laurel 's List: HT100 Readings

• • Metacognition is important in knowledge acquisition, problem-solving, epistemological understanding--CONCEPTUAL CHANGE--esp. as children learn how to do it.
• During its extended developmental course, metacognition becomes more explicit, powerful, and effective, as it comes to operate increasingly under the individual's conscious control.

  • The Reciprocal Teaching literature says the same thing.

• Despite this massive effort, math and science instruction in this country is now in a crisis. Many of the reasons for this have nothing to do with shortcomings of the materials developed under the 1960s initiative, but there was one crucial shortcoming, with vast implications for the art and practice of educating our youngsters. Simply put, in the 1960s, educators and psychologists misanalyzed the very problem math and science education must solve.

  • How much of an initiative really happened in the 1960s due to Sputnik? Tina G. would say it wasn't really Sputnik response, and it sounds like they were misdirected anyway. This is the historical models we talked about in T543: that of making up deficits vs. looking at how children learn from inside out.
• conceptual change is extremely difficult to achieve, for reasons that have been understood at least since the early writings of Kuhn (1962) and Feyerabend (1962).
• preschool children have constructed a very different theoretical framework from that held by adults, in which they have embedded their understanding of animals, just as children of elementary school age have constructed a different framework theory in which they embed their understanding of the material world.

  • Beliefs are different than theories. Children have different ones than adults.
• • Example of conceptual/theory change: Intuitive Theories of Biology w/ person and animal Preschoolers' framework theory is fragmented, with "essentialism" (core properties determine surface characteristics) or ToM.
    8-10-year-olds' framework theory has causality: function of parts is to maintain life; and convergence: new category of "living thing"
• The elementary school child is a theory-bound thinker, just like the scientist or another adult, and is quite capable of being engaged at a theoretical level. But the initial theory of the elementary school child is vastly more different from the target theory of elementary biology than we may suppose

  • Children are not just "concrete thinkers"
• First, the goal of education, teaching for understanding, cannot be achieved without a diagnosis of students' initial understanding of content knowledge.

  • Whoa! A big Purpose of education here. Teachers should stay on top of science ed research to do this
• Second, a very important goal for science education research is to study the mechanisms underlying conceptual change
• Many of the components of standard curricula are based on a logical sequence of the concepts to be built up;

  • partial solution
• the puzzling question can be raised: how can a pile of rice weighing 2 grams be composed of many pieces weighing 0 grams?

  • Great generative question and discrepancy creator for conceptual change!
• Students must be made aware of the role of interpretive frameworks in guiding experimentation and of the nature of conceptual change.
• student misconceptions are inevitable. Not having the target concepts is not an undesirable stage in students but an absolutely necessary one.

  • Another educational implication; that's why it's important to engage students in revising their theories and models.
• • And teachers have to reflect, too, on conceptual change!

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• Brain imaging studies, in particular, have found a correlation between amygdala activation during encoding and subsequent memory.

• In  essence, fragmentation of thoughts and feelings serves the adaptive  function of allowing the child to limit the experience of severe anxiety  and helplessness and maintain functioning
• we can hypothesize that maltreated  children will demonstrate a cluster of fundamental changes in personality  that include malignant feelings of inner badness and basic fragmentation  in self
• By using this pathways model based on dynamic skill theory, we can  characterize maltreated children's behavior as adaptive and complex  rather than delayed.
• it is unclear what factors associated with maltreatment may  result in differences in cognitive skill development between maltreated  and nonmaltreated children.

  • Factors attributed to abusive environment or to genes? Environment-gene interaction again!
• Maltreated children demonstrate a negativity bias

  • emotionally, that is
• effect of early childhood maltreatment on the  neural correlates of processing facial emotion such that maltreated  children are especially sensitive to angry facial displays (Cicchetti  & Curtis, 2005; Pollak, Cicchetti, Klorman,  & Brumaghim, 1997).

  • maltreatment affects the amygdala's ability to process
• As early as 2 years of age, maltreated  children tend to prefer mean to nice stories
• unifying use of dynamic skill theory to  frame questions about differences in maltreated children's cognitive  skill performance in the context of specific positive and negative  emotional stimuli.

  • in two studies; they used the Mean and Nice Interaction Scale and the Maltreatment Classification System
• In Study 1, we found that maltreated children did not evidence  cognitive delay, compared to nonmaltreated children, but rather developed  along an “alternate developmental pathway” as described in the  skill theory literature.
• After approximately 3.5 years of age, maltreated children passed  lower levels of stories that involved nice interactions than nonmaltreated  children
• among maltreated children, affective splitting is  present in early childhood
• The fact that an effect of maltreatment on children's performance  on positive stories was not evident until approximately 40 months of age  is in line with dynamic skill theory. Most 2- and 3-year-olds have not  developed beyond skill level 3, at which point there is no true  coordination of nice and mean. Therefore, very young children are not able  to engage in complex affective splitting.

  • RELEVANT FOR MY HT100 PROJECT!!
• In addition, children in the second study were assessed based on the  identity of the perpetrator of abuse. Fathers as perpetrators resulted in  poorer performance in the child victims. This finding speaks to the need  to target fathers and men in general for both focused and universal  preventive parenting education.

  • Implications for education--directed at fathers. THis also reminds me of the Center for Developing Child talk at the Law School--this study could be used as fuel for education through the judicial system. What does this mean in schools (if anything)?
• the two central organizers of  developing close relationships, the positive–negative dimensions of  emotions and the natural patterns in differentiation and integration, are  fundamentally reorganized as a result of emotional trauma (Fischer et al.,  1997; Fischer & Pipp, 1984).

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• This mysticism is largely unfounded, and the freedom of feeling is an illusion. For one thing, the notion of freedom of feeling runs counter to the traditional wisdom that human beings are enslaved by their passions. For another, the laws of emotion may help us to discern that simple, universal, moving forces operate behind the complex, idiosyncratic movements of feeling,

  • Frijda's arguments for why emotions are subject to laws
• law of situational meaning: Emotions arise in response to the meaning structures of given situations; different emotions arise in response to different meaning structures.

  • so, external stimulus first, then emotional response (as opposed to reverse view)
• Input some event with its particular kind of meaning; out comes an emotion of a particular kind.
• The outputs are highly probable, but are not absolutely certain because the inputs can still be perceived in different fashions.
• When given the descriptions by 30 subjects of affective states corresponding to 32 emotion labels, the computer achieved a hit rate of 31% for the first choice and of 71% for the first five choices

  • Computer analogy to support emotional mechanisms...seems to be initially accurate
• • Emotional mechanisms affected by our perception of how we can handle the situation
• the automatic workings of the law of situational meaning are evident.

  • law or mechanism from situations works for: sentimentality reactions and falling in love
• All emotions—all states, that is, that one would want to call “emotions”—involve some change in action readiness: (a) in readiness to go at it or away from it or to shift attention; (b) in sheer excitement, which can be understood as being ready for action but not knowing what action; or (c) in being stopped in one's tracks or in loss of interest.
• Meaning structures are lawfully connected to forms of action readiness.
• the available modes of action readiness, correspond to the behavior systems and general response modes with which humans are endowed.

  • some of these are species-specific behaviors (Fischer lecture 2/6 or 2/11)
• law of concern: Emotions arise in response to events that are important to the individual's goals, motives, or concerns
• Emotions arise from the interaction of situational meanings and concerns.
• aw of apparent reality: Emotions are elicited by events appraised as real, and their intensity corresponds to the degree to which this is the case.

  • connected to the perception of the "situation"
• Knowing means less than seeing.
• Feeling means more than knowing.
• Words mean less than tone of voice.

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• These data lend support to the notion that part of the fascination, and the credibility, of brain imaging research lies in the persuasive power of the actual brain images themselves.
• In the first experiment participants read fictional articles summarizing cognitive neuroscience research, modeled after news service articles, that either included no image, a brain image, or a bar graph depicting the critical results
• One-hundred fifty-six Colorado State University undergraduates between the ages of 18 and 25 participated for course credit.

  • Might the results be skewed by the age and academic nature of the participants? This generation might be more prone to believe in technologically advanced data-showing methods.
• manipulated within-subjects, and the order of these conditions was counterbalanced

  • What does this mean???
• Experiment 1 established that including brain images, a seemingly direct physical representation of brain activity, with summaries of fictional cognitive neuroscience data, increased ratings of scientific reasoning for those summaries.
• Experiment 2 participants were presented with articles that were accompanied by brain images, and others that were accompanied by topographical maps of brain activation

  • Ruling (subtracting) out visual complexity as a variable
• t(127) = 1.85

  • Significant or no?
• These data suggest that it was not simply the visual complexity of the brain images that influenced ratings of scientific reasoning
• Experiment 3 used a real news service article taken from the BBC website
• Do you agree or disagree with the conclusion that brain imaging can be used as a lie detector?

  • Hmmm...they changed the question a little. It's different than just asking whether the REASONING made sense; now it's the CONCLUSION
• this variable was crossed with whether there was a brain image accompanying the article of not).

  • TWO variables in this one
• between-subjects ANOVA
• the ratings of agreement were higher when the brain image was present,
• Thus, subjects’ rated the title, Brain Scans Can Detect Criminals, as more appropriate when the article was not criticized
• • We all tend to want to simplify...it's how we make sense of the world and is evolutionarily advantageous in most ways. It is profound and sad to think that mind does not equal extension of the brain; otherwise, things would be so much easier!
• our results and those of Weisberg et al. may be the result of different mechanisms being affected in the two studies.
• pre-experimental exposure to brain images in the popular press, which provides a physical explanation for cognitive phenomena, likely influences the allure of cognitive neuroscience data.

  • That's what I said before, except relating to the sample population.
• ethical implications.

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• The cognitive outcome of children who remained in the institution was markedly below that of never-institutionalized children and children taken out of the institution and placed into foster care.

  • Remember the fMRI images Nelson showed at the Law School talk.
• Evidence suggests that children reared in institutions suffer from a variety of neurobiological and behavioral sequelae compared to never-institutionalized children.

  • Environment is very important! And a bad one does damage very early.
• This literature on the effects of early institutional care suffers from methodological limitations, particularly selection bias:
• both developmental brain plasticity and social policy, a vital question is whether there may be sensitive periods after which recovery becomes significantly more difficult

  • How much is plastic and how much is irreversible in a sensitive period?
    What implications might this have for social policy, especially Romania's? (see later highlights!)
• (mean = 3338 g, SD = 467 g), t(187) = 6.8, P < 0.001

  • Remember your stats! That's a HUGE t-value. Is the difference between 3338 and 4150g really that significant?
• 68 children from the institutions (33 males and 35 females) were randomly assigned to remain in institutional care
• government-sponsored foster care was limited to about one family when our study commenced,

  • Yikes! How fortunate we are in the U.S. to at least have SOME system.
• Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID-II)
• Wechsler Preschool Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI-R)
• expect differences in children's performance on the BSID-II versus the WPPSI-R simply because of differences in the nature of the test instruments

  • Remember HT 820 principles.
• a policy of noninterference
• Clinical equipoise is the notion that there must be uncertainty in the expert community about the relative merits of experimental and control interventions such that no subject should be randomized to an intervention known to be inferior to the standard of care

  • Definition: clinical equipoise
• Romanian government passed a law that prohibits institutionalizing children less than 2 years old, unless the child is severely handicapped.

  • Science affecting policy and welfare system for children--just as Nelson and other speakers emphasized at the Law School 2/12/08.
• a conservative estimate of the response to intervention
• (BSID-II), t(116) = 3.39 and P = 0.001
• WPPSI-R), t(108) = 2.48 and P = 0.015
• children placed before 2 years of age had the best response to intervention
• Three main findings emerge from this study

  • Summary of findings: 1) lower intellectual performance when institutionalized; 2) children placed in foster care experienced cognitive gains; 3) sensitive period: below age 2
• implications for child welfare

  • families are better than institutions; placement to foster care before age 2 is best benefit to cognitive development

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• a very simple model that rested on the assumption of single causes, both at the cognitive and the etiologic levels of analysis

  • single cause: like a gene or certain cognitive deficit for a developmental disorder
    deterministic theory
• • problems with single deficit models: 1) dev. disorders don't have single causes: *genes AND environment: Harris and Grigorenko* 2) dev. disorders often occur comorbidly, not independently 3) double dissociations can't always be applied
• • Just like Harris and Grigorenko explain
• we will still face the difficult problem of distinguishing causal risk factors from secondary or associated ones

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• One window through which to investigate the developmental principles governing the brain–experience relationship and the organizing role of emotion is through case studies of atypical but highly functioning children.
• This design was chosen for three main reasons: First, prosodic and emotional skills are thought to involve particular roles for each brain hemisphere, so studying these skills enabled rigorous assessments of how the boys had learned what they should not have been able to learn by traditional accounts.

  • Design is: comparison to typical developers matched for educationally relevant emotional tasks: Emotion is a big factor
• Second, this design revealed the possible organizing role of emotion in the boys’ learning. Third, it allowed me to connect findings about these boys’ functioning to issues of learning and development with broader educational relevance.
• Nico lost his right hemisphere at age 3; yet, he is now a charming and sociable 14-year-old
• Brooke lost his left hemisphere at age 11
• Specifically, although we often assume that everyone perceives the same educational problems in the same ways, for example, a math problem is a math problem for everyone, Nico’s and Brooke’s cases suggest that we can in fact approach even relatively low-level, apparently automatic processing in very different ways

  • Individual differences show up dramatically here; their power is exaggerated by the circumstances
• Too often in the past, brain-based education has stymied itself with detailed accounts of neurological details that, quite simply, are not relevant to the majority of educational concerns (Bruer, 1997)

  • Hmmmm. But she brings together the neuroscience and education over specific cases...kind of like our HT100 assignments. This gives concrete application.
• knowledge about this trend can inform the design of effective learning environments and experiences

  • Plasticity, that is. The fact that children's brains are less efficient and more plastic, and adults' brains are efficient and modularized.
• • Immordino-Yang is trying to bridge neuroscience and education by embedding the study in the cases of Nico and Brooke. I hope she is successful.
• it provides entry points for both neuropsychologists and educators to debate the study’s implications, not just what the boys are doing but how they are doing it
• As both Nico and Brooke have fully functional language despite missing a brain hemisphere, the question then arises as to how they have compensated, both prosodically and emotionally.

  • Has "crowding" occurred in the "garden?"
• Because there is significant variability in children’s paths to recovery from brain damage, case studies can contribute important insights into these trends and the plasticity that created them.
• • Two possible brain adaptations: left hemisphere takes on the emotional processing function; or left hemisphere translates prosody into the syntax structure of language. Both have implications for ed!
• The first scenario suggests that plasticity mainly involves building new strengths to solve problems as they are put to you; the second scenario suggests that, at least in some cases, plasticity is about transforming the cognitive problem itself into a form that suits one’s processing strengths.

  • the nature of the two possible beasts
• I am extending an established microdevelopmental approach used for the study of emotion and cognition (Fischer & Bidell, 1998) into the domain of prosody.
• In each case, the participant is asked to judge whether the final statement in the story had been sarcastic or sincere and to justify his answers via a series of follow-up questions.

  • methods (measurement instruments)
• produced characterizations of the strategy profiles used by Nico and Brooke

  • were they normal prosody strategies, delayed strategies, or something completely different?
• • Wow! She found their expressive pitch range (to see how they expressed emotion in their answers)!
• each boy participated in a standard cognitive and emotional "Self-in-Relationships" interview

  • How well did they connect complex emotional relationships like resentment and security?

  • to assess emotional understanding
• Nico’s and Brooke’s abilities to discriminate basic emotions on faces was also tested using Ekman’s test of recognition of facial expression of emotion (Ekman & Friesen, 1975)
• was there evidence that Nico tended to confuse negative emotions, such as fear and disgust, but accurately differentiate positive emotions, such as happiness and surprise? Alternatively, might he or Brooke have shown a tendency to misclassify negative emotions as positive, for example, confuse disgust with surprise?
• In this way, both boys appear to be compensating by capitalizing on the neuropsychological strengths, including emotional strengths, associated with their remaining hemisphere, rather than by adapting their remaining hemisphere to act as the missing hemisphere would have.

  • Nico (left hem.) avoiding emotional processing with snap judgments and a "grammar" of memorized emotional categories
    Brooke (right hem.) belabored connections between tone of voice and emotion
• Figure 2

  • Nico’s and Brooke’s prosodic discrimination abilities
• quite surprisingly, I found that both Nico, missing his right hemisphere, and Brooke, missing his left hemisphere, exhibited more intonational variation than their peers.

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• Immordino-Yang makes an appeal through her study for neuroscience and education as partners in research. She attempts to bridge the two fields while remaining relevant to both. - laurel on 2008-04-23

• a good model for this dialogue is lacking.

  • Dialogue between educators and neuroscientists about learning experiences' relationship to cognitive development.
• • Two reasons for lack of model:
    1) we don't know very much about the relationship among cognitive, emotional, and neurological development
    2) we don't know how to research these relationships rigorously
    3) neuropsychology studies are not often practically accessible to educators