THE INFLUENCE OF A READING AND WRITING CURRICULUM ON TRANSFER LEARNING ACROSS SUBJECTS AND GRADES

This study examined the influence of an innovative reading and writing curriculum on the expository writing and content learning of middle grade students. In Study One, students of teachers who were highly knowledgeable of the curriculum design wrote significantly better essays than students of less knowledgeable teachers. In Study Two, students transferred knowledge and strategies learned in the innovative curriculum to the writing of geography essays throughout the school year. Study Three found that 21% of the variance in the text-based content of Grade 8 social studies essays could be accounted for by text structure knowledge acquired in Grade 7.     

COGNITIVE SWITCHING: A BEHAVIORAL TRACE OF HUMAN INFORMATION PROCESSING FOR TELEVISION NEWSCASTS

A theory of cognitive switching is presented which was developed from human performance literature and signaled stopping research. The purpose of the study was to validate the basic constructs of the theory and to present data which display behavioral traces of the ways people organize television news into their information-processing system during the actual reception of the messages. The findings suggest (1) that people cognitively switch for four basic reasons (functions) to: agree, disagree, think, and question; and (2) that people exhibit similar cognitive switching behaviors in similar information-processing situations, even though the content of the stimulus changes. Limitations of this type of research are discussed and implications for further study are suggested.     

NOT SO PROMISING AFTER ALL: EVALUATOR-RELATIVE TELEOLOGY AND COMMON-SENSE MORALITY

Abstract:  Douglas Portmore has recently argued in this journal for a "promising result"– that combining teleological ethics with "evaluator relativism" about the good allows an ethical theory to account for deontological intuitions while "accommodat[ing] the compelling idea that it is always permissible to bring about the best available state of affairs." I show that this result is false. It follows from the indexical semantics of evaluator relativism that Portmore's compelling idea is false. I also try to explain what might have led to this misunderstanding.