Less is More: How manipulative features affect children's learning from picture books

Picture books are ubiquitous in young children's lives and are assumed to support children's acquisition of information about the world. Given their importance, relatively little research has directly examined children's learning from picture books. We report two studies examining children's acquisition of labels and facts from picture books that vary on two dimensions: iconicity of the pictures and presence of manipulative features (or "pop-ups"). In Study 1, 20-month-old children generalized novel labels less well when taught from a book with manipulative features than from standard picture books without such elements. In Study 2, 30- and 36-month-old children learned fewer facts when taught from a manipulative picture book with drawings than from a standard picture book with realistic images and no manipulative features. The results of the two studies indicate that children's learning from picture books is facilitated by realistic illustrations, but impeded by manipulative features.     

Articulating Christian doctrine in the pluralistic world of the twenty-first century

The reviewer offers an appreciative theological summary of Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen's monumental text, Christian Theology in the Pluralistic World: A Global Introduction. Persaud calls attention to the trinitariancentre of Kärkkäinen's theological articulation, which is the basis for Kärkkäinen's openness to finding and naming commonalities and differences between biblical, creedal, confessional Christianity and each of the two other Abrahamic faiths (Judaism and Islam) and two Asiatic faiths (Hinduism and Buddhism). The reviewer calls for further engagement with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (31 October 1999), in relation to the pressing question of religious conversion in today's pluralistic world.     

“As his name indicates”: R. S. Woodworth's letters of reference and employment for jewish psychologists in the 1930s

Letters of reference from Robert S. Woodworth identified some psychologists as Jews and reveal an implicit stereotype of Jewish “objectionable traits.” I examine these conceptions of “Jewish character” in the context of Woodworth's general views on individual differences and in the broader context of Jewish immigration to America and enrollment at Columbia University in the early 1900s. Constructing the exclusion of Jews from academic psychology in terms of the personality and social behavior of the individual and dividing of Jews into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” allowed for a face-saving gloss on the generally antisemitic hiring practices in 1930s American academia.     

Performance asymmetries and coupling dynamics in the acquisition of multifrequency bimanual coordination

Sixteen right-handed participants without formal musical training performed a rhythmic multifrequency coordination task for several hours over a one-week period. Two groups were studied with respect to the assignment of hand to frequency: 1L:2R, in which the preferred right hand performed the higher frequency, and 2L:1R in which the non-preferred left hand performed the higher frequency. Performance asymmetries in terms of relative phase stability were initially expected and confirmed. The 1L:2R pattern was more stable than 2L:1R. It has been suggested that performance asymmetries result from asymmetrical coupling between the limbs as influenced by handedness. This study examined whether the acquisition of 2L:1R, the less stable of the two patterns, required the formation of asymmetrical coupling such that the faster hand would exert a greater forcing on the slower hand than vice versa, a supposition put forth in many studies of bimanual polyrhythmic tapping. The present data provide quantitative evidence that, in terms of stability (as quantified by relative phase uniformity, transition pathways, and lead-lag relations), handedness asymmetries, as well as acquired asymmetries, can be captured by low-dimensional dynamics consisting of symmetric and asymmetric coupling terms. Received: 18 November 1996 / Accepted: 6 May 1997     

Justification effects on the judgment of analogy

Many of us share a strong intuition that justification forces us to better understand the situations we face. And there is substantial evidence indicating that this is often the case. However, there is a growing body of research showing that, under certain circumstances, explanation and justification can impair performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. In the present research, the effects of justification on judgment of the soundness of analogies were examined. Subjects judged the quality of the match between pairs of stories with varying degrees of superficial and analogical similarity. Experimental subjects either provided reasons for their judgments or wrote recollections of the target stimuli. These subjects rated the match between stimulus pairs as more sound than did control subjects. Also, providing reasons led to poorer discrimination between superficially similar aspects of the stimuli and analogous aspects. Explanations of these findings are proposed, and implications for problem solving and confidence judgment are discussed.     

Evaluation of an empowerment program for early adolescent girls

This article describes and evaluates the Go Grrrls Program, a preventive intervention specifically designed for early adolescent girls. The 12-session curriculum was designed to address developmental tasks considered critical for healthy psychosocial development, such as achieving competent gender role identification, establishing an acceptable body image, developing a positive self-image, forming satisfactory peer relationships, achieving independence, learning to utilize resources, and planning for the future. Middle school students received the intervention and were compared with a no-intervention peer group. Differences were assessed using measures of body image, gender role identification, common beliefs, depression, peer esteem, and help endorsements. Results revealed significant differences between groups on three of the outcome measures (peer esteem, help endorsements, and common beliefs). Implications for the development and implementation of preventive interventions are discussed.