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Background: Phonological processing skills have been found to contribute to spelling development across different orthographies; however, less is known about the role of orthographic knowledge. This longitudinal study explores the contribution of phonological and orthographic knowledge to spelling development in a semi-transparent orthography (Swedish) across a period of 10 years. Methods: A group of Swedish speaking children were assessed on phonological recoding (phonological choice-task), orthographic knowledge (choice-task) and spelling (dictation task) in primary school (grade 2, age 8, total N = 99), secondary school (grade 8, age 14, N = 99) and again in upper secondary school (year 2, age 17, N = 79). Furthermore, spelling in a natural writing assignment was collected in upper secondary school. Spelling scores from grade 8 (dictation) and year 2 in upper secondary school (dictation and text) were included as dependent variables in three sets of hierarchical regression analyses. In the first step spelling performance in grade 2 was included to control for the autoregressive effect. In the second step, orthographic knowledge and phonological recoding from grade 2 were entered into the model in order to test for the longitudinal prediction. Results: Test scores within and across ages were significantly correlated in bivariate analysis. Regression analysis revealed that orthographic knowledge in grade 2 was a unique longitudinal predictor of spelling performance across time-points (secondary and upper secondary school) and assessment formats (dictation and text), beyond the contribution of the control variables. Conclusions: This study confirms the role of early orthographic knowledge in Swedish spelling development throughout the school years assessed in standardized dictation tasks as well as in naturalistic writing assignments.

Research on human causal induction has shown that people have general prior assumptions about causal strength and about how causes interact with the background. We propose that these prior assumptions about the parameters of causal systems do not only manifest themselves in estimations of causal strength or the selection of causes but also when deciding between alternative causal structures. In three experiments, we requested subjects to choose which of two observable variables was the cause and which the effect. We found strong evidence that learners have interindividually variable but intraindividually stable priors about causal parameters that express a preference for causal determinism (sufficiency or necessity; Experiment 1). These priors predict which structure subjects preferentially select. The priors can be manipulated experimentally (Experiment 2) and appear to be domain-general (Experiment 3). Heuristic strategies of structure induction are suggested that can be viewed as simplified implementations of the priors.

This article examines the acquisition of embedded verb placement in Swedish children, focusing on Neg-V and V-Neg order. It is proposed that a principle of economy of movement creates an overuse of V-Neg order in embedded clauses and that the low frequency of the target-consistent Neg-V order in child-directed speech obstructs children from revising their initial hypothesis about the verb placement in embedded clauses, creating a delay in the acquisition of Neg-V. However, it is also demonstrated that, despite the lack of clear evidence for the Neg-V order in Swedish children's input, the children distinguish between different types of embedded clauses in the acquisition of Neg-V and V-Neg order already between the age of 3 and 4 years, supporting a microparametric approach to language acquisition. Comparing child-directed Swedish and child-directed German, it is further proposed that the presence of clear evidence for verb-final in the input to German children aids error-free acquisition of embedded verb placement in German.

A heavily disputed question of moral philosophy is whether spatial distance between agent and victim is normatively relevant for the degree of obligation to help strangers in need. In this research, we focus on the associated descriptive question whether increased distance does in fact reduce individuals' sense of helping obligation. One problem with empirically answering this question is that physical proximity is typically confounded with other factors, such as informational directness, shared group membership, or increased efficaciousness. In a series of 5 experiments, we show that distance per se does not influence people's moral intuitions when it is isolated from such confounds. We support our claims with both frequentist and Bayesian statistics. We relate these findings to philosophical arguments concerning the normative relevance of distance and to psychological theories linking distance cues to higher level social cognition. The effects of joint versus separate evaluation paradigms on moral judgments are also discussed. (Contains 5 tables, 3 figures and 2 footnotes.)

This article addresses the changes in the Commission on Rehabilitation Counselor Certification's 2010 "Code of Professional Ethics for Rehabilitation Counselors" as they relate to Section C: Advocacy and Accessibility. Ethical issues are identified and discussed in relation to advocacy skills and to advocacy with, and on behalf of, the client; to attitudinal barriers as well as barriers to access; and to referral accessibility. Other areas of discussion include knowledge of benefit systems, physical and service accessibility in counseling practice, and confidentiality in regard to advocacy counseling.

A. P. Blaisdell, K. Sawa, K. J. Leising, and M. R. Waldmann (2006) reported evidence for causal reasoning in rats. After learning through Pavlovian observation that Event A (a light) was a common cause of Events X (an auditory stimulus) and F (food), rats predicted F in the test phase when they observed Event X as a cue but not when they generated X by a lever press. Whereas associative accounts predict associations between X and F regardless of whether X is observed or generated by an action, causal-model theory predicts that the intervention at test should lead to discounting of A, the regular cause of X. The authors report further tests of causal-model theory. One key prediction is that full discounting should be observed only when the alternative cause is viewed as deterministic and independent of other events, 2 hallmark features of actions but not necessarily of arbitrary events. Consequently, the authors observed discounting with only interventions but not other observable events (Experiments 1 and 2). Moreover, rats were capable of flexibly switching between observational and interventional predictions (Experiment 3). Finally, discounting occurred on the very first test trial (Meta-Analysis). These results confirm causal-model theory but refute associative accounts. (Contains 4 figures and 3 tables.)

This case study involves investigation of freshman students' abilities to engage in the pursuit and appreciation of complex thinking through their study of comedy and laughter in a Freshman Seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We offer an analysis of students' reflections on their confrontation with complexity as they attempt to formulate theories of these phenomena, and describe how this confrontation changes the students' understanding of both the subject matter and their learning process. In investigating these changes systematically, we demonstrate the value of a methodology of close reading supported by theories of learning (e.g. John Dewey's) for course design and evaluation, and seek to add to our growing understanding of the place of theory in the scholarship of teaching and learning. (Contains 3 notes.)

In everyday life, people typically observe fragments of causal networks. From this knowledge, people infer how novel combinations of causes they may never have observed together might behave. I report on 4 experiments that address the question of how people intuitively integrate multiple causes to predict a continuously varying effect. Most theories of causal induction in psychology and statistics assume a bias toward linearity and additivity. In contrast, these experiments show that people are sensitive to cues biasing various integration rules. Causes that refer to intensive quantities (e.g., taste) or to preferences (e.g., liking) bias people toward averaging the causal influences, whereas extensive quantities (e.g., strength of a drug) lead to a tendency to add. However, the knowledge underlying these processes is fallible and unstable. Therefore, people are easily influenced by additional task-related context factors. These additional factors include the way data are presented, the difficulty of the inference task, and transfer from previous tasks. The results of the experiments provide evidence for causal model and related theories, which postulate that domain-general representations of causal knowledge are influenced by abstract domain knowledge, data-driven task factors, and processing difficulty.

The standard approach guiding research on the relationship between categories and causality views categories as reflecting causal relations in the world. We provide evidence that the opposite direction also holds: categories that have been acquired in previous learning contexts may influence subsequent causal learning. In three experiments we show that identical causal learning input yields different attributions of causal capacity depending on the pre-existing categories to which the learning exemplars are assigned. There is a strong tendency to continue to use old conceptual schemes rather than switch to new ones even when the old categories are not optimal for predicting the new effect, and when they were motivated by goals that differed from the present context of causal discovery. However, we also found that the use of prior categories is dependent on the match between categories and causal effect. Whenever the category labels suggest natural kinds which can be plausibly related to the causal effects, transfer was observed. When the categories were arbitrary, or could not be plausibly related to the causal effect learners abandoned the categories, and used different categories to predict the causal effect.

The ability to derive predictions for the outcomes of potential actions from observational data is one of the hallmarks of true causal reasoning. We present four learning experiments with deterministic and probabilistic data showing that people indeed make different predictions from causal models, whose parameters were learned in a purely observational learning phase, depending on whether learners believe that an event within the model has been merely observed ("seeing") or was actively manipulated ("doing"). The predictions reflect sensitivity both to the structure of the causal models and to the size of their parameters. This competency is remarkable because the predictions for potential interventions were very different from the patterns that had actually been observed. Whereas associative and probabilistic theories fail, recent developments of causal Bayes net theories provide tools for modeling this competency.

The everyday operations of a school district depend on a network of people, including students, teachers, staff, and administrators. However, the ancillary services staff are really responsible for making the school day run smoothly. They are often the first employees that students see in the morning, either on the school bus or in the cafeteria, and they are often the last people students see before going home for the day. They also maintain the condition and structure of buildings to ensure safety and to provide a comfortable learning environment. Supporting all these departments--and the diverse nature of the roles of a district's ancillary staff--can be challenging for school business managers. This article explains how Kings Local School District in Kings Mill, Ohio uses a web-based automated management system to track and manage mandatory tasks and training until completion: accident reporting requirements, federal and state safety compliance tasks, and staff training. When an action is necessary, the software alerts the administrators who can remain hands-off until such notification. The data available through the system allow administrators to change procedures when necessary to provide the best possible learning environment. Kings Local's automated management system ensures that all responsibilities, whether mandated or not, are completed and the district is providing a safe and comfortable learning environment for students.

Based on the assumption that dental schools need to consider applicants with diverse backgrounds, a study was undertaken of the relationship between undergraduate majors and performance in dental school. Liberal arts majors performed as well in dental school and as well or better on licensing examinations as science majors. (Author/MSE)