces the strength of the top-down neural signal to produce a voluntary saccade, or that increases saccade speed, will enhance the likelihood that a reflexive saccade to a stimulus with an abrupt onset will occur.     

Psychometric properties of a revised Spanish 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale adaptation in multiple sclerosis patients

There have been a small number of investigations of alexithymia in multiple sclerosis (MS) using the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). However, the TAS-20 factor structure has not yet been evaluated in a MS patient sample, and earlier Spanish translations of this instrument require some improvement. We aimed to evaluate the factorial validity and reliability of an improved Spanish translation of the TAS-20 (the TAS-20-S). The TAS-20-S was completed by 221 MS patients. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to compare the fit of six different factor models. Internal consistency and retest reliability coefficients were also computed. The correlated three-factor model and the higher-order factor model made up of Difficulty Identifying Feelings, Difficulty Describing Feelings, and Externally Oriented Thinking achieved the best fit. Alpha coefficients ranged between .87 and .67; mean inter-item correlations ranged between .48 and .20; and retest correlations after 6 months ranged between .61 and .52. A high degree of alexithymia was present in 18.1% of the sample. Reliability and the traditional three-factor structure were demonstrated for the TAS-20-S, which can now be recommended for assessing an aspect of emotional processing in MS patients.     

Movement and working memory: Patterns and positions in space

Five experiments are reported in which subjects were asked to remember short, visually presented sequences of whole body movement patterns, words, and spatial positions. The items were recalled in order in a memory span paradigm. During presentation of the items to be remembered subjects simply watched, or they carried out a concurrent activity involving articulatory suppression, movement to external spatial targets, or body-related movement. When the movement patterns to be remembered were familiar to subjects, movement span was not disrupted by articulatory suppression or movement to spatial targets but was disrupted by body-related movement. This movement suppression task, however, did not interfere with performance on a spatial span task or on verbal span. It is concluded that the memory for patterns of limb movement differs from memory for movement to spatial targets and that accounts of visuo-spatial processes in working memory involve the latter type of movement.