Assessing phonological awareness in kindergarten children: Issues of task comparability

Ten different phonological awareness tasks were administered to a group of kindergarten children whose reading ability was assessed 1 year later. The extraneous cognitive requirements inherent in the tasks varied widely. The children's performance on three tasks that involved a rhyming response was at ceiling, and these tasks did not correlate with subsequent reading progress. The other seven measures were all moderately related to later reading ability and, employed in sets, were very strong predictors. The relative predictive accuracy of the phonological tasks was equal to or better than more global measures of cognitive skills such as an intelligence test and a reading readiness test. The phonological tasks had a large amount of common variance. Factor analysis revealed only one factor on which all the nonrhyming phonological tasks loaded highly. The results bolster the construct validity of phonological awareness, indicate considerable comparability and interchangeability among the tasks used to measure the construct, and are encouraging as regards the possible use of such tasks in predictive test batteries.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/24679/1/0000098.pd

Designing for Diabetes Decision Support Systems with Fluid Contextual Reasoning

Type 1 diabetes is a potentially life-threatening chronic condition that requires frequent interactions with diverse data to inform treatment decisions. While mobile technolo- gies such as blood glucose meters have long been an essen- tial part of this process, designing interfaces that explicitly support decision-making remains challenging. Dual-process models are a common approach to understanding such cog- nitive tasks. However, evidence from the first of two stud- ies we present suggests that in demanding and complex situations, some individuals approach disease management in distinctive ways that do not seem to fit well within existing models. This finding motivated, and helped frame our second study, a survey (n=192) to investigate these behaviors in more detail. On the basis of the resulting analysis, we posit Fluid Contextual Reasoning to explain how some people with diabetes respond to particular situations, and discuss how an extended framework might help inform the design of user interfaces for diabetes management

Creating and Breaking Habit in Healthcare Professional Behaviours to Improve Healthcare and Health

Healthcare professionals (HCPs) prescribe, provide advice, conduct examinations, perform surgical procedures, and engage in a range of clinical behaviours. Their clinical actions are characteristically performed repeatedly—sometimes multiple times per day—in the same physical locations with the same colleagues and patients, under constant time pressure, and competing demands. This repetition under pressure in a stable setting provides ideal circumstances for creating contingencies between physical and social cues and clinical actions. HCP behaviour provides an ideal setting in which to advance theory, methods, and interventions to better understand habit formation and habit reversal. Contemporary theoretical and methodological development in the psychology of habit has begun to be applied to understand and promote the formation, breaking, and replacement of habitual behaviour in HCPs. This chapter highlights key theoretical approaches, methods, and intervention techniques that have been applied to conceptualize, measure, develop, and break habit and automaticity in HCPs. These insights have the potential to synergistically contribute novel perspectives to the wider habit literature

Word Recognition In Reaction Time And Tachistoscopic Tasks.

PhDExperimentsPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/190091/2/7726368.pd

How to think straight about psychology

192 p.; 23 cm

Assessing Cognitive Abilities: Intelligence and More

In modern cognitive science, rationality and intelligence are measured using different tasks and operations. Furthermore, in several contemporary dual process theories of cognition, rationality is a more encompassing construct than intelligence. Researchers need to continue to develop measures of rational thought without regard to empirical correlations with intelligence. The measurement of individual differences in rationality should not be subsumed by the intelligence concept

How to Think Rationally about World Problems

I agree with the target essay that psychology has something to offer in helping to address societal problems. Intelligence has helped meliorate some social problems throughout history, including the period of time that is covered by the Flynn effect, but I agree with Sternberg that other psychological characteristics may be contributing as well, particularly increases in rationality. I also believe that increasing human rationality could have a variety of positive societal affects at levels somewhat smaller in grain size than the societal problems that Sternberg focuses on. Some of the societal problems that Sternberg lists, however, I do not think would be remedied by increases in rationality, intelligence, or wisdom, because remedy might be the wrong word in the context of these issues. Issues such as how much inequality of income to tolerate, how much pollution to tolerate, and how much we should sacrifice economic growth for potential future changes in global temperature represent issues of clashing values, not the inability to process information, nor the lack of information, nor the failure to show wisdom

Assessing Cognitive Abilities: Intelligence and More

In modern cognitive science, rationality and intelligence are measured using different tasks and operations. Furthermore, in several contemporary dual process theories of cognition, rationality is a more encompassing construct than intelligence. Researchers need to continue to develop measures of rational thought without regard to empirical correlations with intelligence. The measurement of individual differences in rationality should not be subsumed by the intelligence concept