The Effect of Student-Directed Transition Planning With a Computer-Based Reading Support Program on the Self-Determination of Students With Disabilities

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of student-directed transition planning instruction (Whose Future Is It Anyway? curriculum) with a computer-based reading support program (Rocket Reader) on the self-determination, self-efficacy and outcome expectancy, and transition planning knowledge of students with disabilities. This study employed a pre- and postmeasure design with 168 middle school students with disabilities who were assigned to an experimental group (n = 86) and control group (n = 82). The results of the study demonstrated that self-determination, self-efficacy, and outcome expectancy for education planning improved through the application of Rocket Reader . Avenues are discussed for promoting middle school students’ self-determination in their transition planning, as are implications for future research.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

RECAPP-XPR: A smartphone application for presenting and recalling experimentally controlled stimuli over longer timescales

We report two experiments that used smartphone applications for presenting and recalling verbal stimuli over extended timescales. In Experiment 1, we used an iPhone application that we had developed, called RECAPP-XPR, to present 76 participants with a single list of eight words presented at a rate of one word every hour, followed by a test of free recall an hour later. The experiment was exceptionally easy to schedule, taking only between 5 and 10 min to set up using a web-based interface. RECAPP-XPR randomly samples the stimuli, presents the stimuli, and collects the free recall data. The stimuli disappear shortly after they have been presented, and RECAPP-XPR collects data on when each stimulus was viewed. In Experiment 2, the study was replicated using the widely used image-sharing application Snapchat. A total of 197 participants were tested by 38 student experimenters, who manually presented the stimuli as “snaps” of experimentally controlled stimuli using the same experimental rates that had been used in Experiment 1. Like all snaps, these stimuli disappeared from view after a very short interval. In both experiments, we observed significant recall advantages for the first and last list items (primacy and recency effects, respectively), and there were clear tendencies to make more transitions at output between near-neighboring items, with a forward-ordered bias, consistent with temporal contiguity effects. The respective advantages and disadvantages of RECAPP-XPR and Snapchat as experimental software packages are discussed, as is the relationship between single-study-list smartphone experiments and long-term recency studies of real-world events

The History of the Cluster Heat Map

The cluster heat map is an ingenious display that simultaneously reveals row and column hierarchical cluster structure in a data matrix. It consists of a rectangular tiling with each tile shaded on a color scale to represent the value of the corresponding element of the data matrix. The rows (columns) of the tiling are ordered such that similar rows (columns) are near each other. On the vertical and horizontal margins of the tiling there are hierarchical cluster trees. This cluster heat map is a synthesis of several different graphic displays developed by statisticians over more than a century. We locate the earliest sources of this display in late 19th century publications. And we trace a diverse 20th century statistical literature that provided a foundation for this most widely used of all bioinformatics displays.