The Relationship between a Norm Referenced Measure of Theory of Mind and Preschoolers\u27 Social Skills in the Classroom

This study sought to examine the effect of Theory of Mind (ToM) performance as measured by a norm-referenced assessment on the social skills of a multicultural group of preschool students. This study extends the current research in this area. Most previous studies examined the relationship among ToM, other social cognitive skills and social skills using participants from predominately Caucasian middle class families (Slaughter et al., 2015). Additionally, earlier research relied primarily on homemade measures of such skills (Cassidy et al., 2003; Disendruck & Ben-Eliyahu, 2006; McAlister & Peterson, 2013; Watson et al., 1999; Walker, 2005). Participants included 67 children between 39 and 50 months of age enrolled in publicly funded preschool programs. Assessment using the NEPSY-II (Korkman, Kirk & Kemp, 2007) determined participants ToM and AR skills. Social skills were assessed through behavior observation and teacher report. Study findings indicate that demographic variables play a role in how teachers rate student both pro-social and anti-social behaviors. NEPSY-II reliability coefficients this sample were extremely low and the validity of the measure is discussed (van de Vijver & Leung, 1997). Qualitative analysis of the NEPSY-II ToM scale is presented and possible explanations for low Coefficient alpha are discussed

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

Conversations on Empathy

In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice

The role of inhibitory control in the cooperative play of high-functioning children with autism

This thesis contributes to the executive dysfunction account of autism by demonstrating that impairments in inhibitory control, an aspect of executive functioning, are partially responsible for deficits in the cooperative play of highfunctioning children with autism (HFA). As past research on whether inhibitory control is impaired in autism has been inconclusive, a meta-analysis of 42 empirical studies (57 effect sizes, total n = 2,256) was conducted, which provided clear evidence for impaired inhibition in HFA children. It was also found that the degree of impairment shown does not vary across measures of inhibition, which has important methodological implications for future research. Two experimental studies were carried out to directly test the link between inhibition and three components of cooperation: reciprocity, accepting the play partner’s input, and fairness. In study one, HFA children in primary school and agematched typically-developing (TD) peers were tested on engaging in joint attention, theory of mind (ToM), measures of inhibition, and a cooperative drawing task. The groups did not differ on first-order ToM and joint attention, but HFA participants demonstrated poorer inhibitory control and less cooperative behaviour. Importantly, the degree of impairment in inhibitory control predicted reciprocity and accepting the play partner’s input in HFA children. The second experimental study investigated whether poor inhibitory control can explain the well-established discrepancy between moral reasoning and actual sharing behaviour. A sample of HFA and TD children of primary school age completed a moral reasoning interview, inhibitory control tasks, and a Dictator Game. The results showed that while HFA children demonstrated age-typical levels of moral reasoning and sharing, inhibitory control emerged as the most important predictor of sharing behaviour, lending support to the hypothesis that the ability to suppress one’s own desires is a prerequisite of acting considerately. The last study comprises a qualitative investigation of TD children’s experience of engaging in cooperative play with their sibling who has a diagnosis of HFA. Six children between the ages of 5 and 11 were interviewed, and their reports analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Five themes emerged: poor emotion regulation, restricted interests, and no acceptance of the playmate’s contributions reduced the hedonistic value of joint play for the participants, but these were mitigated by appreciation for the HFA sibling’s creativity and adjustment to the HFA sibling’s behavioural atypicalities. These results can inform the development of support programmes for TD siblings and social skills training for HFA children. Overall, the results of the studies included in this thesis provide evidence that deficits in inhibitory control moderate the relationship between relatively intact social knowledge and impaired social competence in HFA children. This refinement of the executive dysfunction account is a useful building block for an improved multiple-deficit model of the autism phenotype

Conversations on Empathy

In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice

The Best Children\u27s Books of the Year [2019 edition]

Includes more than 600 titles chosen by the Children’s Book Committee as the best of the best published in 2018. In choosing books for the annual list, committee members consider literary quality and excellence of presentation as well as the potential emotional impact of the books on young readers. Other criteria include credibility of characterization and plot, authenticity of time and place, age suitability, positive treatment of ethnic and religious differences, and the absence of stereotypes.https://educate.bankstreet.edu/ccl/1009/thumbnail.jp

Conditional reasoning in autism spectrum disorder: activation and integration of knowledge and belief.

Reasoning from all knowledge and belief is an adaptive approach to thinking about the world. It has been robustly shown that conditional ‘if then’ reasoning with everyday content is influenced by the background knowledge an individual has available. If we are presented with the statement ‘if it rains, then John will get wet’ then we are told that it is raining and asked if John will get wet, we may consider a number of possibilities before answering the question; perhaps John has an umbrella or is sheltered from the rain. Hence, when engaged in conditional reasoning of this sort people typically draw on background knowledge to arrive at an informed response. People with autism tend not to process information in context. There is a wealth of evidence indicating that these individuals have a piecemeal rather than an integrative processing style. It was therefore hypothesised that adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) would be less influenced by background knowledge when engaged in conditional reasoning with everyday content. Adolescents with ASD showed a weak or absent effect of available background knowledge on reasoning outcomes compared to a typically developing control group. This finding was demonstrated in two separate conditional reasoning tasks. These results were not explained by a failure to generate background knowledge or by differences in the beliefs held by the two groups regarding problem content. Within the typical population a lack of contextualised reasoning was also found among participants with high scores on one particular autistic trait, attention to detail. The ability to integrate all relevant information during conditional reasoning was also found to be dependent on available working memory resources. These results extend the known domains which demonstrate a lack of contextualised processing in autism. They also show that for individuals with autism reasoning without regard for background knowledge stems from a failure to integrate information. The findings suggest that this failure is related to the cognitive demands of the task and the processing style of the individual

Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with