Lisa A. Turner

Strategy Acquisition and Transfer among American and German Children: Environmental Influences on Metacognitive Development.

This study explored the differential effects of strategy training on German and American elementaryschool children and assessed the role of parents in the development of their childrens strategic behavior and metacognition. 184 German and 161 American children were pretested on memory and metamemory tasks. Children were then assigned to either an organizational strategy training condition or a control condition. All children were tested on the maintenance and far-transfer of the strategy and task-related metamemory 1 week following training. Parents completed questionnaires about strategy instruction in the home. Strategy maintenance and metacognition were reassessed 6 months following training. German children were more strategic than American children. Instructed children performed better than control children. German parents reported more instruction of strategies in the home. These data suggest that formal education is responsible for aspects of cognitive development that have sometimes been viewed as a function of age.

Students’ academic motivation: relations with parental warmth, autonomy granting, and supervision

In this investigation we assessed the relationships between perceptions of parenting and student’s academic motivation and success. College students completed a series of questionnaires assessing perceptions of parental warmth, autonomy granting, and supervision, and perceptions of academic control. Findings revealed different models for males and females. For females, perception of control was predicted by parental warmth and supervision. For males, only parental warmth was a significant predictor of perceptions of control. Perception of control predicted grade point average for both males and females. Parenting probably influences the development of motivational beliefs during childhood and adolescence and these beliefs continue to be important into the college years. Additionally, our findings of gender differences suggest that the effects of parenting may be moderated by the child’s gender.

Transsituational Characteristics of Metacognition

A consensus has emerged in recent years regarding the development and utilization of learning skills in early and middle childhood: Strategy use is limited by domain boundaries as well as by available knowledge within each domain (cf. Weinert & Kluwe, 1987). A comforting result of this consensus is that the commonplace failure to find strategy transfer—which has plagued the field of cognitive development for two decades (Borkowski & Cavanaugh, 1979; Campione & Brown, 1977)—is much less problematic. That is, the relentless search during the 1970s for the widespread generalization of learning skills is rendered less feasible and, perhaps less interesting, by research and theory on the domain-specificity of strategy use.

Attributional Retraining and the Teaching of Strategies

This article reviews the literature on strategy acquisition, use, and transfer with mentally retarded and learning disabled students. A model of metacognition is presented that integrates three components—Specific Strategy Knowledge, Metamemory Acquisition Procedures, and General Strategy Knowledge (including beliefs about the causes of successful performance)—in an attempt to explain some of the causes of individual differences in strategy use among educationally handicapped students. Two recent studies are presented that show how the retraining of attributional beliefs can be combined with other aspects of metacognitive instruction to enhance strategy transfer. Finally, implications of reshaping self-attributions for educational practice are discussed.

The Rehearsal Deficit Hypothesis

Publisher Summary This chapter presents evidence to support the rehearsal deficit hypothesis in mentally retarded individuals. Strategic behavior ranges from a failure to use rehearsal to the use of strategies that differ from those used by nonretarded individuals. The use of rehearsal seems to be a more fragile phenomenon in retarded groups than in comparable nonretarded groups. Both younger retarded and nonretarded individuals are less likely to use a repetition strategy when the task constrains the number of times the items may be viewed before recall, but the effect of this type of limitation is more severe for retarded individuals than nonretarded adolescents. Similarly, under some conditions study-time patterns similar to those used by nonretarded groups may be found for retarded groups, but only after exquisitely clear task instructions. Retarded individuals may show evidence of primacy effects, but in some cases a large number of trials on one task must be given, whereas primacy is evident in nonretarded groups with relatively few trials. When accuracy on sequences presented at different rates is compared for retarded groups, rate has an effect when relatively slow rates are included, whereas differences due to presentation rate are evident for nonretarded groups even when the rates are relatively fast. Retarded groups may maintain information during an unfilled retention interval, but their maintenance may not be as effective as in nonretarded groups, and it is apparently restricted by a small rehearsal set size.

The Efficacy of an Intimate Partner Violence Prevention Program with High-Risk Adolescent Girls: A Preliminary Test

This study examined the efficacy of a brief (four session) intimate partner violence (IPV) prevention program (Building a Lasting Love, Langhinrichsen-Rohling et al. 2005) that was designed to reduce the relationship violence of predominantly African American inner-city adolescent girls (n = 72) who were receiving teen pregnancy services. These high-risk girls were randomly assigned to the prevention program (n = 39) or waitlist control (n = 33) conditions. Implementation fidelity was documented. As predicted, girls who successfully completed the program (n = 24) reported significant reductions in their perpetration of psychological abuse toward their baby’s father as compared to the control (n = 23) participants. They also reported experiencing significantly less severe IPV victimization over the course of the program. Preliminary analyses indicated that avoidant attachment to one’s partner may be associated with less program-related change. These findings support the contention that brief IPV prevention programs can be targeted to selected groups of high-risk adolescents.

Romantic Attachment, Empathy, and the Broader Autism Phenotype among College Students

ABSTRACT Recent research suggests that mild autistic-like characteristics can be measured among relatives of individuals with autism and in the general population. These characteristics have been referred to as the broader autism phenotype (BAP), and include pragmatic language difficulties, aloofness, and rigidity. Evidence is growing to suggest that individuals with BAP encounter difficulties in their social interactions. Recent work demonstrates that college students scoring high on the BAP report more loneliness (Jobe & Williams White, 2007) and more interpersonal problems (Wainer, Ingersoll, & Hopwood, 2012). Because intimate relationships are important in development and are very salient in emerging adulthood, the authors examined the relation of the BAP to romantic attachment and empathy among young adults. Higher BAP scores were associated with lower empathy and higher attachment anxiety and avoidance. Specifically, pragmatic language difficulties were related to higher rates of avoidant attachment and this relationship was mediated by empathy. In contrast, pragmatic language deficits were directly related to anxious attachment.

Causal Attributions and Parental Attitudes toward Children with Disabilities in the United States and Pakistan

Researchers investigated the relationship between parental attributions for childrens disabilities and the quality of parent-child relationships, in both U.S. and Pakistani families. Parents of children with disabilities identified potential causes of the disability and rated their parent-child relationships. Factor analysis of the causal attributions resulted in 7 factors which became the subscales used to predict parent-child relationships. Findings indicate (a) Pakistani parents rated their relationships more negatively, (b) parents who rated “Something I Did” as an influential cause rated their parent-child relationships more negatively, and (c) parents who rated “Parents Age” as an influential cause rated their parent-child relationships more positively. More important, parent education potentially could decrease self-blame and improve the parent-child relationship for the parents and the children.

The Relationship Between Goal Orientation and Age Among Adolescents and Adults

Abstract According to C. S. Dweck (1986), students often approach an achievement situation in 1 of 2 ways: (a) from a learning orientation, which is characterized by a desire to acquire new skills and knowledge for the sake of learning; or (b) from a performance orientation, which is characterized by a desire to prove ones competence to others. In this investigation, the learning orientations of 199 college students ranging in age from 17 years to 59 years were assessed, because learning-oriented students tend to exhibit more adaptive achievement-oriented behaviors than their performance-oriented peers. It was found that older students were more likely to be learning oriented. If this is a replicable finding, it is possible that grouping students of varied ages together could support the development of a learning orientation in younger students.

Production anomalies (not strategic deficiencies) in mentally retarded individuals

Abstract The presuppositions of the question “Why are the mentally retarded strategically deficient?” were examined with a focus on definitions of the term “strategy” and “strategy deficiency.” It is shown how typical analyses of strategic behavior focus on the “problem of remembering” based on the experimenters conceptualization of optimum task performance. A new definition of a strategy is then suggested in which strategies are seen as attempts to solve the “problem of remembering” as understood by the person. It is also noted that strategy deficiencies have frequently been attributed to cognitive limitations of the individual. However, because strategy use varies with situation-related variables such as memory load and understanding of instructions, poor performance is more aptly characterized as a “production anomaly” that varies with task variables and the persons conceptualization of the task. By more clearly defining the range of strategic capabilities of mentally retarded individuals, their limitations will be better understood.