An important, sometimes controversial feature of all psychological phenomena is whether they are categorical or dimensional. A conceptual and psychometric framework is described for distinguishing whether the latent structure behind manifest categories (e.g., psychiatric diagnoses, attitude groups, or stages of development) is category-like or…

The typology studies reviewed in the Holtzworth-Munroe and Meehan article make considerable methodological and substantive contributions to the field. There are several definitional, conceptual, and methodological advances that can be explored in this work. Macroframeworks such as the nested ecological model and the theory of triadic influence…

This article takes as its starting point discussions on the nature of critical educational research. It seeks to highlight some potential pitfalls for the less experienced researcher entering the field for the first time. It also highlights the tension between the more mechanistic approaches involving categorisation and tendencies that are evident…

This paper describes an exercise in determining the cognitive difficulty of the assessment tasks in six computing courses within an Information Technology (IT) degree, importing Bloom's taxonomy from the field of educational psychology as an analytical framework. Three of the six courses comprise a Programming stream and three a Data…

Benedictus Pererius (1535-1610) published in 1576 his most successful book "De principiis," after he had taught philosophy at the Roman College of the Jesuits. It will be shown that parts of this book are actually based on his lectures. But the printed version was intended as a contribution to the debate within his Order on how science should be…

Political leaders, the media, business people, trade union leaders and academics continually refer to how globalisation is impacting on our lives. Governments may at times argue that globalisation benefits us, and at others attribute to globalisation many of the major problems we currently face. What do ordinary people make of all this? We do not…

This study investigated the ability to describe and categorize common objects following brain injury. Thirteen subjects with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and 13 noninjured controls participated in this project. The project consisted of 3 parts: 1. A spontaneous condition, 2. A training session, and 3. An application condition.…

A well-known asymmetry exists in the bilingual masked priming literature in which lexical decision is used: namely, masked primes in the dominant language (L1) facilitate decision times on targets in the less dominant language (L2), but not vice versa. In semantic categorization, on the other hand, priming is symmetrical. In Experiments 1-3 we…

This paper reviews a body of work conducted in our laboratory that applies functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to better understand the biological response and change that occurs during prototype-distortion learning. We review results from two experiments (Little, Klein, Shobat, McClure, & Thulborn, 2004; Little & Thulborn, 2005) that…

Cross-cultural comparisons of categorization often confound cultural factors with expertise. This paper reports four experiments on the conceptual behavior of Native American and majority-culture fish experts. The two groups live in the same general area and engage in essentially the same set of fishing-related behaviors. Nonetheless, cultural…

Building upon past studies of curriculum textbooks in the US, this paper presents an analytical framework that classifies curriculum texts according to their representation of reconceptualized curriculum scholarship. It uses four indicators of the representation of curriculum scholarship in the analyses of eight curriculum texts published in the…

Four experiments examined the development of negative priming (NP) in 3-5-year-old children using as a measure of children's executive function (EF) the dimensional change card sort (DCCS) task. In the NP version of the DCCS, the values of the sorting dimension that is relevant during the preswitch phase are removed during the postswitch phase.…

This study provides a profile of the actions taken by Australian universities to diversify their revenue streams in order to generate more independent non-government) income. Marginson's taxonomy of Australian universities is used to catergorise universities and contrast levels of independent income (Marginson and Considine 2000). This study finds…

Although a variety of studies have indicated that using statistical clustering techniques to examine genetic information may allow for geographically based groupings of individuals that tenuously map onto some conceptions of race, these studies have also indicated that the amount of genetic variation within these groupings is significantly larger…

Principles of social constructivism and about communities of learners clarify that being a responsible student involves performing well on a task as well as having motivation, having volition strategies, understanding rules and regulations, and having access to a productive social support network. A hotly debated issue is what motivation processes…