The Mind's "I": Children's Conception of the Mind as an Active Agent

1 hypothesis about children's developing conception of the mind is that preschoolers are limited to an understanding that persons have internal, mental contents like thoughts and beliefs, whereas older children and adults conceive of the mind itself as an independent, active structure or processor. Adults' conception of the mind in this independent active fashion seems evident in their use of personified mental metaphor (e.g., "My mind tricked me"). 3 studies examined the development and consolidation of this active, personified view. Study 1 provided an analysis of natural language data regarding 1 child's uses of vision words such as see and look from age 2 1/2 to 8 years. We examined the child's use of such words to refer literally to perception (e.g., "I see the TV") and also to refer nonliterally to active mental processes such as comprehension and inference (e.g., "I see what you mean"). Studies 2 and 3 examined 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds' comprehension and production of mental metaphors. In a metaphor comprehension task, we asked children to interpret personified metaphoric statements about the mind (e.g., "My mind wandered") and 3 comparison domains, mechanics (e.g., "The car is dead"), nature (e.g., "The wind is howling"), and emotion (e.g., "Her heart was smiling"). In an explanation task, we asked children to explain the processes underlying the making of both instant photos and mental images. The findings reveal a developing ability to interpret and produce statements personifying the mind and provide considerable evidence about children's movement toward a conception of the mind as an independent entity deserving reference and conceptualization in its own right.     

Relating deaf students' reading and language scores at college entry to their degree completion rates

Graduation patterns were examined for 905 deaf students (1990-1998) at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Students with higher reading and language skills had the best overall graduation percentage. Comparison of recipients of different degrees--bachelor of science (BS) versus fine arts (BFA); associate of applied science (AAS) versus occupational studies (AOS)--showed 92% of BS and 82% of AAS graduates reading at the 9th-grade level or above, versus 65% of BFA and 47% of AOS graduates. Interestingly, 80% of non-degree-earning students read at the 9th-12th grade levels; in absolute terms, they outnumbered graduates with similar reading skills in the AAS and BFA programs combined, and in the BS program. This indicates a need for improved counseling, placement, and retention strategies. Students performed similarly across degree categories, regardless of curriculum requirements and difficulty. Only non-degree-earning students had significantly lower grade averages.     

RESOLV: Readers' Representation of Reading Contexts and Tasks

We introduce RESOLV, a theoretical model to account for readers' construction and management of goals during text comprehension and use. RESOLV focuses on readers' experience of their physical, social, and communicative context prior to actually engaging with texts. RESOLV assumes that readers construct two types of mental models prior to reading: The context model is a representation of the physical and social reading context, whereas the task model is a set of goals and plans that drives readers' decisions and actions in reading. We first present the RESOLV model, and we articulate two core hypotheses. We then present and discuss evidence supporting these hypotheses, from past and more recent research conducted in our labs, as well as in others'. The data support the view that reading decisions and processes are guided by readers' perceptions and attributions regarding the task statement but also more implicit cues from the reading context.     

Transforming engagement: a case study of building intrinsic motivation in a child with autism

This longitudinal case study of a 10‐year‐old girl with autism and severe communication impairment measures the impact of the MORE (Means, Opportunities, Reasons and Expectations) approach to enhancing engagement and communication. Through detailed observation of video data over a period of 28 months, engagement behaviours including interaction with adults and following adult directions increased, while resistant behaviours such as kicking, hitting and pushing adults away decreased. Fluctuation between different ‘states’ demonstrated that the frequency and duration of engagement was influenced by the MORE approach and an emphasis on developing intrinsic motivation. In order to enable further efficacy research, core features of the intervention and the changes in engagement over time are described.     

Developing a communal identity as beginning teachers of mathematics: Emergence of an online community of practice

The aim of this study is to investigate how a community of practice focused on becoming a teacher of secondary school mathematics emerged during a pre-service teacher education programme and was sustained after students graduated and began their first year of full-time teaching in schools. Bulletin board discussions of one pre-service cohort are analysed in terms of Wenger’s (1998) three defining features of a community of practice: mutual engagement of participants, negotiation of a joint enterprise, and development of a shared repertoire for creating meaning. Emergence of the online community was associated with our own role in facilitating professional dialogue, the voluntary and unstructured nature of participation, initial face-to-face interaction that created familiarity and trust, and the convenience of using email rather than logging on to a website. The study shows that the emergent design of the community contributed to its sustainability in allowing the pre-service and beginning teachers to define their own professional goals and values.

Hyperactive Grey Objects

Previous papers on grey literature by the authors have described (1) the need for formal metadata to allow machine understanding and therefore scalable operations; (2) the enhancement of repositories of grey (and other) e-publications by linking with CRIS (Current Research Information Systems); (3) the use of the research process to collect metadata incrementally reducing the threshold barrier for end-users and improving quality in an ambient GRIDs environment. This paper takes the development one step further and proposes “intelligent” grey objects. The hypothesis is in 2 parts: (1) that the use of passive catalogs of metadata does not scale (a) in a highly distributed environment with millions of nodes and (b) with vastly increased volumes of R&D output grey publications with associated metadata; (2) that a new paradigm is required that (a) integrates grey with white literature and other R&D outputs such as software, data, products and patents (b) in a self-managing, self-optimizing way and that this paradigm manages automatically curation, provenance digital rights, trust, security and privacy. Concerning (1) existing repositories provide catalogs; harvesting takes increasing time ensuring non-currency. The end-user expends much manual effort/intelligence to utilize the results. The elapsed time of (1) the network (2) the centralized (or centrally controlled distributed) catalog server searches (3) end-user intervention becomes unacceptable. Concerning (2) there is no paradigm currently known to the authors that satisfies the requirement. Our proposal is outlined below. Hyperactive combines both hyperlinking and active properties of a (grey) object. Hyperlinking implies multimedia components linked to form the object and also external links to other resources. The term active implies that objects do not lie passively in a repository to be retrieved by end-users. They “get a life” and the object moves through the network knowing where it is going. A hyperactive grey object is wrapped by its (incrementally recorded) formal metadata and an associated (software) agent. It moves through process steps such as initial concept, authoring, reviewing and depositing in a repository. The workflow is based on the rules and information in the corporate data repository with which the agent interacts. Once the object is deposited, the agent associated with it actively pushes the object to the end-users (or systems) whose metadata indicate interest or an obligation in a workflowed process. The agents check the object and user (or system) metadata for rights, privacy, security parameters, and for any charges and assure compatibility. Alternatively the object can be found passively by end-user or system agents. The object can also associate itself with other objects forming relationships utilising metadata or content. Declared relationships include references and citations; workflowed relationships include versions and also links to corporate information and research datasets and software; inferenced relationships are discovered relationships such as between documents by different authors developed from an earlier idea of a third author. Components of this paradigm have been implemented to some extent. The challenge is implementing—respecting part two of the hypothesis—the integration architecture. This surely is harnessing the power of grey.

Evaluating the impact of library user training programmes across Thames Valley Strategic Health Authority in the UK

BACKGROUND: This study was undertaken to provide evidence that library outreach projects in the NHS in the Thames Valley Strategic Health Authority area were effective and could justify continued funding. Objectives: The object was to assess whether information literacy skills training taken up by health professionals impacts on their confidence and skills in using electronic sources of health information. METHOD: A total of 487 health professionals taking up training on a voluntary basis were assessed by completing a self-assessment questionnaire prior to and after training to establish their information literacy skills and confidence levels. Of these, 223 trainees (46%) also returned 6-week follow-up questionnaires. RESULTS: Results showed that 464 trainees (95%) intended to apply what they had learnt in a variety of ways; use of specific resources greatly increased after training and confidence in using them increased substantially. Use of search techniques increased considerably overall, whereas use of Google decreased. CONCLUSIONS: The major findings of this research are that training health-care personnel in the use of electronic resources impacts positively on their information literacy skills and confidence, and that the information available to them is considered to have potential value across health-care practice.