Reflecting on Bill Foster's influence on the author's work leads to reflections about the lifelong dialogue among scholars whose thinking and writing is continually refreshed and deepened by a scholarly field of dialogue. Over time, a dialogue between two scholars illuminates earlier scholarly influences on each of them, leading to the enrichment…

Bennett Reimer has pointed out the crucial distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic meaning or, in his terminology, between inherent and delineated meaning. He has eloquently described how feeling in music can be both of the inherent type and of the delineated type and has argued that both types of meaning can coexist. There is no point in…

M. Pena, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (see record 2002-06215-001) argued that humans compute nonadjacent statistical relations among syllables in a continuous artificial speech stream to extract words, but they use other computations to determine the structural properties of words. Instead, when participants are familiarized with a…

L. L. Bonatti, M. Pena, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (see record 2006-06642-010) argued that P. Perruchet, M. D. Tyler, N. Galland, and R. Peereman (see record 2004-21166-008) confused the notions of segmentation and generalization by ignoring the evidence for generalization in M. Pena, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (see record…

The authors make 3 points in response to F. Schlaghecken and M. Eimer's (see record 2006-09007-009) proposal of self-inhibition as an explanatory factor in the negative compatibility effect: (a) The self-inhibition hypothesis lacks empirical support for its main tenets; (b) considering the roles of geometric, spatial, and temporal similarity of…

By analyzing the Fisher information allotted to the correct response of a Rasch binary item, Huynh (1994) established the response probability criterion 0.67 (RP67) for standard settings based on bookmarks and item mapping. The purpose of this note is to help clarify the conceptual and psychometric framework of the RP criterion.

At the onset of the essay by Alerby and Perm, musicality is described as emotional or cognitive phenomena. In this response, Fung questions what role a psychomotor phenomenon plays in musicality. Alerby and Perm describe "motor knowledge" in the context of Merleau-Ponty's "maximum grip." Does this mean that "motor knowledge" or "maximum grip" in…

In this response to Muis et al. (2006), I draw on the writings of Dewey to explore three critical questions. The first question is what is gained or what is lost when the study of epistemology moves from philosophy to psychology and eventually to educational practice? The second asks whether the primary question under examination should be "if"…

Students will see writing as a powerful act when they learn to analyze a published author's writing style and send a written critique straight to the source. The author critiques help students to analyze their own writing and the Sentence Opening Sheet is an excellent device for this purpose as it reformats the text so that students can see their…

Students knowledge of literary theories helps them to understand that there are many ways to know texts, to read and interpret them. Divergent and critical thinking about literature developed by high school students through analyzing a fairy tale, a short story and a novel are presented.

Responds to the comment by Kamyar Arasteh on the Eidelson and Eidelson article which made an important contribution, at a critical juncture, to the discussion of international conflicts by identifying core dimensions that allow for the systematic examination of the problem. The authors appreciate Arasteh's thought-provoking comments about their…

D. Hume (1739/1987) argued that causality is not observable. P. W. Cheng claimed to present "a theoretical solution to the problem of causal induction first posed by Hume more than two and a half centuries ago" (p. 398) in the form of the power PC theory (L. R. Novick & P. W. Cheng). This theory claims that people's goal in causal induction is to…

Scholars disagree about the relative importance of racism and economic inequality, but there's a consensus that both are significant and worthy of study. And much work is devoted to the question of when race matters and when it does not. Michaels recognizes that most poor kids, given their lack of resources, are not adequately prepared to succeed…

Reading comprehension plays a key role in academic success in today's classrooms. Literature Circles (LCs), a learner-centered collaborative reading activity, brings together the ideas of cooperative learning, independent reading, and reader response theory to enhance students' reading comprehension as well as their motivation toward learning…

The author draws on his own extensive research in urban classrooms to present a grounded theoretical model of young children's understanding of picture storybooks. Advancing a much broader and deeper theory of literary understanding, the author suggests that children respond in five different ways during picture storybook readalouds; that these…