Assigning Integration: A Framework for Intellectual,Personal, and Professional Development in Seminary Courses

This article explores assignments as a core teaching practice essential to integrating the cognitive, personal, and professional identities of seminary students. These core practices emerge in seminary curricula where there is a strong focus on the teaching of canonical texts and a goal of achieving textual mastery. We propose that carefully chosen and constructive assignments achieve the kind of integration necessary for building content knowledge and the professional, spiritual, and religious identities of our students. While the difference between the educational goals of clergy‐training in a seminary and training graduate students in the academy can be sharp, we argue here for ways to make that contrast both productive and generative.     

A Review of: “The Fundamentals of Brain Development: Integrating Nature and Nurture. By Joan Stiles.”

Reviews the book The Fundamentals of Brain Development: Integrating Nature and Nurture by Joan Stiles. This volume examines the complex interactions between inheritance and experience by detailing the hows and whys of brain development from conception through adolescence. Weaving together evidence from neuroscience, embryology, genetics, physiology, and psychology, Stiles presents a tour-de-force guide of the metamorphoses that take place in the creation of the mammalian brain—metamorphoses that are often overlooked or misunderstood by an analysis of behavior alone. Throughout, many surprising and counterintuitive findings are set forth. The volume provides a stunning, in-depth, biologically based way of thinking about innateness, learning, and experience for a broader psychology audience.     

Correlation of the Response Potentials of the Skin with “Exciting” and Non-“Exciting” Stimuli

The relationship between psychological test performance and adult judgments of children's intelligence was explored in Guatemala and the U. S. A. In Guatemala, 15 male and 15 female children, age eight, were studied in each of two rural villages. In one village, 48 adult community members ranked the children on intelligence; in the other, 29 adults did the rankings. Male and female children were ranked separately. In the U. S., nine male children in a small New Jersey town were ranked by 25 adults. In a second U. S. community. a small California town, eight male children were ranked by 14 adults. In general, adult judgments were found to be congruent with children's test performance. In Guatemala, a simple family socioeconomic index was also related to both adult judgment and children's test performance. The implications of the results and the utility of these types of judgment techniques in cross-cultural research are discussed.     

Constructing a New Theory From Old Ideas and New Evidence

A central tenet of constructivist models of conceptual development is that children's initial conceptual level constrains how they make sense of new evidence and thus whether exposure to evidence will prompt conceptual change. Yet little experimental evidence directly examines this claim for the case of sustained, fundamental conceptual achievements. The present study combined scaling and experimental microgenetic methods to examine the processes underlying conceptual change in the context of an important conceptual achievement of early childhood—the development of a representational theory of mind. Results from 47 children (M age = 3.7 years) indicate that only children who were conceptually close to understanding false belief at the beginning of the study, and who were experimentally exposed to evidence of people acting on false beliefs, reliably developed representational theories of minds. Combined scaling and microgenetic data revealed how prior conceptual level interacts with experience, thereby providing critical experimental evidence for how conceptual change results from the interplay between conceptions and evidence.     

Postural muscle responses following changing balance threats in young, stable older, and unstable older adults

The authors determined the postural muscle response to support surface perturbations, in relation to aging and level of stability of 16 young adults and 32 older adults who were classified into stable (SOA) and unstable (UOA) groups on the basis of their functional balance abilities. Forward and backward support surface translations of various amplitudes and velocities were used so that postural responses of the standing adults could be elicited. The thigh and leg postural muscle responses were recorded with surface electromyography (EMG). The older groups had significantly longer onset latency in the anterior postural muscles, smaller integrated EMG in the posterior muscles, and greater extent of integrated EMG attenuation over time. The UOA showed longer onset latency in the gastrocnemius following slow backward perturbation and used a greater percentage of the functional capacity of the gastrocnemius muscle than the SOA did. Those findings indicate that the SOA and UOA had limited ability to adapt to changing balance threats; the UOA were more limited than the SOA. When designing balance training programs, therefore, therapists should consider the adult's level of functional stability.     

Making human research safe: Why we cannot afford to fail

This paper was given as a keynote address at the international conference on Ethics of Intellectual Property Rights and Patents held in Warsaw, Poland on April 23–24, 2004. The address was the introductory presentation to the important topic of protecting individuals who participate in research as research subjects.     

Factors mediating the relationships between preschool children's play patterns and peer ratings: Verbal communication styles

The effects of verbal communication styles on relationships between play patterns and peer ratings were investigated with a sample of 30 4-year-olds. Play patterns were determined in 22 spot checks made of each child during freeplay. Styles of verbal communication-including verbosity, affect tone, person/play focus, and responsivity-were ascertained from written accounts of each child's verbalizations gathered during three 5-min periods of freeplay. Peer ratings were gathered sociometrically. Multiple regression procedures were used in analyzing the data. In general, relationships between play and peer ratings reported in earlier work are supported, but in some cases differing patterns emerged when verbal communication styles were taken into account statistically. R² change scores indicate that when verbal communication styles are taken into account: Solitary play is not associated with low ratings from peers: solitary play is associated with the desire to play with opposite-sex peers; associative play is related to higher ratings from same-sex peers; and associative play is related to lower ratings given to opposite-sex peers. Part correlations indicate that when other independent variables in the equation are taken into account. A person-focused (as opposed to play-focused) verbal communication style is associated with higher ratings from peers; and affect tone is positively but not significantly associated with ratings received from same-sex peers.     

TRAINING PARENTS TO USE THE NATURAL LANGUAGE PARADIGM TO INCREASE THEIR AUTISTIC CHILDREN'S SPEECH

Parents of four nonverbal and four echolalic autistic children were trained to increase their children's speech by using the Natural Language Paradigm (NLP), a loosely structured procedure conducted in a play environment with a variety of toys. Parents were initially trained to use the NLP in a clinic setting, with subsequent parent-child speech sessions occurring at home. The results indicated that following training, parents increased the frequency with which they required their children to speak (i.e., modeled words and phrases, prompted answers to questions). Correspondingly, all children increased the frequency of their verbalizations in three nontraining settings. Thus, the NLP appears to be an efficacious program for parents to learn and use in the home to increase their children's speech.     

STIMULUS VARIATION AS A MEANS OF ENHANCING PUNISHMENT EFFECTS

We compared the effects of varied punishers (presentation of one of three available punishers) with the single presentation of one of the punishers on the occurrence of inappropriate behaviors with three developmentally delayed children. Two children were presented with varied-punisher conditions in which either overcorrection, time-out, or a verbal “no” was presented contingent upon inappropiate behavior. A loud noise was substituted for overcorrection for a third child. Results of the multielement with reversal design indicated that both punishment formats produced a decrease in the target behaviors with the varied-punisher format slightly more effective than the single presentations of the punishers. The results suggest the use of varied punishers as a means of enhancing the effects of less intrusive procedures to effectively reduce inappropriate behaviors.