Chan, Jeffrey; McVilly, Keith R.; Stevenson, Elaine; Webber, Lynne S. (2010). The Use of Restrictive Interventions in Victoria, Australia: Population Data for 2007-2008. Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disability, v35 n3 p199-206 Sep. The once common use of restrictive interventions (the use of restraint and seclusion) for controlling the behaviour of people with an intellectual disability is now coming under greater scrutiny by government and community sector services. Questions are being raised with respect to the clinical efficacy and ethical appropriateness of such interventions. In Victoria, Australia, the Senior Practitioner was established in 2007 by the Disability Act (2006) to protect the rights of people with a disability who are subjected to restrictive interventions or compulsory treatments, and who are in receipt of a disability service funded by the Department of Human Services' Disability Service. Among other functions, the Senior Practitioner is mandated by the Disability Act (2006) to monitor and review the use of restrictive interventions in Victoria. The data included in this paper summarise findings from the first 12 months of operation of the Office of the Senior Practitioner's Restrictive… [Direct]

Marx, Gary (2011). Sixteen Trends…Their Profound Impact on Our Future. Educational Research Service Seismic Shifts. Future Forces. Call them whatever you'd like. The Sixteen Trends revealed in this benchmark book will have a profound impact on our future. Noted futurist, educator, communicator, executive and leadership counsel, author, and international speaker Gary Marx makes the case for those trends and speculates on their implications for education and the whole of society. Supported by compelling research and observations, the trends address: aging, diversity, intellectual capital, technology, generations, education, personalization, human ingenuity, continuous improvement, ethics, planetary security, polarization, interdependence, personal meaning, poverty, and careers. \Sixteen Trends\ is essential reading for anyone involved in education, business, government, nonprofits, community groups, and other types of organizations, industries, or professions. The table of contents presents the following: (1) We're not as young as we used to be! (2) Highly diverse and looking good…. [Direct]

Valentine, Stephen J. (2011). The Professionalization of Independence: New Tensions and Opportunities for Independent School Teachers. Independent School, v70 n4 Sum. In this article, the author suggests that a successful independent school career, especially in an increasingly professionalized environment, follows the model of the best teachers he knew at the start of his career. They did not walk around looking for \either/or\ solutions. Instead, they adopted a \both/and\ stance. They taught students and worked closely with intense parents. They prepared students to think for themselves and helped them credential themselves in order to gain admittance into the college that was truly right for them. The lesson of successful veteran teachers is clear: Teachers need to edge forward in their professional conduct. Passion and knowledge are great, but they will not sustain teachers over time. Today, they also need to hone their communication skills so that their parent correspondences are clear and student centered. They need to manage email accounts, web portals, and RSS feeds. They need to teach their classes while also developing programs to expose… [Direct]

Eicher, Virginia; Feldman, Ruth; Kim, Pilyoung; Leckman, James F.; Mayes, Linda C.; Swain, James E.; Thompson, Nancy (2011). Breastfeeding, Brain Activation to Own Infant Cry, and Maternal Sensitivity. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, v52 n8 p907-915 Aug. Background: Research points to the importance of breastfeeding for promoting close mother-infant contact and social-emotional development. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have identified brain regions related to maternal behaviors. However, little research has addressed the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the relationship between breastfeeding and maternal behavior in human mothers. We investigated the associations between breastfeeding, maternal brain response to own infant stimuli, and maternal sensitivity in the early postpartum. Methods: Seventeen biological mothers of healthy infants participated in two matched groups according to feeding method–exclusive breastfeeding and exclusive formula-feeding at 2-4 weeks postpartum. fMRI scanning was conducted in the first postpartum month to examine maternal brain activation in response to her own baby's cry versus control baby-cry. Dyadic interactions between mothers and infants at 3-4 months… [Direct]

Standish, Paul (2009). Food for Thought: Resourcing Moral Education. Ethics and Education, v4 n1 p31-42 Mar. J.M. Coetzee's "Elizabeth Costello" is an overtly philosophical novel, at the heart of which are questions concerning the relation of human beings to animals and the discussion of animal rights. The nature of its subject matter and the prominence it gives to dialogue, sometimes of an almost Platonic kind, make it a rich potential resource for moral education. This article begins by imagining a course based on extracts from the novel, intended for teenage students or older people. It goes on to make suggestions for further reading. There is now a rich secondary literature that has developed in response to central elements in Coetzee's text, involving the work of Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Cary Wolfe, and Ian Hacking, amongst others. This literature raises questions about the nature of moral philosophy, and it has implications for moral education. (Contains 1 note.)… [Direct]

Dark, Melissa J.; McPherson, Clewin; Troutner, Joanne (2008). The ABCs of Privacy Practices for Educators. Learning & Leading with Technology, v35 n4 p24-27 Dec 2007-Jan. Over the last year, the number of reported cases of confidential information lost because of stolen laptops, lost USB flash drives, misplaced PDAs, and simple human error has significantly increased. These trends have school districts concerned with issues of violating private information. Laws such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Child Online Protection Act are not new, but the proliferation of technology makes managing privacy more complicated than it was in the past. This article addresses essential practices school administrators and teachers should consider for preserving and protecting the information they handle daily. (Contains 2 tables.)… [PDF] [Direct]

Challis, John H.; Dawson, Amanda A.; Rosenbaum, David A. (2006). Haptic Tracking Permits Bimanual Independence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, v32 n5 p1266-1275 Oct. This study shows that in a novel task–bimanual haptic tracking–neurologically normal human adults can move their 2 hands independently for extended periods of time with little or no training. Participants lightly touched buttons whose positions were moved either quasi-randomly in the horizontal plane by 1 or 2 human drivers (Experiment 1), in circle and square patterns in the vertical plane by 2 human drivers (Experiment 2), or at different frequencies in the horizontal plane by 2 human drivers (Experiment 3). Bimanual contact was maintained equally well in all conditions even though in Experiment 1 the left-and right-hand motions were uncorrelated (in the 2-driver condition), in Experiment 2 the left and right-hand motions were spatially incongruous when circles and squares were tracked at the same time, and in Experiment 3 the left- and right-hand motions maintained different frequency ratios. Because haptic tracking has revealed that humans can in fact move their 2 hands… [Direct]

Henwood, Maureen; Molony, Terry (2010). Signature Strengths in Positive Psychology. Communique, v38 n8 p15-16 Jun. Positive psychology can be thought of as the scientific study of what is \right about people\ as opposed to the traditional focus on the healing of psychological pain or trauma. The philosophical roots of positive psychology can be traced back to Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, as well as Islamic and Athenian teaching and other ancient scholars, philosophers, and spiritual leaders. Thus, positive psychology is an integrative framework that draws upon the enduring themes and values across time periods and cultures to test theories using scientific tools designed to discover not only the elements of human well-being, but also the means by which that well-being can be experienced by all individuals. School psychologists can engage in action research to implement the strategies of positive psychology regarding signature strengths (courage, justice, humanity, temperance, wisdom, transcendence) to help children identify and cultivate their own. Encouraging… [Direct]

Okada, Takashi; Sato, Wataru; Toichi, Motomi (2006). Right Hemispheric Dominance in Gaze-Triggered Reflexive Shift of Attention in Humans. Brain and Cognition, v62 n2 p128-133 Nov. Recent findings suggest a right hemispheric dominance in gaze-triggered shifts of attention. The aim of this study was to clarify the dominant hemisphere in the gaze processing that mediates attentional shift. A target localization task, with preceding non-predicative gaze cues presented to each visual field, was undertaken by 44 healthy subjects, measuring reaction time (RT). A face identification task was also given to determine hemispheric dominance in face processing for each subject. RT differences between valid and invalid cues were larger when presented in the left rather than the right visual field. This held true regardless of individual hemispheric dominance in face processing. Together, these results indicate right hemispheric dominance in gaze-triggered reflexive shifts of attention in normal healthy subjects…. [Direct]

Burgess-Wilkerson, Barbara (2008). Selection and Interview Procedures at a Multinational Company. Business Communication Quarterly, v71 n1 p100-102. This article presents an interview with Jim Olson, a retired auto industry executive, about his experience with his company's hiring process. The responsibility for establishing and implementing procedures and policies that adhere to government regulations is critical. It makes sense for employers and potential employees to understand laws governing the hiring process and for companies to provide training to ensure that their managers practice these standards. Creating policies and procedures for selecting and interviewing job candidates is usually the responsibility of a company's human resources department, often with the guidance and approval of its legal affairs office. Such requirements are designed in accordance with U.S. federal and state laws related to civil rights, gender and ethnic rights, age discrimination, disabilities, and family leave, among others. These laws govern the conduct for companies during the recruitment process (Andrews & Baird, 2005), and though federal… [Direct]

Trotter, Richard (2010). Transgender Discrimination and the Law. Contemporary Issues in Education Research, v3 n2 p55-60 Feb. An emerging area of law is developing regarding sex/gender identity discrimination, also referred to as transgender discrimination, as distinguished from discrimination based on sexual orientation. A transgendered individual is defined as "a person who has a gender-identity disorder which is a persistent discomfort about one?s assigned sex or a sense of belonging to the other sex.? While Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or it amendments do not provide protection from discrimination for individuals based on sexual orientation, transgender, or transvestites, there are a growing number of state, cities, and counties with transgender explicit non-discrimination laws. In addition to the above private employers, colleges and universities and collective bargaining agreements prohibit discrimination against transgendered people. While Title VII does not protect transgendered people, some federal courts have broadly interpreted Title VII?s prohibitation against sex… [PDF]

Dymond, Simon; Whelan, Robert (2010). Derived Relational Responding: A Comparison of Match-to-Sample and the Relational Completion Procedure. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, v94 n1 p37-55 Jul. Previous research suggests that the Relational Completion Procedure may be an effective alternative procedure for studying derived relational responding. However, the parameters that make it effective, relative to traditional match-to-sample, remain to be determined. The present experiment compared the Relational Completion Procedure and match-to-sample protocols for training and testing Same and Opposite derived stimulus relations. Trials to criterion and overall pass rate (i.e., yield) in both procedures were compared across three variables: presence versus absence of a confirmatory response requirement, three versus five comparison stimuli, and top-to-bottom versus left-to-right presentation format. Findings demonstrated a facilitative effect of the confirmatory response requirement in both procedures. Training trials to criterion were nominally but not significantly lower during the nonarbitrary training phase in the Relational Completion Procedure compared to match-to-sample,… [Direct]

Olmstead, Anne Jane (2009). An Investigation of Embodied Language Comprehension from the Perspective of Coordination Dynamics. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Connecticut. In four experiments, participants performed sentence comprehension tasks simultaneously with bimanual coordination. Half of the sentences described events that could not be performed by a human (non-performable) and half described actions that could be performed by a human (performable). Effects of sentence type on coordination were indexed by mean relative phase shift and variability of relative phase as well as movement period. Effects of sentence type on comprehension were indexed by reaction time in judging sentence plausibility. Experiments 1a and 1b showed no differences in coordination between the sentence conditions, but showed a difference in mean relative phase shift when participants performed the sentence judgment task and the coordination task together (dual task) as compared to when participants performed the coordination task alone (single task). This difference also appeared for movement period. Experiment 2 explored the effects of sentence difficulty combined with… [Direct]

Cavanagh, Sean (2008). \Academic Freedom\ Used as Basis of Bills to Question Evolution. Education Week, v27 n37 p1, 15 May. In another twist in the decades-long battle over evolution's status in public school science classrooms, state legislators are arguing that teachers have a right to raise doubts about that essential scientific theory as a matter of free speech. Similarly worded bills that attempt to protect the right of educators and students to present critiques of evolution on the basis of \academic freedom\ have emerged in at least five states. Those measures do not call for teaching \intelligent design\ or biblically based creationism. Instead, they generally describe evolution as controversial and seek to bar school administrators from interfering with teachers who describe what they see as flaws in the theory. The overwhelming scientific consensus, however, is that there is no debate about the core principles of evolution, which scientists regard as the only credible, and thoroughly tested, scientific explanation for the development of human and other life on Earth, and for its diversity of… [Direct]

Roepstorff, Andreas; Tylen, Kristian; Wallentin, Mikkel (2009). Say It with Flowers! An fMRI Study of Object Mediated Communication. Brain and Language, v108 n3 p159-166 Mar. Human communicational interaction can be mediated by a host of expressive means from words in a natural language to gestures and material symbols. Given the proper contextual setting even an everyday object can gain a mediating function in a communicational situation. In this study we used event-related fMRI to study the brain activity caused by everyday material objects when they are perceived as signals. We found that comprehension of material signals activates bilaterally areas of the ventral stream and pars triangularis of the inferior frontal cortex, that is, areas traditionally associated with verbal language and semantics. In addition, we found that right-hemisphere inferior frontal cortex is recruited as a function of the increasing unconventionality of communicative objects. Together these findings support an interpretation of the traditional language areas as playing a more general role across modalities in relation to communicational mediation of social semantic meaning…. [Direct]

Alexakos, Konstantinos (2009). Science and Creationism: A Response to Kenneth Tobin. Cultural Studies of Science Education, v4 n2 p495-504 Jun. In his December editorial on Michael Reiss, Kenneth Tobin (\Cult Stud Sci Educ\ 3:793-798, 2008), raises some very important questions for science and science teachers regarding science education and the teaching of creationism in the classroom. I agree with him that students' creationist ideologies should be treated not as misconceptions but as worldviews. Because of creationism's peculiarly strong political links though, I argue that such discussion must address three critical and interconnected issues, including the uncertain state of teaching evolution in public schools nationally, the political convergence of the creationist political beliefs with bigoted worldviews, and creationism's inherent contrariness to science and human progress. I suggest that we as science educators therefore not consider all sides to be equally right and to instead take side against the politics of creationism. I also argue that we need much more serious discussion on how to better teach science to… [Direct]

Lehr, Sabine (2008). Ethical Dilemmas in Individual and Collective Rights-Based Approaches to Tertiary Education Scholarships: The Cases of Canada and Cuba. Comparative Education, v44 n4 p425-444 Nov. One of the ongoing debates in Canadian higher education is the dilemma of the brain drain and the seemingly conflicting goals between the strategies and intentions of various government departments. While Citizenship and Immigration Canada aims to recruit the brightest students from across the globe to study in Canada and to enable their long-term stay as permanent residents and ultimately as citizens, the Canadian International Development Agency is mandated to strengthen human capacity in developing countries. This paper provides a critical analysis of the brain drain problem by juxtaposing Canadian policies with Cuban policies as manifested in the two countries' divergent approaches to international students and tertiary education scholarships for students from poorer countries. Following an overview of the existing scholarship programmes in both countries, ethical and philosophical considerations are examined that appear to underlie the two countries' individual-rights-based and… [Direct]

Burrows, Brittany; Gabrieli, John D. E.; Glover, Gary H.; Race, Elizabeth; Thomason, Moriah E.; Whitfield-Gabrieli, Susan (2009). Development of Spatial and Verbal Working Memory Capacity in the Human Brain. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, v21 n2 p316-332 Feb. A core aspect of working memory (WM) is the capacity to maintain goal-relevant information in mind, but little is known about how this capacity develops in the human brain. We compared brain activation, via fMRI, between children (ages 7-12 years) and adults (ages 20-29 years) performing tests of verbal and spatial WM with varying amounts (loads) of information to be maintained in WM. Children made disproportionately more errors than adults as WM load increased. Children and adults exhibited similar hemispheric asymmetry in activation, greater on the right for spatial WM and on the left for verbal WM. Children, however, failed to exhibit the same degree of increasing activation across WM loads as was exhibited by adults in multiple frontal and parietal cortical regions. Thus, children exhibited adult-like hemispheric specialization, but appeared immature in their ability to marshal the neural resources necessary to maintain large amounts of verbal or spatial information in WM…. [Direct]

Hebert, Terri (2011). Keys to Scholarship. Teacher Education and Practice, v24 n4 p465-467 Fall. Up ahead, a foreboding wooden door showing wear from passage of earlier travelers is spotted. As the old porch light emits a pale yellow glow, a key ring emerges from deep inside the coat pocket. Searching for just the right key, the voyager settles on one that also shows age. As the key enters its receptacle and begins to turn, a clicking noise is heard. Everyone wonders curiously, what will happen next? In the world of teaching and learning, many are wondering the same thing. According to Sir Ken Robinson (2011), a key can be turned in two directions: One way can activate the locking mechanism keeping potential resources secure yet removed from the learner. Turned in the opposite direction, the door graciously opens presenting a wealth of reserves available to all who enter. Within this analogy to expand on the challenges currently facing scholarship of teaching and learning within the environment of higher education, the traveler equates to the learner. Human beings possess deeply… [Direct]

Koenig, Stephan; Lachnit, Harald (2011). Curved Saccade Trajectories Reveal Conflicting Predictions in Associative Learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, v37 n5 p1164-1177 Sep. We report how the trajectories of saccadic eye movements are affected by memory interference acquired during associative learning. Human participants learned to perform saccadic choice responses based on the presentation of arbitrary central cues A, B, AC, BC, AX, BY, X, and Y that were trained to predict the appearance of a peripheral target stimulus at 1 of 3 possible locations, right (R), mid (M), or left (L), in the upper hemifield. We analyzed as measures of associative learning the frequency, latency, and curvature of saccades elicited by the cues and directed at the trained locations in anticipation of the targets. Participants were trained on two concurrent discrimination problems A+R, AC+R, AX+M, X+M and B+L, BC+L, BY+M, Y+M. From a connectionist perspective, cues were predicted to acquire associative links connecting the cues to the trained outcomes in memory. Model simulations based on the learning rule of the Rescorla and Wagner (1972) model revealed that for some cues,… [Direct]

Vargas, Lucila, Ed. (2002). Women Faculty of Color in the White Classroom: Narratives on the Pedagogical Implications of Teacher Diversity. This book compiles narratives by women professors of color who examine their classroom experiences in predominantly white U.S. campuses, focusing on the impact of their social positions upon their classroom practices and teaching-learning selves. The 19 papers are (1) "Introduction" (Lucila Vargas); (2) "Why Are We Still So Few and Why Has Our Progress Been So Slow?" (Lucila Vargas); (3) "My Classroom in Its Context: The Struggle for Multiculturalism" (Lucila Vargas); (4) "'Passing/Out' in the Classroom: Eradicating Binaries of Identity" (Giselle Liza Anatol); (5) "Reading the Body Indian: A Chicana Mestiza's Experience Teaching Literature" (Lisa D. Chavez); (6) "Useful Anger: Confrontation and Challenge in the Teaching of Gender, Race, and Violence" (Kimberly Nichele Brown); (7)"Negotiating the Minefield: Practicing Transformative Pedagogy as a Teacher of Color in a Classroom Climate of Suspicion" (Rashmi Luthra);…

(2015). Fostering Digital Citizenship through Safe and Responsible Use of ICT: A Review of Current Status in Asia and the Pacific as of December 2014. UNESCO Bangkok The proliferation and emergence of information and communications technology (ICT) has fundamentally changed the way in which society operates. The increasingly ubiquitous nature of ICT has also inevitably caused it to become indispensable as part of daily life and a basic building block of modern society. When used effectively and appropriately, the benefits of ICT are boundless, enabling inclusive and sustainable human development by providing people not only with access to information and services but also expending opportunities to participate in and contribute to the knowledge economy. Despite the affordances of ICT, the widespread use of ICT at present has brought about a range of social and ethical issues from online safety and security, misuse of information, and to health and mental hazard. Therefore, more so than ever, there is an urgent need to address and mitigate the risks associated with ICT use while simultaneously exploiting the opportunities afforded by these… [Direct]

Demiray, Ugur, Ed.; Sever, N. Serdar, Ed. (2009). The Challenges for Marketing Distance Education in Online Environment: An Intergrated Approach. Online Submission The education system of our times has transformed greatly due to enormous developments in the IT field, ease in access to online resources by the individuals and the teachers adopting new technologies in their instructional strategies, be it for course design, development or delivery. The field of Distance and Online Education is experiencing continuing growth. Starting from simple form of correspondence courses, this field has passed through various generations, employing from simple to complex technology like radio, television to computes, satellites, Internet, Wiki and Web 2.0 applications. The Internet and the Wide World Web have fundamentally altered the practice of distance teaching and learning. Many of the universities around the globe are offering their courses online. The emerging distance and online learning environments pose unique challenges towards marketing of distance education programmes. Distance education and online education is practiced in all the fields of human… [PDF]

Beckmann, Andrea; Cooper, Charlie; Hill, Dave (2009). Neoliberalization and Managerialization of "Education" in England and Wales–A Case for Reconstructing Education. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, v7 n2 p310-345 Nov. This paper argues that the neoliberalization of education in England, begun in the 1980s, is having profoundly harmful effects on the lives of individuals and society. Neoliberalism represents a shift away from the post-war social democratic notion of universal "citizenship" rights/identities toward a system of individual consumer rights/identities. In education, neoliberal reforms have exposed state provision to privatization and marketization, and the ideology of the "new managerialism" and its belief in "business" management practices. In this paper, the authors explore the dimensions of and potential resistances to this disenchanting status quo. They begin by outlining the drivers behind the privatization and marketization of education services before then detailing the impact of these changes on the education system (and, as a consequence, society) in England and Wales. This paper largely focuses on developments within the higher education (HE)… [PDF]

Joyce, Marguerite P. (2008). Interviewing Techniques Used in Selected Organizations Today. Business Communication Quarterly, v71 n3 p376-380. Businesses continue to use the job interview as a final determinant of the applicant's good fit for the company and its culture. Today, many companies are hiring less and/or are taking longer to find just the right person with the right skills for the right job. If an applicant is asked to come for an interview, the general feeling is that the applicant can do the job. So the applicant has to give an unforgettable interview. Companies will ask questions to assess the skills, experiences, and attitudes of job candidates to hire the best applicant for the job. This analysis links current interview instruction with current business practices. To gain knowledge of current business practices in the interview process, the author interviewed three human resources personnel in early 2008: Connie B. from a CPA firm, Bernadette H. from a regulatory government agency, and Eric S. from an oil service provider company. Based on these interviews, the types of hiring interviews conducted by these… [Direct]

Christian, Brian R.; Griffiths, Thomas L.; Kalish, Michael L. (2008). Using Category Structures to Test Iterated Learning as a Method for Identifying Inductive Biases. Cognitive Science, v32 n1 p68-107 Jan. Many of the problems studied in cognitive science are inductive problems, requiring people to evaluate hypotheses in the light of data. The key to solving these problems successfully is having the right inductive biases–assumptions about the world that make it possible to choose between hypotheses that are equally consistent with the observed data. This article explores a novel experimental method for identifying the biases that guide human inductive inferences. The idea behind this method is simple: This article uses the responses produced by a participant on one trial to generate the stimuli that either they or another participant will see on the next. A formal analysis of this \iterated learning\ procedure, based on the assumption that the learners are Bayesian agents, predicts that it should reveal the inductive biases of these learners, as expressed in a prior probability distribution over hypotheses. This article presents a series of experiments using stimuli based on a… [Direct]

Fleming, Stephen M.; Haggard, Patrick; Wenke, Dorit (2010). Subliminal Priming of Actions Influences Sense of Control over Effects of Action. Cognition, v115 n1 p26-38 Apr. The experience of controlling one's own actions, and through them events in the outside world, is a pervasive feature of human mental life. Two experiments investigated the relation between this sense of control and the internal processes involved in action selection and cognitive control. Action selection was manipulated by subliminally priming left or right keypress actions in response to a supraliminal visual target. The action caused the display of one of several colours as an action effect. The specific colour shown depended on whether the participant's action was compatible or incompatible with the preceding subliminal prime, and not on the prime identity alone. Unlike previous studies, therefore, the primes did not predict the to-be-expected action effects. Participants rated how much control they experienced over the different colours. Replicating previous results, compatible primes facilitated responding, whereas incompatible primes interfered with response selection…. [Direct]

Bird, Geoffrey; Heyes, Cecilia; Leighton, Jane (2010). \Goals\ Are Not an Integral Component of Imitation. Cognition, v114 n3 p423-435 Mar. Several theories suggest that actions are coded for imitation in terms of mentalistic goals, or inferences about the actor's intentions, and that these goals solve the \correspondence problem\ by allowing sensory input to be translated into matching motor output. We tested this intention reading hypothesis against general process accounts of imitation using the pen-and-cups task. The task has three components: participants place a pen in one of two cups, using their right or left hand, and one of two grips. Previous research has revealed a colour minimum error pattern; when one of the components is differentially coloured (e.g., one cup is red and the other blue), accuracy is greatest on the coloured dimension. We found the colour minimum error pattern, not only in the standard version of the task, where participants imitate the actions of a human model, but also in three novel variants of the task, in which participants responded on the basis of spatial or arbitrary… [Direct]

Maxwell, Lesli A. (2008). Human Capital Key Worry for Reformers. Education Week, v28 n14 p1, 13 Dec. Corporations have been striving to perfect the \people side\ of their operations for decades. Most hunt aggressively for the right talent, train workers to produce at high levels, and reward top performers with promotions and higher pay. In public education, though, school districts have been more passive in managing this vital asset. Most rely on colleges and universities to supply workers, and pay and promote people for experience and education levels rather than for their success in raising student achievement. But as the pressure to improve schools continues to mount–and reform efforts fall short–a growing number of school district leaders, funders, education thinkers, and policymakers are zeroing in on developing \human capital\ as the key strategy to improve student learning. In Washington last month, the new Strategic Management of Human Capital project held a three-day national conference that drew representatives from 40 large school districts, teachers' unions, state… [Direct]

Raymond, Chase Wesley (2014). On the Sequential Negotiation of Identity in Spanish-Language Discourse: Mobilizing Linguistic Resources in the Service of Social Action. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. This dissertation takes an ethnomethodologically-grounded, conversation-analytic approach in investigating the sequential deployment of linguistic resources in Spanish-language talk-in-interaction. Three sets of resources are examined: 2nd-person singular reference forms (t√∫, vos, usted), indicative/subjunctive verbal mood selection, and Spanish-English intersentential code-switching. In each case, we ask: How is it that these elements of language are mobilized by speakers to accomplish identity in the service of social action in interaction? With regard to 2nd-person reference forms, we illustrate how the turn-by-turn progression of talk can make relevant shifts in the linguistic means through which speakers refer to their hearers. It is demonstrated that these shifts contribute to the objective of an utterance by mobilizing the pragmatic meaning of a pronominal form to embody a recalibration of who the interactants project they are to one another–not in general, but rather at a… [Direct]