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.     

Moderators of the effect of weight on job‐related outcomes: a meta‐analysis of experimental studies

This study provides the first meta‐analytic testing of (1) several proposed moderators of the relationship between employee weight and job‐related outcomes (e.g., target gender, target qualifications, and rater gender); and (2) the effect of specific design features on the variation in results obtained across relevant experimental studies (e.g., weight manipulation and amount of job‐relevant information). The results indicate that there are important moderators of the relationship between people's weight and job‐related outcomes. However, design feature may significantly influence the obtained results. In particular, inconsistent experimental findings regarding the hypothesized moderating role of target sex appear to be explained by limitations in the way in which target weight was manipulated in some studies. Directions for future research are identified.     

A Comparison of New and Revised Rorschach Measures of Schizophrenic Functioning in a Serbian Clinical Sample

We empirically evaluated indexes derived from the Rorschach Comprehensive System (CS) and the Rorschach Performance Assessment System (R–PAS) that are used for the assessment of psychotic functioning in schizophrenia. We compared the Perceptual Thinking Index (PTI) and the Ego Impairment Index (EII–2) with their revised versions: Thought and Perception Composite (TP–Comp) and EII–3. We evaluated their predictive validity for differentiating schizophrenic from nonschizophrenic patients in a Serbian sample. The sample consisted of 211 (109 men and 102 women, 18–50 years old) inpatients in Serbia who were divided into 2 groups: schizophrenic (100) and nonschizophrenic (111). Test administration, coding, and form quality classification followed CS guidelines. Logistic regression analysis indicated that the new indexes TP–Comp and EII–3 have slightly better predictive power than their counterparts, PTI and EII–2, in identification of schizophrenia, and that TP–Comp performed better than other indexes, although all 4 indexes were successful in differentiating these groups. The results supported the use of TP–Comp in diagnosis of schizophrenia and generally provided evidence for the utility of the Rorschach in evaluating psychosis and for its use in a cross-national context.     

Can students evaluate their understanding of cause-and-effect relations? The effects of diagram completion on monitoring accuracy

For effective self-regulated study of expository texts, it is crucial that learners can accurately monitor their understanding of cause-and-effect relations. This study aimed to improve adolescents' monitoring accuracy using a diagram completion task. Participants read six texts, predicted performance, selected texts for restudy, and were tested for comprehension. Three groups were compared, in which learners either completed causal diagrams immediately after reading, completed them after a delay, or received no-diagram control instructions. Accuracy of predictions of performance was highest for learning of causal relations following delayed diagram completion. Completing delayed diagrams focused learners specifically on their learning of causal relations, so this task did not improve monitoring of learning of factual information. When selecting texts for restudy, the participants followed their predictions of performance to the same degree, regardless of monitoring accuracy. Fine-grained analyses also showed that, when completing delayed diagrams, learners based judgments on diagnostic cues that indicated actual understanding of connections between events in the text. Most important, delayed diagram completion can improve adolescents' ability to monitor their learning of cause-and-effect relations.     

Auditory habituation in the fetus and neonate: an fMEG study

Habituation – the most basic form of learning – is used to evaluate central nervous system (CNS) maturation and to detect abnormalities in fetal brain development. In the current study, habituation, stimulus specificity and dishabituation of auditory evoked responses were measured in fetuses and newborns using fetal magnetoencephalography (fMEG). An auditory habituation paradigm consisting of 100 trains of five 500 Hz tones, one 750 Hz tone (dishabituator) and two more 500 Hz tones, respectively, were presented to 41 fetuses (gestational age 30–39 weeks) and 22 newborns or babies (age 6–89 days). A response decrement between the first and fifth tones (habituation), an increment between the fifth tone and the dishabituator (stimulus specificity) and an increment between the fifth (last tone before the dishabituator) and seventh tones (first tone after the dishabituator) (dishabituation) were expected. Fetuses showed weak responses to the first tone. However, a significant response decrement between the second and fifth tones (habituation) and a significant increment between the fifth tone and the dishabituator (stimulus specificity) were found. No significant difference was found for dishabituation nor was a developmental trend found at the group level. From the neonatal data, significant values for stimulus specificity were found. Sensory fatigue or adaptation was ruled out as a reason for the response decrement due to the strong reactions to the dishabituator. Taken together, the current study used fMEG to directly show fetal habituation and provides evidence of fetal learning in the last trimester of pregnancy.     

Propose but verify: Fast mapping meets cross-situational word learning

We report three eyetracking experiments that examine the learning procedure used by adults as they pair novel words and visually presented referents over a sequence of referentially ambiguous trials. Successful learning under such conditions has been argued to be the product of a learning procedure in which participants provisionally pair each novel word with several possible referents and use a statistical-associative learning mechanism to gradually converge on a single mapping across learning instances [e.g., Yu, C., & Smith, L. B. (2007). Rapid word learning under uncertainty via cross-situational statistics. Psychological Science, 18(5), 414–420]. We argue here that successful learning in this setting is instead the product of a one-trial procedure in which a single hypothesized word-referent pairing is retained across learning instances, abandoned only if the subsequent instance fails to confirm the pairing – more a ‘fast mapping’ procedure than a gradual statistical one. We provide experimental evidence for this propose-but-verify learning procedure via three experiments in which adult participants attempted to learn the meanings of nonce words cross-situationally under varying degrees of referential uncertainty. The findings, using both explicit (referent selection) and implicit (eye movement) measures, show that even in these artificial learning contexts, which are far simpler than those encountered by a language learner in a natural environment, participants do not retain multiple meaning hypotheses across learning instances. As we discuss, these findings challenge ‘gradualist’ accounts of word learning and are consistent with the known rapid course of vocabulary learning in a first language.     

Morality‐ and identity‐related antecedents of children's guilt and shame attributions in events involving physical illness

It is theorised that guilt‐ and shame‐related appraisals vary on two separate dimensions. Guilt implies an appraisal that one has either committed a moral transgression or that one has otherwise been involved in the creation of a morally wrong outcome. Shame implies one's appraisal that the current event or condition reflects negatively on one's identity. To test these claims, 206 7‐ to 16‐year‐old children gave shame and guilt ratings of three types of events that were drawn from the domain of physical illness and that were designed to elicit primarily guilt, primarily shame, or both emotions. The 12‐year‐olds and older children's ratings were fully consistent with our hypothesis. Younger children's greatest difficulty was in not attributing shame to protagonists who were involved in causing a moral wrong without there being the threat of an unwanted identity.