Strengthening the Scientific Foundations of Professional Psychology: Time for the Next Steps

The field of professional psychology has been tremendously successful, although it has also been characterized by many competing preparadigmatic theoretical orientations, which have led to a great deal of contention as well as conflicting views regarding psychological development, functioning, and behavior change. There is now widespread agreement regarding scientific explanations of many psychological processes, however, and, consequently, it is time to update the basic conceptual frameworks used for professional psychology education and practice. Replacing the traditional reliance on an array of theoretical orientations with a science-based biopsychosocial framework would resolve many of the contradictions and conflicts that characterized the preparadigmatic era and would also provide a common perspective for unifying psychologists around a shared approach to practice, research, and training

A Collaborative Lecture in Information Retrieval for Students at Universities in Germany and Switzerland

K3, work in progress, is an acronym for Kollaboration (collaboration), Kommunikation (communication), and Kompetenz (competence). K3 provides a platform in the context of knowledge management to support collaborative knowledge production in learning environments. The underlying hypothesis states that collaborative discourse conciliates information as well as communication competence in learning contexts. The collaborative, communicative paradigm of K3 is implemented by asynchronous communication tools as a means of constructivist learning methodology. In this paper we will describe a K3 course. The lecture was organized and carried out at two places in two different countries (Germany and Switzerland) with students from different universities in the context of Library and Information Science. The paper informs about the management of the lecture and about the problems we had to run the lecture at two places. The circumstances in coordinating the presentations, the exercises, the examinations and evaluation, and the time schedule are presented. The conclusions of the lecturers and the results of a questionnaire for the students are explained in detail

A storage and access architecture for efficient query processing in spatial database systems

Due to the high complexity of objects and queries and also due to extremely large data volumes, geographic database systems impose stringent requirements on their storage and access architecture with respect to efficient query processing. Performance improving concepts such as spatial storage and access structures, approximations, object decompositions and multi-phase query processing have been suggested and analyzed as single building blocks. In this paper, we describe a storage and access architecture which is composed from the above building blocks in a modular fashion. Additionally, we incorporate into our architecture a new ingredient, the scene organization, for efficiently supporting set-oriented access of large-area region queries. An experimental performance comparison demonstrates that the concept of scene organization leads to considerable performance improvements for large-area region queries by a factor of up to 150

In Search of Professional Dispositions that Yield Cultural Relevance in Primary Grade Pedagogy: A Cautionary Tale of One Kindergarten Teacher

Primary grade teachers are challenged to establish firm learning foundations for all children, yet for many teachers cultural diversity makes this a complex pedagogical challenge. It is widely assumed that the success with which teachers meet this challenge is reflected in their dispositions toward diversity, and ultimately toward culturally relevant pedagogy as a professional orientation. This article describes a multi-year study of cultural relevance in early mathematics teaching. Using the case of one kindergarten teacher who exhibited positive dispositions toward cultural relevance, the authors examine factors that seemed to work against its adoption in her pedagogy

Active Learning: Effects of Core Training Design Elements on Self-Regulatory Processes, Learning, and Adaptability

This research describes a comprehensive examination of the cognitive, motivational, and emotional processes underlying active learning approaches, their effects on learning and transfer, and the core training design elements (exploration, training frame, emotion-control) and individual differences (cognitive ability, trait goal orientation, trait anxiety) that shape these processes. Participants (N = 350) were trained to operate a complex computer-based simulation. Exploratory learning and error-encouragement framing had a positive effect on adaptive transfer performance and interacted with cognitive ability and dispositional goal orientation to influence trainees’ metacognition and state goal orientation. Trainees who received the emotion-control strategy had lower levels of state anxiety. Implications for developing an integrated theory of active learning, learner-centered design, and research extensions are discussed

User Attitudes on E-Books Collection in Mahatma Gandhi University Library: A Case Study

A study on the user’s attitudes, interest and understanding of e-book collections. The sample taken for the study is the E-book collection developed at the Mahatma Gandhi University Library and its users. The survey assessed the impact of the e-books on teaching learning and research. The problems associated with the use of e-books aware also identified. The inference of the study are that the user’s require an orientation on different types of collections, and also extended facilities for access which is possible in this format

Psychological impacts of challenging behaviour and motivational orientation in staff supporting individuals with autistic spectrum conditions

Despite increased risk of experiencing challenging behaviour, psychological impacts on community and residential staff supporting adults with autistic spectrum conditions are under-explored. Studies examining related roles indicate protective psychological factors may help maintain staff well-being. This study investigated relationships between motivational orientation (eudaimonic or hedonic), challenging behaviour frequency and type (physical, verbal or self-injurious), and psychological impacts (anxiety, depression and life satisfaction). Participants (N=99) were recruited from six organisations providing autism-specific adult services within Scotland. A series of binary logistic regressions demonstrated weekly challenging behaviour exposure (compared to monthly or daily) significantly increased the likelihood of anxiety caseness. Increased eudaimonic motivation significantly reduced the likelihood of anxiety caseness while also predicting higher life satisfaction. Further, having high levels of eudaimonic motivation appeared to moderate the impact of weekly challenging behaviour exposure on anxiety. No motivational orientation or challenging behaviour factor significantly predicted depression. This sample also demonstrated higher anxiety, lower depression, and equivalent life satisfaction levels compared to general population norms. The results highlight the need for considering staff’s motivational orientations, their frequency of exposure to challenging behaviour, and both positive and negative psychological outcomes, if seeking to accurately quantify or improve well-being in this staff population

Collaborative video searching on a tabletop

Almost all system and application design for multimedia systems is based around a single user working in isolation to perform some task yet much of the work for which we use computers to help us, is based on working collaboratively with colleagues. Groupware systems do support user collaboration but typically this is supported through software and users still physically work independently. Tabletop systems, such as the DiamondTouch from MERL, are interface devices which support direct user collaboration on a tabletop. When a tabletop is used as the interface for a multimedia system, such as a video search system, then this kind of direct collaboration raises many questions for system design. In this paper we present a tabletop system for supporting a pair of users in a video search task and we evaluate the system not only in terms of search performance but also in terms of user–user interaction and how different user personalities within each pair of searchers impacts search performance and user interaction. Incorporating the user into the system evaluation as we have done here reveals several interesting results and has important ramifications for the design of a multimedia search system