Kevin F. Miller

Psychology's Role in Mathematics and Science Education

Improving mathematics and science education in the United States has been a matter of national concern for over half a century. Psychology has a vital role to play in this enterprise. In this article, the authors review the kinds of contributions that psychology can make in four areas: (a) early understanding of mathematics, (b) understanding of science, (c) social and motivational aspects of involvement in mathematics and science, and (d) assessment of learning in mathematics and science. They also examine challenges to psychologys playing a central and constructive role and make recommendations for overcoming those challenges.

Orthography and the development of reading processes: an eye-movement study of Chinese and English.

As children become proficient readers, there are substantial changes in the eye movements that subserve reading. Some of these changes reflect universal developmental factors while others may be specific to a particular writing system. This study attempts to disentangle effects of universal and script-dependent factors by comparing the development of eye movements of English and Chinese speakers. Third-grade (English: mean age = 9.1 years, n = 23; Chinese: mean age = 9.4 years, n = 25), fifth-grade (English: mean age = 11.2 years, n = 30; Chinese: mean age = 11.4, n = 25), and undergraduate students (English: n = 26; Chinese: n = 30) read stories in their native language while their eye movements were recorded. Results show a mixture of orthography-dependent factors with others that are remarkably parallel across these two very different writing systems. Orthographic effects are also more pronounced for children than for skilled adult readers. Implications for theories of reading eye movements and reading development are discussed.

The Answer Is Only the Beginning: Extended Discourse in Chinese and U.S. Mathematics Classrooms

The authors investigated the use of a particular discourse practice--continued questioning and discussion after a correct answer was provided, which they called extended discourse--and examined the frequency and content of this practice in 17 Chinese and 14 U.S. elementary mathematics classes. They found that the Chinese classrooms had more, and spent more time in, extended discourse than did the U.S. classrooms. The content of these episodes differed: The Chinese classrooms focused more on rules and procedures than did the U.S. classrooms, whereas the U.S. classrooms focused more on computation than did the Chinese classrooms. These findings shed light on interesting practices of discourse in both countries and also have implications for current U.S. reforms in mathematics pedagogy.

Automatic classification of activities in classroom discourse

Classroom discourse is the primary medium through which teaching and learning occur. Managed skillfully, it can provide an opportunity for students to develop their understanding and to profit from the ideas of their peers and the teacher. Yet it is difficult for teachers to be mindful of the nature and distribution of classroom discourse at the same time as they juggle other instructional concerns. It is possible to record, transcribe, and analyze classroom discourse, but it is not possible to do this quickly enough to give a teacher timely feedback. We report on the development and validation of an automated system for recording and analyzing aspects of classroom discourse that can result in timely feedback. Based on the LENA system, it aims to identify three common discourse activities: teacher lecturing, whole class discussion and student group work. The system consists of a speech processing module (diarisation performed by the LENA system) and an activity detection module that detects the discourse activities by using classification analysis. Results showed that our automatic detection of discourse activities converged well with those of human coders. The system enables timely and relatively inexpensive generation of a classroom discourse profile, which helps teachers to visualize and potentially improve their classroom discourse management skills.

A good match is hard to find. Comment on Mayer, Tajika, and Stanley (1991)

R. E. Mayer, H. Tajika, and C. Stanley (1991) reported that U.S. students scored higher on problem-solving tasks than their Japanese peers when matched on computation skills. Contrary to Mayer et al., we believe that these results are artifacts that reveal little about the nature of Japanese and U.S. education. Drawing on work by P. E. Meehl (1970), we use Mayer et al.s study to illustrate pitfalls of matching cases in an attempt to create equivalent groups of subjects. Besides well-known regression effects, matching (whether by selecting subjects or by statistical correction) is subject to three major criticisms: (a) It produces systematically unmatched samples with respect to other meaningful variables, (b) it results in unrepresentative samples from which it is hard to draw meaningful generalizations, and (c) causal interpretation becomes nearly impossible

Let SMIL be your umbrella: software tools for transcribing, coding, and presenting digital video in behavioral research.

Video-based techniques have become central to many areas of social science research, although their use has been limited by the expense and complexity of tools for working with video information. New standards for the representation of digital video make the manipulation of video for observational research a far less time-consuming and expensive process than it once was. We provide an overview of SMIL, a cross-platform markup standard, and guidelines on how it can be used to edit, synchronize, caption, and present video clips with no need to modify the original digital video files. We also presentTransTool, a free Windows program that can generate SMIL files for playing video clips of interest along with captions and codes. TransTool can also be used as a transcribing and coding tool that synchronizes video and text such as transcripts. These tools greatly facilitate tasks such as creating video events with multilanguage transcripts, showing synchronized views of the same event, quickly extracting clips from longer video files, and incorporating video clips into presentations and web pages. Example SMIL files and the TransTool program can be downloaded from http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~kmiller/smil.

Reliance on Orthography and Phonology in Reading of Chinese: A Developmental Study.

Background Disruptions of reading processes due to text substitutions can measure how readers use lexical information. Methods With eye-movement recording, children and adults viewed sentences with either identical, orthographically similar, homophonic or unrelated substitutions of the first characters in target words. To the extent that readers rely on orthographic or phonological cues, substitutions that contain such cues should cause less disruption reading than do unrelated substitutions. Results On pretarget words, there was a reliable reduction in gaze duration due to homophonic substitution only for children. On target words, we observed reliable recovery effects due to orthographic similarity for adults. On post-target words, adults had better orthographic-based and phonological-based recovery abilities than children. Conclusions The combination of eye movement recording and the error detection paradigm offers a novel implicit paradigm for studying reading development: during sentence reading, beginning readers of Chinese may rely on phonological mediation, while skilled readers have more direct access to semantics from orthography. Highlights What is already known about this topic There is little evidence for early phonological activation during the reading of Chinese sentences among skilled Chinese readers There is a rich body of evidence supporting the view that phonological information is activated very early in alphabetic scripts, as indexed by shorter fixation durations when useful phonological information is present. What this paper adds Chinese beginning readers have early parafoveal activation of phonology during the silent reading of Chinese sentences, as indexed by the parafovea-on-fovea effect in the homophonic substitution condition. The early activation of phonology diminishes with the development of reading skills. Implications for theory, policy or practice The phonological parafovea-on-fovea effect was revealed during the silent reading of Chinese sentences for beginning readers. Chinese children may rely on phonological codes while skilled readers have more direct access to semantics from orthography. The teaching of phonological aspects of Chinese orthography is very important for beginning readers

How Listening to Music Affects Reading: Evidence From Eye Tracking.

The current research looked at how listening to music affects eye movements when college students read natural passages for comprehension. Two studies found that effects of music depend on both frequency of the word and dynamics of the music. Study 1 showed that lexical and linguistic features of the text remained highly robust predictors of looking times, even in the music condition. However, under music exposure, (a) readers produced more rereading, and (b) gaze duration on words with very low frequency were less predicted by word length, suggesting disrupted sublexical processing. Study 2 showed that these effects were exacerbated for a short period as soon as a new song came into play. Our results suggested that word recognition generally stayed on track despite music exposure and that extensive rereading can, to some extent, compensate for disruption. However, an irrelevant auditory signal may impair sublexical processing of low-frequency words during first-pass reading, especially when the auditory signal changes dramatically. These eye movement patterns are different from those observed in some other scenarios in which reading comprehension is impaired, including mindless reading.