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The more-than-human turn in early childhood education has highlighted the relevance of children's intra-actions with their environment, as well as the multiple ways in which worlds and literacies emerge in them. The rejection of representationalism as the single source of knowledge leads to the consideration of affect, embodiment, memories, sound and movement as ways of knowing. The ways in which they manifest in a school context deserve close attention to the tiny details of literacy events. Our research presents a diffractive reading of an event in a school classroom, aiming to understand human and more-than-human intra-actions in this context, the re-configurations of time, space and matter, and the ways in which children articulate entanglements with texts and bodies. We focus on the intra-actions of a seven-year old child with a photo of his favourite videogame and the ways in which affect and memory emerge. The child's sounds and movements, the researcher, the photo and the space become entangled to re-configure time, space and matter. Our analysis provides an insight into an event often occurring in schools. We offer some clues to understand it as part of the language and literacy practices of children, and pose the necessity of reconsidering the usual concept of literacy in school.

Previous literature has suggested the existence of a close relationship between individuals' intellectual abilities and their cognitive profile, understood as their performance in tasks tapping into the different cognitive domains. This relationship has typically been discussed in populations characterized as having high intellectual abilities, as is the case of gifted children and adolescents. In this study, the cognitive profile in domains of memory, attention, coordination, perception, and reasoning of a group of gifted children and adolescents was contrasted with a control group similar in age distribution, gender and socioeconomic level but with normotypical development. The results indicated that participants in the gifted group scored higher than those in the control group in all cognitive domains. The differences in cognitive abilities were not consistent across all areas, meaning that some cognitive abilities did not show significant differences, while others did. These results help to identify a more precise cognitive profile of gifted individuals, yielding a better understanding of the relationship between intelligence and cognitive abilities. The study provides evidence that allows delving into the most differential and characteristic aspects of giftedness.

Purpose: The Basque Country has been suffering political conflict and human rights´ violation for decades, tearing the social fabric. Human rights and peace education carried out through the testimony of the victims and their memory about this recent violent past can play an essential role in reestablishing the social understanding. This article aims to make known the experience of Adi-Adian initiative developed with the victims of the politic violence in the Teacher Training School of the University of Basque Country and asses its effectiveness in terms of critical thinking and empathy. Design/methodology/approach: This research is based on group discussion and personal surveys focused on students' feedback as a suitable method to analyze the way of thinking of students, their feelings and opinions about the violence. Findings: The results indicate that these initiatives implemented at school might be suitable to achieve the goals of human rights and peace education and deepen on democratic citizenship.

Research on experiences of gender and racial discrimination among young, racialized college women in Europe is scarce, particularly in Spain where Black women have traditionally had a minority presence in universities. As a result of processes of social mobility, these women are now occupying higher education spaces to an unprecedented extent, where they are becoming increasingly visible. These women's experiences of gender and racial discrimination throughout the education cycle are invisible. The aim of this article is to explore the personal experiences of racialization and discrimination among Black female college students in southern Spain. Twelve in-depth interviews were conducted and analysed to shed light on the experiences of young Black female students in predominantly white educational institutions. The stories of these women show that gender and race intersect and are constructed simultaneously through interactions with their mostly white peers. These women display responses of significant resilience.

Our preferences and evaluations are often affected by contextual factors. One unavoidable context is language. We used an evaluative conditioning (EC) paradigm (pairing neutral stimuli with emotional or neutral stimuli) to investigate whether our evaluations are equally conditioned in a first (L1) and a second language (L2). An EC effect was observed in both languages, however, if in L1 it occurred independently of recollection of the pairing of the stimuli, in second language memory seemed to play a larger role. These results were confirmed using a more implicit measure (memory confusion paradigm). Overall, the results suggest that conditioning occurs both in L1 and L2 but is weaker and more sensitive to memory of the emotional stimuli in L2. The study is the first demonstration that EC is modulated by language and converges with recent findings showing that linguistic context can modulate our behaviours.

Objective: To describe whether there are stereotypes towards older adults by the group of teachers in initial training. Method: The approach was quantitative and not probabilistic through a statistical study with university students preparing to become primary school teachers in the Spanish education system. This training profile includes adult and senior education as an additional professional opportunity. The sample (n=110) has been selected among students of the Primary Education Degree. We have applied the Negative Stereotype Questionnaire for the Elderly (CENVE) and the Educational Stereotype Questionnaire for the Elderly (CEEAM). Results: We suggest that the respondents present some degree of stereotypes towards older adults; the stereotype is greater when we question the deterioration of memory and cognitive impairment in general. However, the data are positive, except that in the case of the health factor we found two items in which respondents reported a higher level of stereotyping. Conclusions: Based on these results, we conclude that it is necessary to work on stereotypical perceptions, especially with students pursuing careers related to education, since their professional performance can lead them to develop their teaching careers in adult and senior education. The education professions must be involved in improving quality of life, active aging, and lifelong learning through professional practice and the elimination of personal and societal stereotypes.

(1) Background: An abacus is an instrument used to perform different arithmetic operations. The objective was to analyze the benefits of mathematical calculations made with an abacus to improve the concentration, attention, memory, perceptive attitudes, and creativity cognitive abilities of primary school students. (2) Methods: A total of 65 children, aged 7-11 years (8.49 ± 1.65) participated in this randomized controlled clinical trial. The children were randomly distributed into a control group (n = 34) and experimental group (n = 31). The questionnaires used were the D2 test to measure attention and concentration, the Difference Perception Test (FACE-R) test for the perception of differences, the test of immediate auditory memory (AIM), and the test to evaluate creative intelligence (CREA). (3) Results: No significant differences were found between both groups before the intervention. Significant improvements were observed in the cognitive parameters of concentration, memory, perceptive attitudes, and creativity after the intervention, using the abacus, with respect to the control group. (4) Conclusions: It is demonstrated that a calculation program based on the use of the abacus for 8 weeks has beneficial effects on the cognitive capacities of concentration, immediate auditory memory, perceptive attitudes, and creativity. In addition, the benefits of using the abacus to improve cognitive attitudes are reported.

This case study describes an art therapy intervention with a client diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease who was coping with grief. The course of fifteen sessions included three phases: body awareness, grief emotions, and grief acceptance. The positive changes parallel ways that art therapy can benefit older adults by promoting communication, accessing memories, reconstructing identity, and supporting creativity.

There is a strong ethical component to historical memory which means that no group should be left out. Hence the need to recover the voice of half the population, women, so often rendered invisible by the narrative. In more traditional education history this silence is even more apparent. University education museums, supported by the pertinent legal regulations, are duty-bound to rescuing, interpreting and exhibiting a historical-educational heritage that takes them into account. To this end, it is essential to use a gender perspective in these institutions, aiming for more critical, inclusive and realistic memory policies. In this study, supported by a descriptive qualitative research methodology, we evaluate to what extent and how the eight Spanish university education museums are working actively for equality and non-discrimination. We do this by means of a semi-structured diagnostic questionnaire, supported by personal interviews with those who coordinate these museums and by the analysis of their regulations and websites. The results show that, for half of them, this task continues to be a pending challenge in many respects. However, the sensitivity on this issue of the other half is striking, as shown by the range of practices and decisive actions they have undertaken, and which, if shared, could help to improve everyone's situation.

Previous research with adults has shown mixed findings regarding the correlation between specificity and detailedness within autobiographical memories, and their associations with depressive symptoms. However, minimal research has tested these links in adolescents, despite the importance of this developmental period. The present investigation examined these associations in a sample of young community adolescents in Spain (N = 768; M[subscript age] = 11.04) by replicating methodology of existing studies. Cued recall was measured using the Autobiographical Memory Test and responses were subsequently coded for specificity (whether the memory referred to an event that lasted less than 24 hours) and amount of detail (time, place, sensory-perceptual information, etc.). Depressive symptoms were assessed using the Patient Reported Outcomes Measure Information System (PROMIS) measure. Two linear mixed models showed that young adolescents who retrieved more detail recalled a greater number of specific memories and that specific memories included a greater amount of detail than nonspecific memories. However, neither memory specificity nor detail were associated with depressive symptoms. Our findings suggest that, in a population of young adolescents, memory specificity and detail are distinct, but interrelated, constructs. Further longitudinal research should examine whether specificity and detail predict depressive symptoms differentially over the course of adolescence; possible mediators and moderators within this association should also be investigated.

Background: A growing body of work shows that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) perform poorly on statistical word learning (SWL) tasks, consistent with the predictions of the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis that predicts that procedural memory is impaired in DLD. To date, however, SWL performance has not been compared across linguistically heterogeneous populations of children with DLD. Aims: To compare SWL performance in a group of age, sex and non-verbal IQ-matched Catalan-Spanish and English-speaking children with and without DLD. Methods & Procedures: Two cohorts of children: (1) 35 Catalan-Spanish-speaking children with DLD (M[subscript age] = 8;7 years) and 35 age/sex-matched typical developing (TD) children (M[subscript age] = 8;9 years), and (2) 24 English-speaking children with DLD (M[subscript age] = 9;1 years) and 19 age/sex matched TD controls (M[subscript age] = 8;9 years) completed the tone version of a SWL task from Evans et al. (2009). Children listened to a tone language in which transitional probabilities within tone words were higher than those between words. Outcomes & Results: For both Catalan-Spanish and English cohorts, overall performance for the children with DLD was poorer than that of the TD controls regardless of the child's native language. Item analysis revealed that children with DLD had difficulty tracking statistical information and using transitional probability to discover tone word boundaries within the input. For both the Catalan-Spanish and English-speaking children, SWL accounted for a significant amount of unique variance in Receptive and Expressive vocabulary. Likelihood ratio analysis revealed that for both Catalan-Spanish and English cohorts, children having performance [less than or equal to] 45% on the SWL task had an extremely high degree of likelihood of having DLD. The analysis also revealed that for the Catalan-Spanish and English-speaking children, scores of [greater than or equal to] 75% and [greater than or equal to] 70%, respectively, were highly likelihood to be children with normal language abilities. Conclusions & Implications: The findings add to a pattern suggesting that SWL is a mechanism that children rely on to acquire vocabulary. The results also suggest that SWL deficits, in particular when combined with other measures, may be a reliable diagnostic indicator for children with DLD regardless of the child's native language, and whether or not the child is bilingual or monolingual.

This article proves statistically the effectiveness of humour in the teaching of English and German to Spanish students of foreign languages. The referred lexicon is particularly troublemaking because of the difficulties that such vocabulary poses for Spanish learners of not-Latin-originated languages. The approach followed is a quantitative and contrastive analysis and was carried out with four groups of Spanish learners. The experimental groups (one for each language) were presented with the input they were supposed to learn in sentences and contexts in which the use of the English/German term, with the meaning of its Spanish 'false friend', resulted in nonsensical and highly humorous utterances. The presentation of the same lexical items to the control groups was more neutral and deliberately bereft of humour. After that, the participants were set a test to find out whether or not they remembered the proper sense of the lexicon taught and could also use it correctly. The results are conclusive and the outcome strongly supports the beneficial effects of pedagogical humour in the language classroom.

Children's drawings hold a contested place in archives of war. Often portrayed as unfiltered records of psychological impact on innocent young civilians, the same drawings are also sophisticated testimonies of agency. With child-artists creating their work within classrooms, families, and communities, this article offers an alternative reading of their historical significance. Children's art offers not simply a firsthand view of conflict but also a critical view onto the alliances and ideologies of the adults who guided their creation. Before and after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), after which Spain entered into several decades of National-Catholic dictatorship, psychologists and teachers used children's drawings to further educational projects toward both progressive and conservative ends. Across key nodes of conflict and postwar quietude, I ask how advocacy of children's art allowed teachers to practice what I call a form of pedagogical postmemory. Centering on Francoist-era education and the artists who created new openings for individual expression, the essay focuses on two educators, namely the artist Ángel Ferrant (1890-1961) and the novelist Josefina Aldecoa (1926-2011). Contrasting their paired views of children's art as a liberating, imaginative activity with that of the Francoist pedagogue Josefina Álvarez de Cánovas (1898-?), this study exposes how the same fundamental rhetoric of imagination and freedom could result in vastly different archives of children's drawings under dictatorship. Understanding children's art as bound up in wider social and political processes, it posits the seemingly neutral sphere of postwar art education as a key vehicle for pedagogical memory and historical recovery.

Psychology undergraduates can benefit from direct experiences with laboratory procedures of psychological phenomena. However, they are not always available for students within a distance education program. The present study included students from the Spanish National Distance Education University (UNED) that were to take part in a Basic Psychology examination session. They participated in web-sessions on a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) laboratory procedure. The aim was to study whether their performance at TOT-related items would be differentially improved. Our results support the conclusion that practicing with the TOT application was effective in improving the TOT comprehension among students. Study A showed that the performance level was higher for the TOT-practiced participants relative to the non-practiced ones. Study B showed significant group by item-type interaction. Also, there was a significant effect of group, and item-type. The results are contextualized in the psychological institutions' mainstream effort for Psychology to be viewed as a STEM discipline by students, the political representatives, and the society.

Difficulty in retrieving specific autobiographical memories is known as overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM). OGM has been related with clinical psychopathology (e.g., depression, schizophrenia, etc.). People presenting an OGM style usually recall more repetitive summary-type memories, so-called categoric memories, (e.g., "each time I saw her") rather than specific memories (events occurring on a specific day whose duration does not exceed 24 hours; e.g., "the day I met her"). Differences in brain activation in the search phase of the retrieval process of specific and categoric autobiographical memories are examined using EEG techniques. Fourteen younger adults performed an Autobiographical Memory Task. Results show significant differences in the activation between specific and categoric memories mainly in frontal areas during the 2.5 seconds before the memory recovery. Specific memories were associated with an increased activation of the left prefrontal cortex, while brain activation for categoric memories was less intense. These results support the idea that the activation of prefrontal areas is required to facilitate the process of elaborating specific memories.

On the eighth of October, 1622, Lope de Vega finished "La nueva victoria de don Gonzalo de Córdoba." This "comedia" recounts a Spanish victory in the Battle of Fleurus, one of several military triumphs that encouraged hope and excitement during the early years of Philip IV's reign. The battle had occurred in late August of 1622, and Lope's play, written and staged scant weeks later, functioned as a type of journalistic dramatization of Fleurus for "corral" audiences. I argue that, in addition to its news-bearing utility, the play historicizes its content, moving it from a journalistic happening to an integral part of Spain's larger historical narrative, broadening and enhancing the ways in which audiences conceived of Fleurus. To do so, "La nueva victoria" engages with historical consciousness in the form of ballads, chronicles, genealogies, and collective memory. Such strategies enable the play to portray the victory as an essential part of Spain's story, as a recent event that logically evolved out of the past and promises to condition the future.

The high rate of rurality and population ageing are two of the principal characteristics that make Galicia a region with certain peculiarities that require actions to promote an active role for its senior citizens. Through a service-learning project embedded within a broader framework of arts-based research, student teachers designed an artistic workshop that they implemented in a rural community centre. This workshop allowed the creation of visual narratives that were especially appropriate to recover elders' memories. By means of a case study, the impact of the service-learning project developed during the training of the students was analysed. The results enable us to ascertain students' perceptions related to the benefits and impact of the project in their training. Students have a positive opinion regarding the opportunity of experiencing a service-learning project that allowed them to create a documentary film where they portrayed the life histories of the elderly people. For the City Council (the partner in this project), as well as for the participants in the workshops, it was also an enriching experience that can be transferred to other contexts. The positive effects of the project reflect student teachers' commitment to society and opportunities for experiential learning in teacher training courses.

Although small children have autobiographical memories, as they grow, they forget its specific details. Although this forgetting is common in early childhood, the presence of effective cues may help recall autobiographical memories. This study examines the effect of verbal and visual cues on the long-term maintenance of a school trip autobiographical memories. One hundred children aged between 50 and 74 months were divided into three experimental groups: one verbal, one visual, and one control groups. The results show that, compared to the control group, both verbal and visual cues enhanced children's autobiographical memory of the school trip in the short term. These results are in line with those of other studies showing that over time children require reminder cues in order to accurately recall autobiographical memories, and that the benefit seems to be greater if the reminder cue is visual.

Research has shown that teaching second language (L2) learning strategies explicitly promotes an increase in strategy use and in oral proficiency. Consequently, a checklist based on the six types of strategies from Oxford's taxonomy (1990) was created to analyze strategic instruction in the most common textbooks used in the last year of Higher Secondary Education in Spain. The study considered whether there was explicit strategy instruction and its location (within the units [Internal] or in other sections [External]) in course books, and what specific strategies were explicitly taught for the two oral skills, listening and speaking. Results showed, first, that there was explicit internal and external instruction of L2 learning strategies both for listening and speaking, but not in all the books; second, that there was significantly more implicit use than explicit instruction, and less explicit instruction in the units of the textbooks than in specific extra sections in the textbook or in support material; and finally, that internal explicit instruction of strategies remains very limited; and thus, L2 learning strategy instruction, competence and use may not be sufficiently encouraged in those textbooks.

Introduction: The huge impact of technology in the last few decades, and the ample development of information and communication technologies (ICT) has established them as an essential characteristic of today's society. This vertiginous advance, and the quantity and diversity of changes in knowledge that are being generated, are inducing important innovations and transformations in the school environment and its curriculum. The irruption of ICT in the educational sphere entails an increase in motivation and an interest in the learning processes of each student. Likewise, greater autonomy and competence have been fostered within this society in state of continual transformation. On the other hand, the quantity of time that each student dedicates to using certain technologies (mobile phones, internet, social media and videogames) outside of the school environment, and the variety of digital and audiovisual resources that are being developed, leads to a need to consider their influence on some of the basic psychological processes used in learning, and their relevance to teaching practice. It has been demonstrated that the use of ICT influences skills such as attention, perception and memory. For this reason, this investigation aims to: a) analyze the influence of ICT on the learning of second languages -- concretely, on learning English; b) test whether there is a relation between neurophysiological maturity and learning second languages; c) discover the role played by attention in learning second languages; and d) to investigate whether learning second languages through ICT influences students' motivation. Method: 70 students (35 girls and 35 boys) aged between 10 and 11 years old participated in this study. The students are in their fifth year of primary education, in a center based in the city of Granada. Results: The results show that both the methodology employed through the use of ICT and the neurophysiological development of each student influence their learning of English as a second language. Equally, attention was also found to be related with the learning of English. On the other hand, motivation to learn was found to be greater in students learning via ICT. Discussion and conclusions: Thus it can be concluded that a methodology based in ICT favors acquisition of second languages, as does the motivation of the student for learning. Likewise, those students with more advanced neurophysiological development and who score higher for attention find it easier to learn English.

The 'learner biography' is commonly used in teacher education to assist in the unpacking of schooling experiences. Although past teachers are often central in these memories, the educational benefit of these recollections for the student teacher's development is often dependent on how these experiences are recalled as they form the basis of further analysis and interrogation. Through an analysis of written learner diaries by pre-service teachers in Spain, this study aimed to explore how past teachers were recalled from a psychological, cognitive perspective. The study found that teachers were presented in a polarised manner as either 'good' or 'bad'. However, more significantly, analysis of the student teachers' descriptions indicate that some recollections were framed through subsequent theoretical perspectives acquired as part of their teacher education programme while others were not. A theoretical model to understand pre-service teachers' memories of teachers is outlined and its implications for teacher education are discussed.

In this paper we try to assess whether there are differences in a group when their members try to remember the content of a text, and if this fact affects the learning levels through an experimental methodology with a design of two groups only with posttest to assess the readers' free recall after reading a text. We found firstly interindividual and intergroup differences in recall of textual material. And secondly text comprehension and therefore the memory of the reading depend largely on reader's inferences. In this paper we propose a specific intervention in order to prepare students for a better understanding of the text read, using a simple methodology to apply with materials easy to prepare.

The main aim of this research was to study whether memory dynamics influence older people's choices to the same extent as younger's ones. To do so, we adapted the retrieval-practice paradigm to produce variations in memory accessibility of information on which decisions were made later. Based on previous results, we expected to observe retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) and choice bias in younger and older participants after they engaged in retrieval practice of some studied attributes. In addition, we aimed to compare both age groups' performance in an experimental condition in which retrieval practice was replaced by reading aloud practice of the same studied items. The results indicated that whereas both age groups showed RIF after performing retrieval practice, biased decisions were observed only in the younger participants. Interestingly, neither older nor younger people showed memory impairment or choice bias in the condition of reading practice. These results extend previous findings and support the idea that, under specific circumstances, elderly people may make better choices than younger people. (Contains 2 tables.)

A study was made of different emotions that prospective primary school teachers report with respect to science subjects, when they were pupils, and during their practice teaching, taking into account the variables gender and the specialty they studied in the secondary education. The study consisted of a questionnaire completed by 63 primary education students at the University of Extremadura, Spain. The results show a great difference between the emotions related to the subjects of physics/chemistry and the nature sciences (biology/geology). The scientific subject influences the emotions of pre-service primary teachers, both in learning and teaching. In physics and chemistry, the emotions are mostly negative. While in nature sciences they are very positive. In nature sciences, there is a correlation between the emotions felt as secondary school pupils learning science and those they feel as teachers. In physics and chemistry, there is a correlation in the women between the emotions felt as secondary school pupils learning science and those they feel as teachers, but not in the men. The memory of their emotions in learning science at school is more negative than in teaching science during their teaching practice, except in nervousness in physics/chemistry. By gender, men declared a greater predilection for science content than women, with more of them describing such feelings as sympathy or confidence. The results highlight the influential role that emotions play throughout the professional growth of future primary teachers. (Contains 2 tables and 6 figures.) [An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at ESERA Conference 2009, Istanbul, Turkey, August 31st-September 4th. This work was financed by Research Project of the Ministry of Education and Science (Spain) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).]

The explosion of interest in the recovery of historical memory in Spain seeks to address many decades of silence and forgetting during the years of the Franco dictatorship and afterwards. Working with trauma theory, Michel Foucault's understanding of silence as discourse, as well as queer theory's exploration of silence as strategy and power, this article examines the multiple roles of silence in Jenn Díaz's "Es un decir" (2014), a novel that portrays the effects of political violence on three generations of women living in postwar Spain. With closer examination of the dynamic between enunciated and silenced discourses in the novel, this study aims to understand how silence communicates and testifies to traumatic pain and memory, strength, and resistance. This analysis shows that silence in the face of trauma does not indicate weakness, nor does it equal forgetting. Rather, it is a part of discourse that expresses suffering, conveys strength, and safeguards memory.

Recommender systems provide users with content they might be interested in. Conventionally, recommender systems are evaluated mostly by using prediction accuracy metrics only. But, the ultimate goal of a recommender system is to increase user satisfaction. Therefore, evaluations that measure user satisfaction should also be performed before deploying a recommender system in a real target environment. Such evaluations are laborious and complicated compared to the traditional, data-centric evaluations, though. In this study, we carried out a user-centric evaluation of state-of-the-art recommender systems as well as a graph-based approach in the ecologically valid setting of an authentic social learning platform. We also conducted a data-centric evaluation on the same data to investigate the added value of user-centric evaluations and how user satisfaction of a recommender system is related to its performance in terms of accuracy metrics. Our findings suggest that user-centric evaluation results are not necessarily in line with data-centric evaluation results. We conclude that the traditional evaluation of recommender systems in terms of prediction accuracy only does not suffice to judge performance of recommender systems on the user side. Moreover, the user-centric evaluation provides valuable insights in how candidate algorithms perform on each of the five quality metrics for recommendations: usefulness, accuracy, novelty, diversity, and serendipity.

Recent research has shown that the ability to inhibit irrelevant information is related to Working Memory (WM) capacity. In three experiments, we explored this relationship by using a list-method directed-forgetting task (DF) in participants varying in WM capacity. Contrary to predictions, in Experiment 1, DF effects were only found for participants with low WM capacity, whereas high WM capacity participants did not show this effect. This unexpected pattern of results was explained as due to the differential susceptibility to interference of high and low span participants. In Experiments 2 and 3, interference was increased by introducing a memory load between the to-be-forgotten and the to-be-remembered list (Experiment 2) and by increasing the list length (Experiment 3). In these conditions of high interference, the pattern of results was reversed so that DF effects were obtained for the high span group and they were not present for the low span group. The reversal of the effect for the high and low WM capacity group depending on the degree of interference suggests that inhibition in the DF procedure depends on both: the degree of interference experienced by the participants, and the availability of controlled resources. (Contains 3 tables.)

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the context switch effect upon retrieval of the information about a cue-outcome relationship in human predictive learning. The results replicated the well-known effect of renewal of the cue-outcome relationship due to a context change after a retroactive interference treatment, as much as the null effect of the context change upon acquisition before retroactive interference training had taken place (Experiment 2). However, retrieval of an unambiguous cue-outcome relationship was also impaired by a context switch when this relationship was established in a context where a different cue had received an interference treatment (Experiments 1 and 2). Once the interference treatment was given to participants in one context, unambiguous cue-outcome relationships learned in a different context also became context specific (Experiment 2). The implications of these results for retrieval theory are discussed. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

This study had two purposes: examining the internal structure of the "Test Estandarizado para la Evaluación Inicial de la Escritura con Teclado" (TEVET; Spanish Keyboarding Writing Test), and analyzing the development of keyboarding skills in Spanish elementary school children with and without learning disabilities (LD) in writing. A group of 1,168 elementary school children carried out the following writing tasks: writing the alphabet in order from memory, allograph selection, word copying, writing dictated words with inconsistent spelling, writing pseudowords from dictation, and independent composition of sentence. For this purpose, exploratory factor analysis for the TEVET was conducted. Principal component analysis with a varimax rotation identified three factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0. Based on factorial analysis, we analyzed the keyboarding skills across grades in Spanish elementary school children with and without LD (i.e., poor handwriters compared with poor spellers, who in turn were compared with mixed compared with typically achieving writers). The results indicated that poor handwriters did not differ from typically achieving writers in phonological processing, visual-orthographic processing, and sentence production components by keyboarding. The educational implications of the findings are analyzed with regard to acquisition of keyboarding skills in children with and without LD in transcription.

This study examined whether spelling tasks contribute to the prediction of the handwriting status of children with poor and good handwriting skills in a cross-sectional study with 276 Spanish children from Grades 1 and 3. The main hypothesis was that the spelling tasks would predict the handwriting status of the children, although this influence would decrease with age due to a gradual automatization of handwriting skills. The results confirmed this hypothesis. Another interesting result was that the pattern of pseudoword and irregular word spellings as predictors of handwriting status changed from Grade 1 to Grade 3. In Grade 1, the pseudoword spelling task made a significant contribution, whereas the irregular word spelling task did not. The opposite pattern was found in Grade 3. These results may be a consequence of progressive acquisition of orthographic representations. The orthographic role of the task of writing the alphabet in order from memory in the prediction model was also analyzed. The writing of the alphabet in order from memory task made a significant contribution to the prediction of handwriting status of the children beyond the orthographic influence of spelling tasks. The additional effect of this task on the prediction of handwriting status is presumably due to the fact that this measure is based on fluency.

The hypothesis that reduced accessibility to relevant information can negatively affect problem solving in a remote associate test (RAT) was tested by using, immediately before the RAT, a retrieval practice procedure to hinder access to target solutions. The results of 2 experiments clearly showed that, relative to baseline, target words that had been competitors during selective retrieval were much less likely to be provided as solutions in the RAT, demonstrating that performance in the problem-solving task was strongly influenced by the predetermined accessibility status of the solutions in memory. Importantly, this was so even when participants were unaware of the relationship between the memory and the problem-solving procedures in the experiments. This finding is consistent with an inhibitory account of retrieval-induced forgetting effects and, more generally, constitutes support for the idea that the activation status of mental representations originating in a given task (e.g., episodic memory) can unwittingly have significant consequences for a different, unrelated task (e.g., problem solving).

This study examined the relationship and degree of predictability that the fluency of writing the alphabet from memory and the selection of allographs have on measures of fluency and accuracy of spelling in a free-writing sentence task when keyboarding. The "Test Estandarizado para la Evaluación de la Escritura con Teclado" ("Spanish Keyboarding Writing Test"; Jiménez, 2012) was used as the assessment tool. A sample of 986 children from Grades 1 through 3 were classified according to transcription skills measured by keyboard ability (poor vs. good) across the grades. Results demonstrated that fluency in writing the alphabet and selecting allographs mediated the differences in spelling between good and poor keyboarders in the free-writing task. Execution in the allograph selection task and writing alphabet from memory had different degrees of predictability in each of the groups in explaining the level of fluency and spelling in the free-writing task sentences, depending on the grade. These results suggest that early assessment of writing by means of the computer keyboard can provide clues and guidelines for intervention and training to strengthen specific skills to improve writing performance in the early primary grades in transcription skills by keyboarding.

The aim of this study was to analyze whether children with and without difficulties in handwriting, spelling, or both differed in alphabet writing when using a keyboard. The total sample consisted of 1,333 children from Grades 1 through 3. Scores on the spelling and handwriting factors from the "Early Grade Writing Assessment" (Jiménez, in press) were used to assign the participants to one of four groups with different ability patterns: poor handwriters, poor spellers, a mixed group, and typically achieving students. Groups were equalized by a matching strategy, resulting in a final sample of 352 children. A MANOVA was executed to analyze effects of group and grade on orthographic motor integration (fluency of alphabet writing) and the number of omissions when writing the alphabet (accuracy of alphabet writing) by keyboard writing mode. The results indicated that poor handwriters did not differ from typically achieving children in both variables, whereas the poor spellers did perform below the typical achievers and the poor handwriters. The difficulties of poor handwriters seem to be alleviated by the use of the keyboard; however, children with spelling difficulties might need extra instruction to become fluent keyboard writers.

The central purpose of this study was to analyze the dynamics of handwriting movements in real time for Spanish students in early grades with and without learning disabilities. The sample consisted of 120 children from Grades 1 through 3 (primary education), classified into two groups: with learning disabilities and without learning disabilities. The Early Grade Writing Assessment tasks selected for this purpose were writing the alphabet in order from memory, alphabet copying in cursive and manuscript, and allograph selection. The dynamics of these four handwriting tasks were recorded using graphonomic tablets (type Wacom Intuos-4), Intuos Inking pens, and Eye and Pen 2 software. Several events were recorded across four different tasks: velocity, pressure, time invested in pauses, and automaticity. The results demonstrated significant graphonomic variations between groups across grades, depending on the type of task.

Introduction: This study explored the variables of executive functioning (EF) that permitted the evaluation of EF both at home and at school. The objective was to compare the results of the evaluations of these functions in children aged 5 to 6 years, and see to what extent these variables predicted mathematics performance best. Method: Sixty-six third year early childhood education students took part, who were given verbal memory and visuospatial tests, of inhibition, of estimation of mathematical performance and the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF), carrying out a correlational and descriptive study. Results: The results showed correlations between the evaluation of children with neuropsychological tests and the ecological assessments of teachers and parents; and between the BRIEF evaluations, in the metacognitive domain. Conclusion: The measurement that best predicted mathematics performance was the teacher BRIEF, especially in working memory.

Strategies based memory training programs are widely used to enhance the cognitive abilities of the elderly. Participants in these training programs are usually people whose mental abilities remain intact. Occasionally, people with cognitive impairment also participate. The aim of this study was to test if memory training designed specifically for healthy people is effective in people with severe memory impairment. We carried out a 10-year retrospective case-control study with Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test (RBMT) and memory complaint measures obtained pre-post training. The case group consisted of 73 people with memory impairment (IM group). The control group (n = 72) was made of individuals with preserved memory and sociodemographic characteristics similar to the case group (PM group). Both groups improved their performance on everyday memory tasks (measured using the RBMT). The IM group improved more than the PM group in everyday memory tasks, especially in prospective memory tasks. Both groups also reduced their level of subjective complaints as a result of training. In conclusion, our results are encouraging with respect to the efficacy of comprehensive memory training programs for older people with severe memory impairment.

This article is based on the findings of a broader research project entitled "Childhood Participation and Citizenship Building," which examined the medium-term effects of intense experiences of participation in childhood within both the school environment and those of leisure-time and community education. The results presented in this article refer specifically to the memories subjects hold of their participation in these childhood experiences. The study combined quantitative (using a questionnaire) and qualitative approaches (conducting in-depth interviews). The results obtained contribute to strengthening the idea--explicit or implicit in all pedagogies that seek to promote child participation--that such participation is not only a right, but that it also contributes to the quality of educational experiences.

The long-running Spanish television program "Cuéntame cómo pasó" represents not only a wildly successful series for Radio Televisión Española, but also an excellent example of the project of historical memory. Premiering in 2001 (but set, in the first season, in 1968), the story of the multigenerational Alcántara family forms a microhistory which reflects the larger sociohistorical context of the end of the Franco era and the transition to democracy. This program, its authentic rendering of recent history, and its connection to the polemics of historical memory in contemporary Spain prompted us to create an upper-level hybrid (cultural studies/literature) course using this series as the primary text. This article elaborates the challenges we encountered in creating a course based on the series and our solution to those problems. In addition, we explain our pedagogical approach to using the program as text, including examples of visual interpretative strategies we explored with students. Finally, we reflect on the student experience in this course, the outcomes they reported and that we observed, making the case that use of the visual text created a distinctive and effective learning experience.

After thirty-three years of exile in Mexico, Ernestina de Champourcin returned to Madrid in 1972, in time to witness the profound political changes in Spain prompted by the death of Franco and by the cultural revolution originating in the capital known as the "movida madrileña." Between 1979 and 1980, she responded to the explosion of mass media products and subculture activities by writing "La pared transparente" (1984), a series of poems that portray the postmodern city as an alienating and dehumanized place symbolized primarily as a wall of obstructions. The poet employs multiple synonyms for "wall," along with allusions to the emptiness of the hole, the blankness of the color white, and the estrangement provoked by silence to complete her depictions of the modern big city. She especially laments the incapacity for calm, verbal communication within this crowded and animated, yet lonely and impersonal, environment. After expressing her anxiety, in the second half of the collection, Champourcin discovers that the wall erected between human beings can be mitigated or traversed through memory, love, and looking to the reality within the self and ultimately beyond.

The aim of this study was to examine the associations of control and vividness of mental imagery on performance in several components of in-depth drawing in a sample of fine arts undergraduates. The sample consisted of 56 second-year undergraduates (44 women and 12 men, mean age = 21.18 years) from the Fine Arts Faculty of Vigo University, Pontevedra, Spain. Participants were required to undertake a plastic art assignment focusing on the pictorial representation of space. Participants scoring high on the image control test obtained higher scores on the spatial analysis and in the formal construction of a work than participants with poor image control. Further research involving spatial image performance tests and mental image rotation tests is proposed.

Retrieving memories can impair recall of other related traces. Items affected by this retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) are often less accessible when tested with independent probes, a characteristic known as cue independence. Cue independence has been interpreted as evidence for inhibitory mechanisms that suppress competing items during retrieval (M. C. Anderson & Spellman, 1995). Several authors, however, have proposed that apparent cue independence might instead reflect noninhibitory cue-dependent blocking mechanisms. In this view, when participants receive an independent probe test, they do not limit themselves to those probes but instead recall study cues covertly to aid performance. This strategy is thought to be self-defeating, because it reintroduces cues that instigate blocking, lending the appearance of generalized inhibition. M. C. Anderson (2003), in contrast, proposed that covert cuing masks cue-independent forgetting by providing a compound cuing advantage. Here, we replicated cue-independent RIF and documented how access to the original study cues influences this effect. In Experiments 1-2, we found that overtly providing category cues on independent probe tests never increased RIF. Indeed, when we provided categories selectively for items that should suffer the most blocking, a sizable reversal of RIF occurred, consistent with the masking hypothesis. Simply asking participants to covertly retrieve categories eliminated cue-independent RIF, contradicting predictions of the self-inflicted blocking account. Far from causing cue-independent forgetting, covert cuing masks it. These findings strongly support the inhibition account of RIF and, importantly, may explain why cue-independent forgetting is not always found.

Introduction: The aim of this research was to examine the relationship between state and trait anxiety and verbal and graphic creativity, as well as how the two types of anxiety contribute to predicting creativity in students of Compulsory Secondary Education. Method: The study was conducted with 89 subjects of both sexes between the ages of 12 and 14. The State/Trait Anxiety Inventory was applied, consisting of two independent scales that measure transitory situations and general experiences of stress, and the "Prueba de Imaginacion Creativa" [Test of Creative Imagination], which assesses two types of creativity in their verbal and graphic manifestations, and creative imagination or total creativity. Results: The results showed a negative, statistically significant relationship between both types of anxiety and verbal and graphic creativity; the relationship with trait anxiety being stronger and more significant. However, neither state anxiety nor trait anxiety was a good predictor of verbal and graphic creativity and creative imagination, although the first was more predictive than the second. Discussion and conclusions: The research findings are interesting because of the data they contribute regarding the relationship between anxiety and creativity. (Contains 3 tables.)

In the present article, we report 3 experiments using the odd-man-out variant of the implicit priming paradigm, aimed at determining the role played by phonological information during the handwriting process. Participants were asked to write a small set of words learned in response to prompts. Within each block, response words could share initial segments (constant homogeneous) or not (heterogeneous). Also, 2 variable homogeneous blocks were created by including a response word that did not share orthographic onset with the other response (odd-man-out). This odd-man-out could be phonologically related to the targets or not. Experiment 1 showed a preparation effect in the constant homogeneous condition, which disappeared (spoil effect) in the variable condition not phonologically related. However, no spoil effect was found when the odd-man-out shared the phonological initial segment with the targets. In Experiment 2, we obtained a spoil effect in the variable phonologically related condition, but it was significantly smaller than in the variable not phonologically related condition. The effects observed in Experiment 2 vanished in Experiment 3 under articulatory suppression, suggesting that they originated at a sublexical level. These findings suggest that phonological sublexical information is used during handwriting and provide evidence that the implicit priming paradigm (and the odd-man-out version of this) is a suitable tool for handwriting production research. (Contains 6 tables.)

This investigation analyzed the relation between cognitive functioning and mathematical achievement in 114 students in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. Differences in cognitive performance were studied concurrently in three selected achievement groups: mathematical learning disability group (MLD), low achieving group (LA), and typically achieving group (TA). For this purpose, performance in verbal memory and in the PASS cognitive processes of planning, attention, and simultaneous and successive processing was assessed at the end of the academic course. Correlational analyses showed that phonological loop and successive and simultaneous processing were related to mathematical achievement at all three grades. Regression analysis revealed simultaneous processing as a cognitive predictor of mathematical performance, although phonological loop was also associated with higher achievement. Simultaneous and successive processing were the elements that differentiated the MLD group from the LA group. These results show that, of all the variables analyzed in this study, simultaneous processing was the best predictor of mathematical performance. (Contains 2 tables.)

This article shows the cognitive and motor-perceptive effects of the application of a cognitive stimulating program through motor function on 234 elderly people. The assessment was carried out prior to and after the program. Significant improvements in the experimental group were observed (p [less than or equal to] 0.05) in six of the eight measurements. The control group achieved significant improvements (p [less than or equal to] 0.05) in two of the measurements and significant deterioration in motor memory. (Contains 8 tables.)

Studying fundamental Computer Architecture and Organization topics requires a significant amount of practical work if students are to acquire a good grasp of the theoretical concepts presented in classroom lectures or textbooks. The use of simulators is commonly adopted in order to reach this objective. However, as most of the available educational simulators focus on specific topics, different laboratory assignments usually require the use of different simulators. This paper presents a graphical and interactive reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processor and memory simulator that allows active learning of some theoretical concepts covered in Computer Architecture and Organization courses. The simulator can be configured to present different processor views, from a simple serial one, without caches or pipelines, to a more realistic one with caches and superscalar execution. This approach allows a set of increasingly complex code-based laboratory assignments to be developed using a single simulator, covering topics ranging from assembly language programming to the analysis of the different kind of cache misses, pipeline hazards or branch prediction hits and misses produced during a program execution. The simulator has been included in a an automatic assessment system that helps the students to complete the assignments and helps teachers to evaluate the correctness of the students' solutions in different environments, such as high-enrollment courses or distance education. Since 1996, both the simulator and the automatic assessment system have been successfully used by more than 5000 students in Computer Architecture and Organization courses at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Spain. (Contains 1 table and 10 figures.)

The purpose of the present study was to explore the relative roles of IQ and cognitive processes in reading performance. A sample of 443 Spanish children (264 male, 179 female) ranging in age from 7 to 13 years were classified into four groups according to IQ scores (less than 80, 80-90, 90-110, greater than 110) and reading disabled (RD) and normally achieving readers (NR) were compared. The findings indicate that IQ scores were not related to the differences between children with RD and NR. We found that reading-related cognitive deficits do differentiate between RD and NR children. Therefore, IQ scores do not make a significant contribution to our understanding of reading disability. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

There are two basic guiding referents in the present investigation: the teaching and learning of school-level geometry (basic concepts of Euclidian geometry and measure) and the analysis of the conceptions of prospective primary teachers in Spain. The work assumes that such conceptions appear and develop during school years, and that consequently, for the prospective teachers to learn to teach mathematics, account must be taken of the requirements that arise from these conceptions themselves and from the prospective teachers' knowledge of school-level mathematics. The objective of the study was to describe and analyse prospective primary teachers' conceptions of school-level geometry and its teaching and learning. To this end, we considered the hypothesis that the students' memories and expectations provide information with which to characterize their conceptions of the field of geometry and its teaching/learning at the primary school level.

We investigated sex effects and the effects of educational attainment (EA) on the covariance structure of the WAIS-III in a subsample of the Spanish standardization data. We fitted both first order common factor models and second order common factor models. The latter include general intelligence ("g") as a second order common factor. The results indicate that sex differences in means are due mainly to the WAIS-III factors Working Memory (WM) and Perceptual Organization (PO), rather than to the second order "g" factor. In treating EA as a predictor of the first common factors, we found that EA explained a significant, but clearly varying, amount of variance in the 4 first order common factors. Differences in explained variance over sex were very small. Treating EA as a predictor in the second order common factor model, we found that EA predicted "g" and first order factor Verbal Comprehension (VC). The relationships between PO, WM, and Perceptual Speed (PS) and EA are mediated by "g." In treating EA as a dependent variable, we found that VC and PS were the only significant predictors of EA in the first order common factor model. In the second order common factor model, the same result was obtained. While VC and PS were significant predictors of EA, the second order factor "g," and PO and WM were not. The results are of theoretical interest in the light of the Ankney-Rushton paradox, and the role of "g" in educational attainment.