An analysis of autobiographical tools in written reflection: implications for teaching critical thinking and goal-setting

This paper analyzes the results of an 18 month study of a variety of participants involved in written reflection on their learning, both in classes at two universities in the Southern US or in voluntary focus groups. The purpose of the study was to analyze the effects of including autobiographical tools in written reflection. Participants used three tools from the genre of autobiography as they reflected on their learning inside either course content, internship experiences, experiential learning, or goal-setting. Over 500 samples were gathered, offering a large data set for analysis of what kinds of best practice produce quality reflective writing. Through analysis of the data and student surveys and interviews, results show increased attention to critical thinking and metacognition; expressed flexibility, adaptability, and ability to handle ambiguity; and value in connection to others/empathy-building as a result of incorporating autobiographical tools in reflective prompts. The study indicated that reflections using the same autobiographical tool over the course of several sessions seemed to produce deeper levels of reflection and more engagement with the autobiographical tool. Of the three autobiographical tools used in the study, the tool that seemed most helpful to participants was reflection as storytelling that revealed aspects of the self.     

Lateralized interference in finger tapping: comparisons of rate and variability measures under speed and consistency tapping instructions

Forty right-handed college subjects tapped with and without a verbal task under two instructional conditions (tap as quickly as possible vs. tap as consistently as possible) and two levels of verbal production (silent vs. aloud). The tapping task consisted of the alternate tapping of two keys with the index finger of the left vs. right hands, while the verbal task was anagram solution. Three rate and four variability measures of tapping performance were evaluated in the identification of lateralized interference. The results indicate that reliable lateralized interference, more right-hand than left-hand tapping disruption, was observed only for variability measures under instructions to tap as consistently as possible. Furthermore, only one of these variability measures was sensitive to an increase in lateralized interference produced by verbal production. Because of the limited demonstration of verbal laterality effects with the two-key tapping procedure in this study, conclusions suggest that the simpler manual task of repetitive tapping of one key should be viewed as the method of choice in future dual-task studies.     

Reason and Emotion in the Ethics of Self‐Restraint

In this essay I argue that Reinhold Niebuhr's ethics of self‐restraint, though promising, is based on an incomplete and imprecise moral psychology. Although Niebuhr claims that reason cannot provide a sufficient grounding to motivate self‐restraint, he does not disclose which human capacity might serve this purpose. I suggest that we can address this oversight by strengthening Niebuhr's tentative embrace of David Hume, and by developing a concept of the emotions in order to explain how human beings can cultivate a stable inclination to self‐restraint. This project is informed by and in the service of feminist critiques of Niebuhr and social concerns.     

Processing the intensity of dichotic syllables

Subjects were required to match the intensity levels of the left- and right-ear members of dichotically presented nonsense syllables. When subjects matched the overall average intensities of a sequence of differing dichotic pairs no ear differences were observed. When repetitions of single dichotic pairs were matched right-ear syllables were judged louder than left-ear syllables. The results support a model predicting left-hemisphere superiority in a task permitting higher-level encoding of speech input.