Julie M. Hupp

Heroes Don't Cheat: An Examination of Academic Dishonesty and Students' Views on Why Professors Don't Report Cheating

Some students do not cheat. Students high in measures of bravery, honesty, and empathy, our defining characteristics of heroism, report less past cheating than other students. These student heroes also reported that they would feel more guilt if they cheated and also reported less intent to cheat in the future than nonheroes. We find general consensus between students and professors as to reasons for the nonreporting of cheating, suggesting a general impression of insufficient evidence, lack of courage, and denial. Suggested interventions in academia are based in positive psychology and an understanding of academic heroes.

Evidence for a domain-general mechanism underlying the suffixation preference in language

The ability to distinguish between an inflectional derivation of a target word, which is a variant of the target, and a completely new word is an important task of language acquisition. In an attempt to explain the ability to solve this problem, it has been proposed that the beginning of the word is its most psychologically salient portion. However, it is not clear whether this phenomenon is specific to language. The three reported experiments address this issue. Experiments 1 and 2 established that suffixation-type preferences occur in language and in domains outside of language and that it is plausible that this same mechanism could account for alternative types of inflectional morphology. Experiment 3 indicated that the suffixation preference is both flexible and transferable across domains. In combination, these experiments suggest that the suffixation preference is driven by a cognitive mechanism that is both domain-general and flexible in nature.

Speech Priming: Evidence for Rate Persistence in Unscripted Speech.

Previous research has shown evidence for priming of rate in scripted speech. Two experiments examined the persistence of rate in production of unscripted picture descriptions. In Experiment 1, speakers heard and repeated priming sentences presented at a fast or slow rate and in a passive or active form. Speakers then described a new picture. The timing of their productions reflected the timing of the prime. In Experiment 2, participants heard but did not repeat the priming sentences. As in Experiment 1, their picture descriptions reflected the rate of the priming sentences. These experiments demonstrate persistence of rate, an acoustic dimension related to prosody, in unscripted speech. The persistence in timing may provide a social advantage and help to coordinate conversation.

Speech priming: An examination of rate and syntactic persistence in preschoolers

Interactional coordination is important for conversational competence. For example, the syntactic form and rate of perceived speech can influence future productions in adults. Previous work has shown that children are similarly primed by syntax. This experiment demonstrates that syntactic priming and rate priming exist simultaneously in children. Participants (4- and 5-years-old) alternated between listening to priming sentences that described visual scenes and producing their own descriptions of similar scenes. The priming sentences varied in rate (fast and slow) and syntactic structure (active and passive). Childrens sentences reflected the timing and syntactic structure of the primes, and there were developmental differences in their rate persistence.

Death Sentences: A Content Analysis of Children's Death Literature

A multidimensional concept of death must include biological, sociocultural, and emotional components. Children glean information about death in many ways, one of which is through books. In this study, the authors compared the 3 dimensions of deathrelated information (irreversibility, inevitability, nonfunctionality) in 24 young childrens picture books and 16 older childrens storybooks. In these death-themed childrens books, the primary focus was on emotional aspects of death and grieving. Biological facts were more likely to appear in picture books than in storybooks. The authors offer speculation on the impact of childrens books for use with bereaved children.

Active Learning through Role Playing: Virtual Babies in a Child Development Course.

Abstract The authors designed an active learning project for a child development course in which students apply core concepts to a hypothetical baby they “raise” during the term. Students applied developmental topics to their unique, developing child. The project fostered student learning and enthusiasm for the material. The projects versatility makes it easily adaptable to a wide variety of courses and formats depending on instructor objectives or student population. Furthermore, the project avoids obstacles that commonly underlie instructor reluctance when considering the implementation of role-play assignments.

Learning to Learn: From Within-Modality to Cross-Modality Transfer during Infancy.

One critical aspect of learning is the ability to apply learned knowledge to new situations. This ability to transfer is often limited, and its development is not well understood. The current research investigated the development of transfer between 8 and 16 months of age. In Experiment 1, 8- and 16-month-olds (who were established to have a preference to the beginning of a visual sequence) were trained to attend to the end of a sequence. They were then tested on novel visual sequences. Results indicated transfer of learning, with both groups changing baseline preferences as a result of training. In Experiment 2, participants were trained to attend to the end of a visual sequence and were then tested on an auditory sequence. Unlike Experiment 1, only older participants exhibited transfer of learning by changing baseline preferences. These findings suggest that the generalization of learning becomes broader with development, with transfer across modalities developing later than transfer within a modality.

Demonstration of the shape bias without label extension.

Existing shape bias research has determined that children generally extend object labels to novel instances on the basis of shape, and this typically occurs by around age 2.5. This research was conducted to further examine the nature of this bias during the second year of life, and determined that by using a more sensitive measure (novelty preference looking time) an emerging shape bias can be found as early as 14 months of age. In addition, demonstration of the shape bias in the current experiment appears to be unrelated to the 50 count noun marker.

An Examination of Academic Misconduct Intentions and the Ineffectiveness of Syllabus Statements

This experiment uses quantitative and qualitative measures to address the effect of two syllabus statements on academic misconduct: one based on prohibitions and one on academic integrity. Students expressed favorable attitudes toward the statements, showed an increase in guilt compared to a control group, but showed no decrease in intentions to cheat. Including only a standard academic misconduct statement in ones syllabus is not sufficient to alter behavior, which should be acknowledged by faculty.

That's a Boy's Toy: Gender-Typed Knowledge in Toddlers as a Function of Mother's Marital Status

ABSTRACT A child who is highly gender schematic readily uses gender when processing new information. In the current study, we examined whether and how family structure predicts a childs level of gender-typed knowledge (as assessed by a gender-stereotype sorting task) once the category of gender is in place (as assessed by a gender-labeling task). It was predicted that children from more “traditional” family structures (married mothers) would have more gender-typed knowledge compared to children from less traditional families (unmarried mothers). Moreover, we explored if this relationship would be related to, at least in part, the greater frequency of androgynous behaviors (i.e., both masculine and feminine household activities) an unmarried mother performs. Twenty-eight children (age 2 to 3) were tested at local childcare centers. The mother of each child reported her marital status as well as how often she engaged in stereotypically masculine and feminine behaviors. As expected, mothers’ marital status was associated with childrens level of gender-typed knowledge, such that children with unmarried mothers had less gender-typed knowledge, in part due to the unmarried mothers greater frequency of androgynous behaviors. Implications for childrens acquisition of gender-related stereotypes and the possible benefit of having mothers model both masculine and feminine behaviors are discussed.