Brief Experimental Analysis: A Decision Tool for Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice

This special issue illustrates how brief experimental analysis (BEA) is gaining recognition as a valuable tool for making treatment decisions about children who are unresponsive to regular classroom instruction. This commentary article provides evidence for why BEA has grown in popularity, briefly summarizes each of the studies included in the series, and discusses issues that are critical to conducting and interpreting data from a BEA. The articles in the issue exemplify how BEA is flexible enough to evaluate diverse intervention options, is time and cost efficient, and is uniquely suited for use in a problem-solving approach to school-based service delivery.     

Effect of task presentation on students’ performances in introductory statistics courses

Research on academic learning indicates that many students experience major difficulties with introductory statistics and methodology courses. We hypothesized that students’ difficulties may depend in part on the fact that statistics tasks are commonly viewed as related to the threatening domain of math. In two field experiments which we carried out in the ecological context of introductory statistics courses, the representation of a statistics task administered to undergraduate students in Psychology (Study 1; n = 127) and Biology (Study 2; n = 166) was manipulated. In both studies we found that students who reported the least favorable prior attainments in math had their performance thwarted when the task was presented as related to the math domain, whereas no performance impairment was observed when the task was presented as related to the verbal/linguistic domain. Implications of the findings for the design and delivery of introductory statistics and research methodology courses are discussed.

基于认知加工过程的数学训练方案述评

数学训练方案（Modules for Math）是加拿大心理学家J.P.Das提出的促进数学学习的训练方案。该方案的理论基础是基于Luria神经三级网络的PASS（计划-注意-同时性加工-继时性加工）模型以及Vygotsky主张以言语内化方式进行自我学习的教育原则。数学训练方案包括模式转换;学习数轴;数一数;模仿、画路径和估算;数字记忆广度等五个训练模块,通过大约五十多个活动任务实现一般认知加工的促进,同时迁移到数学学习的课程中。数学训练方案今后将结合行为实验与认知神经影像学数据,证实训练的效果及变化。     

How is anxiety related to math performance in young students? A longitudinal study of Grade 2 to Grade 3 children

Both general and math-specific anxiety are related to proficiency in mathematics. However, it is not clear when math anxiety arises in young children, nor how it relates to early math performance. This study therefore investigated the early association between math anxiety and math performance in Grades 2 and 3, by accounting for general anxiety and by further inspecting the prevalent directionality of the anxiety–performance link. Results revealed that this link was significant in Grade 3, with a prevalent direction from math anxiety to performance, rather than the reverse. Longitudinal analyses also showed an indirect effect of math anxiety in Grade 2 on subsequent math performance in Grade 3. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of monitoring anxiety from the early stages of schooling in order to promote proficient academic performance.     

Implicit stereotypes and women’s math performance: How implicit gender-math stereotypes influence women’s susceptibility to stereotype threat

This experiment examined the effects of implicit gender-math stereotyping and implicit gender and math identification on women’s math performance under stereotype threat and reduced threat conditions. Results showed that of the three, only implicit gender-math stereotyping moderated stereotype threat effects on women’s math performance: women who showed less implicit math-gender stereotyping showed the largest performance difference across experimental conditions. These results suggest that women’s implicit associations between gender and math interact with situational cues to influence their math performance: women who implicitly associate women more than men with mathematics were most benefited by reduction of stereotype salience during testing.     

ROY SCHAFER: A BEGINNING

The author provides a biographical overview of Schafer's life, culled from his published work and focused primarily on his professional development. This biography is used to demonstrate some of Schafer's central theoretical insights on narrativity and language, and reveals the consistency of his thinking over his long career. A brief discussion of his writing on King Lear provides a bridge between theoretical and biographical material.     

Sport Records Are Social Facts

In this paper I address the topic of sport records and concentrate on the ontology of sport records. I argue that sport records are social facts in the sense that sport records not only depend on the physical facts of sport competitions, but also on the attitude we take towards the phenomenon—our attitude is partly constitutive of the phenomenon of sport records. In particular, the Mieto–Wassberg incident and the Larsson–McKee incident show that performance records should also be regarded as social facts. Lastly, I show how my view sits with the view that sports are response-sensitive. I argue that the latter gives us further reason to believe that sport records, in particular performance records, are social facts.     

The place of once-weekly treatment in the work of an analytically trained child psychotherapist

In this paper, I explore how we might link ideas about clinical facts to current issues in child psychotherapy research. I consider what our understanding of clinical facts might contribute to our research methods and how our research methods might better represent the clinical facts. The paper introduces a selection of psychoanalytic writers' formulations of the concept and describes some of the debates about the shortcomings of the traditional style of case reporting. The importance of keeping emotional experience central in our research is discussed. I describe a research method that I believe has the potential to capture and describe some of the complicated processes of change in psychotherapy. This is the concept of the ‘turning point’ session. Introducing the paradigm of complexity theory, I briefly explore how we might think about and understand the relationship between processes revealed through detailed analysis of a single session and change over a longer period of therapy.     

Gender Differences and Cognitive Correlates of Mathematical Skills in School-Aged Children

Published information concerning the influence of gender on mathematical ability tests has been controversial. The present study examines the performance of school-aged boys and girls from two age groups on several mathematical tasks and analyzes the predictive value of a verbal fluency test and a spatial test on those mathematical tasks. More specifically, our research attempts to answer the following two questions: (1) Are gender differences in mathematical test performance among children interrelated with age and (2) do verbal and spatial nonmathematical tests mediate gender effects on mathematical test performance? Two hundred and seventy-eight 7- to 10-year-old children and 248 13- to 16-year-olds were selected from schools in Colombia and Mexico (231 boys and 295 girls). The age effect was found to be significant for all measures, with scores improving with age. Results showed that boys and girls in both age groups scored similarly in most subtests, but that differences emerged in the performance of mental mathematical operations and in resolving arithmetical problems. In the latter – but not in mental math – older boys outperformed older girls, whereas no gender differences were observed in the younger groups. After controlling for age, it was found that the spatial test was, indeed, a significant mediator of gender effects, while the verbal task was not.