Does testing with feedback help grade-school children learn key concepts in science?

Testing effects have been well-established across a variety of studies involving school-age children. Specifically, children's test performance improves when they are given the opportunity to practice retrieval prior to the final test as compared to when practice involves only study. The current investigation focused on the influence of testing with feedback on fifth graders’ learning of science concepts. Across two experiments, 65 students studied twenty key concept definitions. After study, the definitions were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: control, test only, study only, and test plus feedback. Concepts assigned to the latter three conditions were presented again (either for test only, study only, or test plus feedback) during two separate sessions, and a final test was administered during a separate session. At the final test, students were asked to provide the definition for each of the twenty key concepts. Final test performance was best for definitions that had been tested with feedback, followed by recall for those that had only been tested or only restudied, with lowest performance for those that did not receive additional practice. Despite multiple sessions spaced across several days, however, performance for all conditions was low, which may have resulted from the ineffective use of feedback. In summary, testing followed by feedback can boost younger students learning of science concepts, but mastery will require the use of other strategies as well.     

On Biotechnology,Theology, and the Human Sciences

There may be very good Christian theological reasons to oppose human biotechnological enhancement. It is, however, difficult to discern what they are. Much of the specifically Christian response to transhumanist biotechnological enhancement has revolved around the metaphysics of human persons; this is hardly surprising, given that similar themes appear in other bioethical themes, such as over in vitro fertilization, abortion, and euthanasia. The main aim of this paper is to clarify the theological requirements for such responses, particularly those that are mistakenly delegated to scientists. In particular, the paper will focus on the need for a Christian theological account of human nature that does not unduly rely on biological accounts of the same.     

The Soul Cluster: Reconsideration of a Millennia Old Concept

The article presents a comparative analysis of the theories on conceptions of soul in indigenous and early European traditions. The focal point of the study is the observation that the concept of soul is noticeably complex in aboriginal cultures, and its plural—especially tripartite—nature is the rule rather than the exception. Another observation is that the described pluralism, the number of soul components, and their attributes go through speculative changes as the tradition moves away of tribal origins, which have the shamanic state of consciousness as experiential source of knowledge instead of scholarly theorization. A three-network model of human experience is drawn to support the tripartition cum trilocation concept of soul.     

Authors' Response to Lutzker's Evaluation

No abstract available for this article.     

Lay concepts of health and illness from a developmental perspective

Abstract

The concepts of children, adolescents and their mothers with regard to different aspects of health and illness in general and five specific diseases were explored in this study. An exploration with fully standardised questions and open answers was subjected to a content analysis. A reliable rating system was developed to score the sophistication of the answers. The study included 99 Ss of the age groups 5, 8, 12 and 16 years, as well as 48 mothers of the children. Many children and adolescents were able to define health positively (well-being) and not merely as the absence of illness. The definition of illness in general was frequently composed of somatic symptoms and disorders, feeling poorly and things one would like to accomplish but can't. The causality explanations of illness in general were dominated by contagion. The concepts of the older children and the mothers were richer, more elaborated, less concrete and less action-oriented than those of the younger children. However, abstract formulations and complex aspects of illness were very rarely expressed. In addition, concepts regarding the characteristics (definition, symptoms, causality, treatment and prevention) of five diseases (cold, measles, heart infarction, cancer and AIDS) were measured. The pattern of results was strongly influenced by age. By and large, the development of most disease concepts was linear with significant differences between age groups. Conversely, within a given age group, significant differences were found in the cognitive level of disease characteristics, either with respect to the same disease or between different diseases (“horizontal shifts”).     

The simplicity principle in human concept learning

How do we learn concepts and categories from examples? Part of the answer might be that we induce the simplest category consistent with a given set of example objects. This seemingly obvious idea, akin to simplicity principles in many fields, plays surprisingly little role in contemporary theories of concept learning, which are mostly based on the storage of exemplars, and avoid summarization or overt abstraction of any kind. This article reviews some evidence that complexity minimization does indeed play a central role in human concept learning. The chief finding is that subjects' ability to learn concepts depends heavily on the concepts' intrinsic complexity; more complex concepts are more difficult to learn. This pervasive effect suggests, contrary to exemplar theories, that concept learning critically involves the extraction of a simplified or abstracted generalization from examples.     

Reverse-engineering ‘esotericism': how to prepare a complex cultural concept for the cognitive science of religion

The article introduces a framework for preparing complex cultural concepts for the cognitive science of religion (CSR) and applies it to the field of Western esotericism. The research process (‘reverse engineering') rests on a building block approach that, after problematic categories have been deconstructed, seeks to reconstruct new scholarly objects in generic terms that can be operationalized in interdisciplinary contexts like CSR. A four-step research process is delineated, illustrated by a short discussion of previous work on ‘Gnosticism,' ‘magic,' and ‘religion,' before applying it to ‘esotericism.' It is suggested that the implicit scholarly objects of esotericism scholarship can be reconstituted in generic terms as concerned with processes of creating and disseminating ‘special knowledge.' Five definitional clusters are identified in the literature; these provide a basis for formulating research programs on the psychological and cognitive level, drawing on metarepresentational processes, event cognition, and psychological dispositions for altering experience.     

Counterintuitive Religious Ideas and Metaphoric Thinking: An Event‐Related Brain Potential Study

It has been shown that counterintuitive ideas from mythological and religious texts are more acceptable than other (non‐religious) world knowledge violations. In the present experiment we explored whether this relates to the way they are interpreted (literal vs. metaphorical). Participants were presented with verification questions that referred to either the literal or a metaphorical meaning of the sentence previously read (counterintuitive religious, counterintuitive non‐religious and intuitive), in a block‐wise design. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results converged. At variance to the literal interpretation of the sentences, the induced metaphorical interpretation specifically facilitated the integration (N400 amplitude decrease) of religious counterintuitions, whereas the semantic processing of non‐religious counterintuitions was not affected by the interpretation mode. We suggest that religious ideas tend to operate like other instances of figurative language, such as metaphors, facilitating their acceptability despite their counterintuitive nature.