The Impact of Facilitation by Museum Educators on Family Learning at Interactive Math Exhibits: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Although discussions of museums often revolve around exhibits, educators in these spaces have the potential to create in-depth, social learning experiences beyond what is possible at exhibits alone. There is still little empirical research, however, to inform how we understand, approach, and improve museum facilitation practices. In this study, we sought to address this gap by quantifying the impact of facilitation by trained educators working with visitors at interactive museum exhibits and comparing this to visitor engagement and learning outcomes for families without educator support. Using a quasi-experimental design, we measured the impact of staff facilitation on visitor engagement time, mathematical reasoning, math awareness, satisfaction, and intergenerational communication across three different exhibits, four trained educators, and two experimental conditions. Multivariate regression modeling showed that staff facilitation had a positive impact on engagement time, mathematical reasoning, and satisfaction, a negative impact on intergenerational communication, and no impact on math awareness.     

Supervision in the Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia: Awareness of and Mutual Reflection upon Fragmentation

Historical and newly emerging models of schizophrenia suggest it is a disorder characterized by the fragmentation of the experience of the self and the world, leading to the interruption of how a unique life is unfolding in the world. It has been proposed that psychotherapy might therefore promote recovery by facilitating the development of a greater ability to integrate information about the self and others. In this paper we explore how the supervision of a metacognitively-oriented psychotherapy can assist therapists to experience and conceptualize fragmentation within sessions, join patients in the gradual process of making sense of their psychiatric problems and life challenges, and ultimately envision and achieve recovery. Common challenges and responses within supervision are described and discussed.

     

Models for letter cancellation performance and their implications for models of reading

Models for letter cancellation are developed, i.e. for tasks where subjects read a coherent piece of prose at the same time as trying to cancel every target letter they encounter. These models have two components (i) a model of how information is represented by the reader, (ii) a model of how this information is scanned to enable the reader to detect particular target letters. Models of representation range from a photographic image of the printed page to a sophisticated multi-level representation, and models of scanning range from a series of independent saccadic movements (like eye movements) to scans which take into account morphemic and syntactic structure.

Several predictions about the detailed pattern of letter cancellation data are developed on the basis of these models, and these are tested on a data base collected by Smith and Groat (1979). While some support for the simpler models is forthcoming, only the most elaborate models (multi-level representation, syntactically guided scan) can fully account for all the data. While instances can be found where the cancellation task is clearly disrupting the reading task, much of the data are consistent with the notion that the letter cancellation task is not excessively intrusive, and our analyses can thus give us significant information about normal reading.