Hope and Forgiveness: Reply to Davies and Hirsch

As I had hoped, each of the discussants on the idea of forgiveness in the consulting room approached it from their own very different theoretical and personal slant. Davies (this issue) offered the perspective of one who works such concepts from the framework of multiplicity. Hirsch’s (this issue) ideas on the work with such concepts is with an eye on using it only if it inhibits the achievement of a fuller life. Both left room for non-resolution and ambivalence, a concept with which I fully agree. In my reply to these insightful papers, I expand on my use of forgiveness, as well as other multivalent concepts. My effort to try and open up these avenues is always to help someone retain hope underneath the frequently threatening life review, and often personality reconstruction, that we undertake. I have included a response to Davies’ question of analyst self-maintenance in and around challenging therapeutic situations. And finally, I consider how we might usefully expand difficult discussions that straddle values, religious and cultural beliefs, and similar concepts that we ourselves may not believe in or share.     

FLUENCY SNAPSHOTS: A QUICK SCREENING TOOL FOR YOUR CLASSROOM

In this article, the authors present a research-based, classroom tested assessment tool, the Classroom Fluency Snapshot (CFS). This assessment is grounded in the research that establishes fluency as an important component of initial reading instruction and in the work on the efficacy of curriculum based measurement. The article presents the case of one classroom in which a teacher uses the CFS as a pre-, post-assessment. Rich classroom examples, details of the teacher's interpretation, and instructional decision making are shared along with ideas for instruction.     

Theory of mind selectively predicts preschoolers’ knowledge‐based selective word learning

Children can selectively attend to various attributes of a model, such as past accuracy or physical strength, to guide their social learning. There is a debate regarding whether a relation exists between theory‐of‐mind skills and selective learning. We hypothesized that high performance on theory‐of‐mind tasks would predict preference for learning new words from accurate informants (an epistemic attribute), but not from physically strong informants (a non‐epistemic attribute). Three‐ and 4‐year‐olds (N = 65) completed two selective learning tasks, and their theory‐of‐mind abilities were assessed. As expected, performance on a theory‐of‐mind battery predicted children's preference to learn from more accurate informants but not from physically stronger informants. Results thus suggest that preschoolers with more advanced theory of mind have a better understanding of knowledge and apply that understanding to guide their selection of informants. This work has important implications for research on children's developing social cognition and early learning.     

Rigidity and flexibility of gender stereotypes in childhood: developmental or differential?

Previous research has shown that the early learning of male–female categories is characterized by rigid beliefs about stereotypic differences, but that once gender knowledge is well established, the beliefs become more flexible. Because most studies are cross‐sectional, it is not known if the early rigidity represents a normative transitional developmental stage that passes, or if early individual differences in rigidity continue into later childhood. To answer that question, analyses were performed on longitudinal data of 64 children who had been questioned about their gender concepts yearly from ages 5 to 10 years. Supporting a cognitive‐developmental approach, the findings showed that the period of rigidity was short‐lived whether rigidity began early or late or whether the level of peak rigidity was high or low. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Study of the Effectiveness of a Small-Group Intervention on the Vocabulary and Narrative Development of At-Risk Kindergarten Children

This study investigated the effect of a small-group storybook-based intervention on kindergarten students’ vocabulary and narrative development, which is important to later reading achievement. Twenty-eight kindergarten children from a high-poverty urban school, all significantly behind their peers on standardized measures of language development (semantic and syntactic) and narrative (understanding and production), were randomly assigned to the intervention or control group. The intervention students engaged in three 30-minute storybook-based lessons per week for 12 weeks, focused on vocabulary and narrative development. The intervention students made greater gains on both standardized and nonstandardized measures of vocabulary and narrative achievement than did control-group children.     

A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi

People's evaluations of stimuli may change when they verbally attempt to communicate the reasons underlying their judgments. The reported experiments demonstrate the interactive influence of expertise, verbalizability (i.e., the ease with which stimulus features can be linguistically encoded), and appraisal mode in the verbalization bias phenomenon. In Experiment 1, art novices and experts rated their liking of artworks with compositional features that were easy (e.g., figurative–naturalistic) or difficult (e.g., abstract) to verbalize. When asked to verbalize the reasons underlying their judgments, novices assigned lower ratings to abstract but not figurative works. Experts, in contrast, were not influenced by the verbalization manipulation. Experiment 2 explored the possibility that verbalization bias is attributable to a componential appraisal mode that verbalization induces, rather than the specific reasons that people articulate. We found that verbalizing reasons for liking or disliking one abstract work influenced art novices' judgments of a second work for which they did not attempt to verbalize reasons. Moreover, those who merely attempted to verbalize their perceptual experiences also exhibited this contamination effect. The results of both studies suggest that verbalizing the attributes of complex stimuli can significantly alter the way we evaluate these stimuli.