Effects of concurrent monitoring on cognitive load and performance as a function of task complexity

For self‐regulated learning to be effective, students or trainees need to be able to accurately monitor their performance while they are working on a task, use the outcomes as input for self‐assessment of that performance after completing the task and select an appropriate new learning task in response to that assessment. From a cognitive load perspective, monitoring can be seen as a secondary task that may become hard to maintain and hamper performance on the primary task under high load conditions. The experiment presented here investigated the effects of concurrent performance monitoring on cognitive load and performance as a function of task complexity. Results showed that monitoring significantly decreased performance and increased cognitive load on complex, but not on simple tasks. The findings are discussed in terms of theoretical consequences and instructional design for self‐regulated learning. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The involvement of epigenetic defects in mental retardation

Mental retardation is a group of cognitive disorders with a significant worldwide prevalence rate. This high rate, together with the considerable familial and societal burden resulting from these disorders, makes it an important focus for prevention and intervention. While the diseases associated with mental retardation are diverse, a significant number are linked with disruptions in epigenetic mechanisms, mainly due to loss-of-function mutations in genes that are key components of the epigenetic machinery. Additionally, several disorders classed as imprinting syndromes are associated with mental retardation. This review will discuss the epigenetic abnormalities associated with mental retardation, and will highlight their importance for diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of these disorders.     

Segmentation of Worked Examples: Effects on Cognitive Load and Learning

Two ways to improve worked examples are investigated: presenting them in a segmented format (i.e., in pieces separated by blank lines) and instructing students to segment them actively (i.e., students must divide the examples in pieces). Segmented examples are expected to support learning because they show which information elements belong together. Learners might also be encouraged to think about which information elements belong together when they are instructed to actively segment, but on the negative side, this is an additional task that might impose extra cognitive load without facilitating learning. Results showed that students in the actively segmenting condition invested more effort in learning than students in the other conditions without performing better. Furthermore, studying segmented examples required less effort to achieve equal learning outcomes than studying nonsegmented ones. So, presenting learners with segmented examples improved the efficiency of the learning process, whereas instructing them to actively segment decreased this efficiency. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Treating Prepartum Depression to Improve Infant Developmental Outcomes: A Study of Diabetes in Pregnancy

Whether and how the co-occurrence of depression and diabetes in pregnancy may worsen infant development has not been reported. Pregnant women with diabetes and with (n?=?34) or without (n?=?34) major depressive disorder (MDD) were followed during pregnancy and 6-months postpartum. The MDD subset received randomly assigned treatment with cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) or supportive counseling (SC). Depression severity was measured with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI); infant developmental outcomes were measured with the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID) and its Behavior Rating Scale (BRS). Infants of women with MDD had lower BRS scores (p?=?.02). Reduction in depression scores was associated with better infant outcomes on the BSID and BRS (p values <.03). These preliminary findings suggest depression occurring in pregnant women with diabetes is associated with poorer infant development and improvement in prepartum depression is associated with improvement in measures of infant development.     

The 9th annual INDUS-EM 2013 Emergency Medicine Summit, “Principles,Practices, and Patients,” a level one international meeting,Kerala University of Health Sciences and Jubilee Mission Medical College and Research Institute,Thrissur, Kerala,India, October 23–27, 2013

INDUS-EM is India’s only level one conference imparting and exchanging quality knowledge in acute care. Specifically, in general and specialized emergency care and training in trauma, burns, cardiac, stroke, environmental and disaster medicine. It provides a series of exchanges regarding academic development and implementation of training tools related to developing future academic faculty and residents in Emergency Medicine in India. The INDUS-EM leadership and board of directors invited scholars from multiple institutions to participate in this advanced educational symposium that was held in Thrissur, Kerala in October 2013.     

Improving Students' Critical Thinking: Empirical Support for Explicit Instructions Combined with Practice

This experiment investigated the impact of different types of critical thinking instruction and dispositions on bias in economics students' (N = 141) reasoning performance. The following conditions were compared: (A) implicit instruction; (B) implicit instruction with practice; (C) implicit instruction with explicit instruction and practice; (D) implicit instruction with explicit instruction, practice, and self‐explanation prompts; and (E) implicit instruction with explicit instruction, practice, and activation prompts. Results showed that explicit instruction combined with practice is required to improve critical thinking (i.e., conditions A/B < C/D/E). Prompting during practice had no added performance benefits. Participants' dispositions toward actively open‐minded thinking predicted their pre‐test and post‐test scores but did not interact with instruction condition, suggesting that receiving explicit instruction combined with practice was equally effective for all students. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Using Historical Knowledge to Reason About Contemporary Political Issues: An Expert–Novice Study

People often justify history's place in the curriculum by its relationship to citizenship, yet there is little research to help educators picture how people use historical knowledge for civic purposes. This expert–novice study used the think-aloud method to examine how eight political scientists and eight high school students employed historical knowledge to reason about a political issue. Findings indicated that detailed historical narrative played an important role for experts’ reasoning, and the experts used narrative to frame the issue, support their positions, and evaluate historical claims. Participating students used narrative as well, but their narratives were lacking in detail. They never used history to frame the problem, contextualize documents, or to support their positions, and they rarely used narrative to evaluate claims. These differences in how experts and novices use history to make sense of the present have implications for history instruction and research in history and civic education.     

The impact of uncertainty and communal coping on mental health following natural disasters

Abstract

Feelings of uncertainty are a central feature of the disaster experience. Surprisingly, though, there is very little systematic quantitative research about the impact of uncertainty on disaster survivors. Moreover, communal coping has increasingly received attention as a potential buffer of the negative effects of stressors but that literature is also limited in its application to disasters. This investigation applies research in the domain of uncertainty, together with the Theoretical Model of Communal Coping to better understand the experience of a community exposed to three wildfires in a one year period. A random-digit dialing procedure was used to gather data from 402 individuals. Participants completed measures of mental health, uncertainty, and communal coping in the context of their experience with the most personally stressful of the three wildfires. All analyses were examined separately for those who were evacuated and those who were not. Results support the negative impact of uncertainty across both evacuated and nonevacuated sub-samples and show a strong buffering role for communal coping among those who evacuated. The implications of these findings for the understanding of wildfire survivors' experiences are noted and future directions are proposed.