Dueck recounts how, as a high school history teacher, he began to allow students to retake all or part of their end-of-unit tests. Influenced by the work of Rick Stiggins, Dueck prepared students for tests better by focusing on three questions Stiggins says students should be able to answer for themselves: Where am I going in this unit?, Where am…

Generalization gradients have been investigated widely in animal conditioning experiments, but much less so in human predictive learning tasks. Here, we apply the experimental design of a recent study on conditioned fear generalization in humans (Lissek et al., 2008) to a predictive learning task, and examine the effects of a number of relevant…

A mother tracked her preschooler's number word development daily from 18 to 49 months of age. Naturalistic observations were supplemented with observations during structured (Kumon) training and microgenetic testing. The boy's everyday use of "two" did not become highly reliable and selective for 10 months (at 28 months), emerged later than that…

Effects of culture-specific experience on musical rhythm perception are evident by 12 months of age, but the role of culture-general rhythm processing constraints during early infancy has not been explored. Using a habituation procedure with 5- and 7-month-old infants, we investigated effects of temporal interval ratio complexity on discrimination…

This study investigated influences of censored data on mediation analysis. Mediation effect estimates can be biased and inefficient with censoring on any one of the input, mediation, and output variables. A Bayesian Tobit approach was introduced to estimate and test mediation effects with censored data. Simulation results showed that the Bayesian…

Groups typically have difficulties drawing inferences that integrate individuals' unique information (collaborative inferences) and thus yield a true assembly bonus. An experiment with 36 dyads of university-level students in four training conditions showed, particularly in untrained dyads, that collaborative inferences were less likely to be…

Two experiments examined temporally based changes in the conditioned magazine-entries of rats when a target food pellet arrived at a fixed time before the termination of a conditioned stimulus. Both experiments found that increasing the rate of intertrial pellets systematically interfered with the rate of acquisition. When intertrial pellets were…

This report draws from decades of experience using observation in early childhood education, which has implications for administrative decisions, evaluation practices, and policymaking in K-12. Early childhood education has long embraced the value of observing classrooms and teacher-child interactions. In early childhood education the features of…

In a variety of conflict paradigms, target and distractor stimuli are defined in terms of perceptual features. Interference evoked by distractor stimuli tends to be reduced when the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials is decreased, suggesting conflict-induced perceptual filtering (i.e., adjusting the processing weights assigned to stimuli…

Reaction time (RT), thought to be important for acquiring a full understanding of the establishment of equivalence classes, has been reported in a number of studies within the area of stimulus equivalence research. In this study, we trained 3 classes of potentially 3 members, with arbitrary stimuli in a one-to-many training structure in 5 adult…

This article presents the author's open letter to her students. In her letter, the author apologizes to her students for the state's narrow and deceptive standardized test. She asserts that she does not oppose rigorous testing and she understands the purpose of evaluation. A good test can measure achievement and even inspire. But, she argues that…

Tony Alpert, chief operating officer for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), ponders whether to allow tablet computers--and particularly iPads--to be used for summative testing online. As Alpert points out, not only would student cheating compromise the validity of the individual student's test event, "worse yet, it could expose…

This article explores the neo-institutional theory of global policy convergence, or "isomorphism", by comparatively examining one of its most recent manifestations--the global diffusion of national standardised testing--in Australia and Japan. By understanding the particular configurations of national testing as being conditioned by both…

The tri-reference point (TRP) theory takes into account minimum requirements (MR), the status quo (SQ), and goals (G) in decision making under risk. The 3 reference points demarcate risky outcomes and risk perception into 4 functional regions: success (expected value of x greater than or equal to G), gain (SQ less than x less than G), loss (MR…

Visual perceptual learning (PL) and perceptual expertise (PE) traditionally lead to different training effects and recruit different brain areas, but reasons for these differences are largely unknown. Here, we tested how the learning history influences visual object representations. Two groups were trained with tasks typically used in PL or PE…