Daniel A. Wagner

Memories of Morocco: The influence of age, schooling, and environment on memory ☆

Abstract To what extent are models of memory general , in that they may be applied to children or to other cultural groups? In an attempt to answer this question, two experiments were undertaken in Morocco to investigate various cultural and experiential antecedents to memory development. A total of 384 children and young adults, ranging in age from 6 to 22 years, were tested in a design that contrasted schooled and nonschooled children in urban and rural environments. Three additional groups of subjects—Koranic students, Moroccan rug sellers, and University of Michigan students—were also studied because it was hypothesized that each might have particular “culture-specific” memory skills as a function of previous experience. A serial short-term recall task was used in Experiment I. Results showed that the recency effect or short-term store was generally invariant with age or experience. Control processes appeared to be a function of age, but only when coupled with schooling, and, to a lesser extent, urban environment. In Experiment II, a continuous recognition memory task was given with black and white photographs of Oriental rugs as stimuli. Forgetting rates were generally invariant with age and experience, while the acquisition parameter seemed to vary as a function of specific cultural experiences. Data from the three additional groups were useful in supporting the hypothesis of culture-specific memory skills. From Experiments I and II, and previous research, it was hypothesized that structural features of memory (e.g., short-term store and invariant forgetting rates) may be universal , while control processes or mnemonics in memory are probably culture-specific , or a function of a variety of experiential and cultural factors that surround the growing child.

Symmetric lenses

Lenses--bidirectional transformations between pairs of connected structures--have been extensively studied and are beginning to find their way into industrial practice. However, some aspects of their foundations remain poorly understood. In particular, most previous work has focused on the special case of asymmetric lenses, where one of the structures is taken as primary and the other is thought of as a projection, or view. A few studies have considered symmetric variants, where each structure contains information not present in the other, but these all lack the basic operation of composition. Moreover, while many domain-specific languages based on lenses have been designed, lenses have not been thoroughly explored from an algebraic perspective. We offer two contributions to the theory of lenses. First, we present a new symmetric formulation, based on complements, an old idea from the database literature. This formulation generalizes the familiar structure of asymmetric lenses, and it admits a good notion of composition. Second, we explore the algebraic structure of the space of symmetric lenses. We present generalizations of a number of known constructions on asymmetric lenses and settle some longstanding questions about their properties---in particular, we prove the existence of (symmetric monoidal) tensor products and sums and the non-existence of full categorical products or sums in the category of symmetric lenses. We then show how the methods of universal algebra can be applied to build iterator lenses for structured data such as lists and trees, yielding lenses for operations like mapping, filtering, and concatenation from first principles. Finally, we investigate an even more general technique for constructing mapping combinators, based on the theory of containers.

Adult Literacy: The Next Generation

~ n 1993,_the first report from the federa!ly funded .National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), the most comprehensive study of its kind, was released. The good news was that nearly 95% of adult Americans could read at a fourth-grade level or better, showing that illiteracy in its most basic form was relatively low, but the bad news was that nearly half of all adult Americans scored in the lowest two levels of literacy, levels that the National Educational Goals Panel (1994) has stated are well below what American workers need to be competitive in an increasingly global economy. 1 Although these findings shocked public opinion, research showed that it was possible, even likely, that America would continue to fail to achieve a fully literate society. For example, the NALS indicated that nearly 25% of Americas adults with an average of 10 years of formal schooling had only fourth-grade literacy skills or lower (Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993). In many ethnic minority groups, fewer than 50% of the children complete 10 of the compulsory 12 grades of schooling (National Center on Educational Statistics, 1993a). Low achievement in schools, early dropout from schools, along with the continued flow of poorly educated immigrants, increase the population of adults in need of further skills at least as fast as adult education programs attempt to reduce the size of this group through remediation and retraining. In other words, low-literate 2 Americans may now be seen as a chronic feature of the American educational landscape, with all the well-known statistical relationships with increased childrens school failure, lower worker productivity, crime, and welfare. 3 Fortunately, we know considerably more now than we did a decade or even a half decade ago about how to improve literacy in America. 4 This article focuses principally on the 1990s, which have seen a number of new and important studies that can provide guidance for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in the field of adult literacy. Seven areas, corresponding to key topics in the improvement of adult literacy services, are delineated; in each, we provide a brief analysis of major research findings, followed by a series of recommendations. The article concludes with a synthesis of the recent past and a prognosis for what we believe will be the next generation of adult literacy work in America.

Literacy and development: Rationales, myths, innovations, and future directions

Abstract Literacy and economic development have existed as terms that are inextricably linked in the literature, often with little examination. As one looks more closely at the rationales for this relationship, it becomes clear that much more needs to be known about the functions and uses of literacy in everyday life, how literacy is linked to productive activity and how literacy is learned and taught across the life-span. In order to achieve both understanding and improved literacy programming, it is essential that better methods of assessment and program evaluation be put into place. This paper reviews prior experience in assessment, with special attention to the use of literacy surveys, as well as some of the problems with international literacy statistics. The paper concludes with a discussion of innovations in literacy and policy alternatives in the year 2000 and beyond. Also provided is an extended reference list on the published literature in this area.

Differential privacy for collaborative security

Fighting global security threats with only a local view is inherently difficult. Internet network operators need to fight global phenomena such as botnets, but they are hampered by the fact that operators can observe only the traffic in their local domains. We propose a collaborative approach to this problem, in which operators share aggregate information about the traffic in their respective domains through an automated query mechanism. We argue that existing work on differential privacy and type systems can be leveraged to build a programmable query mechanism that can express a wide range of queries while limiting what can be learned about individual customers. We report on our progress towards building such a mechanism, and we discuss opportunities and challenges of the collaborative security approach.

Quality of education, comparability, and assessment choice in developing countries

Over the past decade, international development agencies have begun to emphasize the improvement of the quality (rather than simply quantity) of education in developing countries. This new focus has been paralleled by a significant increase in the use of educational assessments as a way to measure gains and losses in quality. As this interest in assessment has grown, low‐income countries have begun to adopt and adapt international and other assessments for a variety of uses, including the comparability of national quality with other countries, improved ways of measuring reading achievement and further attempts to reach marginalized populations within a country. The present paper reviews a number of international, national and ‘hybrid’ assessments, and considers their merits in terms of how learning is measured, as well as their credibility, sampling and scaling methodologies. The new hybrid assessments, for example, provide innovative opportunities for early intervention for children in their local languages. They also put a premium on local validity over international comparability. The review concludes that there is no single assessment with a dominant scientific superiority, nor is strict comparability across populations or nations a requirement. Rather, different assessments have different policy and practical purposes, and can be used in important and differing ways to improve educational quality. Educational decision makers working in developing countries have important assessment needs and priorities, and will have to choose carefully in order to address them.

World Literacy: Research and Policy in the EFA Decade

This article reviews research on literacy and makes some educated guesses about literacy research and policy in the current decade and beyond. Issues addressed include defining literacy, literacy acquisition, retention of literacy, and consequences of literacy. The article concludes with some suggestions on future literacy programs in the 1990s, the EFA decade.

The myth of literacy relapse: Literacy retention among Moroccan primary school leavers☆

Abstract The issue of literacy retention is central to the educational policy concerning of most developing countries. It has been variously suggested that 4–6 years of primary education may serve as an inoculation against ‘relapse’ into illiteracy in the Third World. This paper reports on one of the first longitudinal studies designed to address this question, by investigating the nature of literacy and cognitive retention in a sample of 72 adolescents two years following fifth grade departure from primary school in Morocco. The present study found that these school leavers, when reassessed two years later, showed a significant increase in performance in first literacy (Arabic), modest gains in second literacy (French), no change in cognitive skills, and a decrement in math skill. Furthermore, urban leavers gained more literacy than rural leavers, and girls more than boys. The present findings do not support the hypothesis of literacy ‘relapse’ or loss of academic/cognitive skills after five grades of primary schooling. It was also found that girls retained more academic skills than boys, but were much less likely to be employed, a finding which calls into question certain claims about the impact of schooled knowledge and literacy on employment in developing countries.

The debate on learning assessments in developing countries

Over the past decade, international and national education agencies have begun to emphasize the improvement of the quality (rather than quantity) of education in developing countries. This trend has been paralleled by a significant increase in the use of educational assessments as a way to measure gains and losses in quality of learning. As interest in assessment has grown, low-income countries have begun to adopt and adapt international and other assessments for a variety of uses, including the comparability of national quality with other countries, improved ways of measuring reading achievement, and further attempts to reach marginalized populations within a country. The present group of papers provides multiple perspectives on the debate currently underway about the best approaches to create and use learning assessments in low-income countries.

Ontogeny of the Ponzo Illusion: Effects of Age, Schooling, and Environment

Abstract Subjects were 384 Moroccan males (age range 6–22 yrs.), divided into 16 equal groups, according to the factorial design: age (4) x schooling (2) x environment (2). Subjects were tested on four Ponzo configurations (differing in contextual information) from Leibowitz eta/. (1969), the Ponzo perspective stimulus from Segall et al. (1966), the CEFT from Witkin et at. (1971), and a measure of pictorial depth perception. Individual measures of contact with mass-media and urban life were collected on each subject. Analyses indicated that all main factors of age, schooling, and environment played important, and differing, roles in inducing illusion susceptibility. Piagets (1969) theory of primary and secondary illusions was found useful in understanding the results of the Ponzo configurations used in the study. Primary illusion configurations were found to be relatively insensitive to experiential variables, and illusion susceptibility decreased with chronological age. In contrast, secondary illusion c...