Critical Thinking Dispositions of Undergraduate College Students in A Comprehensive University of Mainland China

This study was undertaken to assess the critical thinking dispositions of undergraduate college students in a comprehensive university of mainland China and examine the roles of gender and major in the subjects’ critical thinking dispositions. An adapted Chinese version of the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory (CCTDI) was used to survey 534 undergraduate students. Statistics revealed that over 3/4 of the subjects were negative in their dispositions to think critically, and no more than 1/4 of them were positive. All the subscale mean scores were between 30-35, indicating an ambivalent attitude to critical thinking. Meanwhile, the subjects were stronger in systematicity, truth-seeking, and self-confidence than in analyticity, inquisitiveness, and cognitive maturity. Besides, males got significantly higher scores in overall critical thinking dispositions, truth-seeking, cognitive maturity, open-mindedness, and justice-orientedness, an added subscale in the Chinese version of CCTDI. Finally, science-engineering students achieved a non-significant higher overall mean score than non-science-engineering students. They also scored higher in seven out of the eight subscales, but the differences were only significant in open-mindedness and justice-orientedness.

What Determines Student Satisfaction in an E-learning Environment? A Comprehensive Literature Review of Key Success Factors

COVID-19 has significantly changed the teaching-learning process and it may indeed be a permanent change. Schools, colleges and universities have had to switch to remote/e-learning in an attempt to continue their operations during the pandemic. Institutions have struggled to identify the key success factors necessary for effective e-learning. While there have been some studies that have identified a few key factors, there has not been a comprehensive review of the key success factors for effective e-learning. This paper fills that gap by presenting a detailed examination of the critical success factors required for effective e-learning. The results show that success in e-learning is a complex combination of key factors such as institutional/administrative support, systems configuration and technical design, the level of computer skills among learners, learners’ interpersonal behavior, e-learning readiness, learner motivation, computer anxiety, self-efficacy, instructors’ characteristics, environmental factors and the demand it imposes on learners of varying age and cognitive maturity.

Moral judgement development during medical student clinical training

Background Whereas experience and cognitive maturity drives moral judgement development in most young adults, medical students show slowing, regression, or segmentation in moral development during their clinical years of training. The aim of this study was to explore the moral development of medical students during clinical training. Methods A cross-sectional sample of medical students from three clinical years of training were interviewed in groups or individually at an Australian medical school in 2018. Thematic analysis identified three themes which were then mapped against the stages and dimensions of Self-authorship Theory. Results Thirty five medical students from years 3–5 participated in 11 interviews and 6 focus groups. Students shared the impacts of their clinical experiences as they identified with their seniors and increasingly understood the clinical context. Their accounts revealed themes of early confusion followed by defensiveness characterised by desensitization and justification. As students approached graduation, some were planning how they would make moral choices in their future practice. These themes were mapped to the stages of self-authorship: External Formulas, Crossroads and Self-authorship. Conclusions Medical students recognise, reconcile and understand moral decisions within clinical settings to successfully reach or approach self-authorship. Curriculum and support during clinical training should match and support this progress.

Emergence and Development of Wh-questions in Jordanian Arabic-speaking Children: A Longitudinal Study

The main objective of this paper is to examine the emergence and development of wh-questions in two Jordanian Arabic-speaking pre-school children. Specifically, it investigates (1) how these children interact with wh-questions; which questions they find easier and thus earlier to acquire and why, and finally (2) what symptoms one can identify as characteristics of the intra-stage development of such questions. The data of the study are a subset of a large body of a longitudinal audio-taped corpus collected by the principal author, who happened to be a psycholinguist and the children’s grandparent, on the basis of three-day, weekly sessions over a period of five years. The recordings were made in the family home environment during routine activities, mainly after dinner, and mostly in the presence of family members. The findings reveal the acquisition of wh-questions is a complex process that supports a general cognitive maturity model interpretation. The acquisition of wh-questions that ask about concrete objects/entities, that is mi:n ‘who’, we:n ‘where’ and ʔe:ʃ/ʃu: ‘what’ are produced and developed at an earlier stage than those questions which ask about abstract objects/entities, that is le:ʃ ‘why’, ke:f ‘how’, ɡadde:ʃ/kam ‘how many/much’ and wakte:ʃ/ʔe:mta ‘when’. However, the subjects do not find the questions within each of the two sets equally easy/difficult. Put differently, in the first category, mi:n ranked first on the easy/difficult scale while ʔe:ʃ/ʃu: ranked third. Moreover, the order of acquisition in the second category suggested that it is easier for Jordanian Arabic-speaking children to ask about reason (le:ʃ-why) than about time (wakte:ʃ-when) and that to ask about quantity (ɡadde:ʃ/kam-how many/much) is more difficult than to ask about manner (ke:f-how). The study argues that the emergence of wh-words does not mark but the onset of an accumulative process which includes a host of symptoms on the way to adult-like acquisition.

Student's Statistical Literacy skills Based on the Reflective and Impulsive Cognitive Styles

This study aimed to describe students' statistical literacy skills based on their reflective-impulsive cognitive style. This study employed descriptive exploratory research with the qualitative approach. The data collecting techniques used were tests, interviews, and field notes. The data analysis techniques employed were data reduction, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. This study discovered that students’ reflective and impulsive cognitive styles influence their statistical literacy skills such as the ability to construct or interpret information or statistical data, understand statistical concepts, and represent the statistical data in a different form. Students with the reflective cognitive style were different from students with the impulsive cognitive style on statistical literacy skills, especially in evaluating statistical information or arguments. Students with the reflective cognitive style tended to be more critical in evaluating statistical information or arguments by providing arguments based on the results of analytical calculations. Students with the impulsive cognitive style used analytical processes in drawing statistical conclusions. Students with the impulsive cognitive style lacked cognitive maturity and tended to use processes holistically rather than analytically in drawing statistical conclusions.

Introducing an Adolescent Cognitive Maturity Index and Tracking Vulnerability in Emerging Adulthood

The transition from adolescence to young adulthood is a dynamic developmental period during which youth are striving for social independence while simultaneously undergoing maturation of cognitive control skills. Variation in growth trajectories of adolescent neurocognitive development has been hypothesized to contribute to adverse outcomes in the transition to adulthood, such as experiencing violence. However, there remains a lack of consensus on the normative trajectory of cognitive maturation. To address this problem, we derive a Cognitive Maturity Index (CMI), to estimate the difference between chronological and cognitive age predicted with latent factor estimates of inhibitory control, risky decision-making and emotional processing measured with standard neuropsychological instruments. Age prediction with latent factor estimates of cognitive skills approximated age within 10 months (Pearson's Correlation r=0.71). Males in advanced puberty displayed lower cognitive maturity relative to peers of the same age; manifesting as weaker inhibitory control, greater risk taking, desensitization to negative affect, and poor recognition of positive affect. Elevated risk for future violent outcomes was effected by delayed CMI and fully mediated by drive for achieving rewards, illustrating adolescent maturation as a risk traversal process into young adulthood. This work provides a foundation for deriving a more precise definition of cognitive maturity to aid empirical assessment of individual-specific developmental risk factors for adverse outcomes in emerging adulthood.

Association between motor performance, cognitive maturity and socio-demographic aspects in preschooler children

The identification of low motor proficiency in children of preschool age allows intervention programs to be proposed, to minimize the losses in school activities, social relationships and Physical Education classes. Thus, identifying the factors underlying low motor performance is essential, in an attempt to reduce possible motor disorders. The objective of this study was to investigate the association between motor performance, cognitive maturity and sociodemographic aspects in preschool children from Paraná. The participants were 357 preschoolers from 3,5 years to 5 years. The Columbia Mental Maturity Scale, Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 test and a sociodemographic data sheet were used. For statistical analysis, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Friedman (Wilcoxon) and binary logistic regression tests (p<0.05) were used. There was a high prevalence of low motor proficiency (16.8%), cognitive maturity (CM) on average age (67.2%) and socioeconomic level >R$1,500, 00 (45.5%). A significant association was observed between higher CM and low motor proficiency, indicating the upper CM as a protective factor for low motor proficiency (OR 0.513 IC 95% 0,266-1,000). The socio-demographic factors were not intervening in the motor performance (MP). It was concluded that the upper CM in children in early childhood acts as a protective factor for the low motor proficiency and that the socio-demographic factors of the family were not associated with MP and the CM of the preschoolers.

It’s HERstory: Unhealthy Relationships in Adolescence and Subsequent Social and Emotional Development in College Women

The current study sought to expand our understanding of how early relationships characterized by intimate partner violence (IPV) influence college women’s transition into emerging adulthood. We used a longitudinal qualitative design in which women ( n = 13) with histories of IPV victimization participated in interviews twice a year beginning their first semester in college and ending in their final semester of college. Four primary themes were uncovered: making sense of the relationship, recognizing needs in the relationship, posttraumatic growth, and social cognitive maturity. The constitutive pattern across all four themes was resilience (i.e., positive adaptation during and after experiencing adversity).

Academic language in Catalan students’ research reports across levels of study

When students engage in a research community of practice they not only have to master academic register but also discourse features embodied in the research genre. This corpus-based study examines lexico-grammatical features and stance and engagement markers in 54 Catalan (Romance language) research reports in biology, from high school twelfth-graders and university master theses’ writers. These texts belong to the TARBUC corpus (Treballs Acadèmics de Recerca de Batxillerat i Universitat en Català) – Baccalaureate and University Academic Research Reports written in Catalan. Analyses reveal a statistically significant increase in syntactic complexity and lexical density in university writers. Furthermore, findings on interactional function indicate that marking of stance (i.e., hedges) correlates with a specific type of engagement marker (i.e., directive to argument) in university students’ texts. Self-mention is the most salient rhetorical strategy used by students, in line with the requirements of the research article published in this discipline. Finally, overall data on the distribution of interactional markers suggest that the conventions of the research article genre constrain interactional strategies from high school onwards. Results suggest that linguistic literacy, cognitive maturity and the genre’s social convention interact in a linked process in the development of a skilled writer.

Psycholinguistic Model of Abductive Reasoning in Fiction Narrative Discourse

Aim: The paper aims at defining the role of abductive reasoning in the reader&rsquo;s interpretation of English fiction narrative text. Three research questions are defined as follows: (1) what is the nature of sign interpretation in its application to textual analysis? (2) what linguistic factors determine the use of abduction in the interpretation of signs? (3) how to apply abductive reasoning in the process of reading and interpretation in EFL teaching practice? Abduction is viewed here as a type of reasoning in the three-componential semiotic model of argument and as a deductive hypothesis, responsible for implicit meaning processing (Charles Peirce). Materials and Methods: The paper states the four-stage process of abduction to be a basic inquiry method of the reader on his way to fiction world interpretation. By providing a step-by-step analysis of patterns of abductive reasoning in a short story &ldquo;Happy Endings&rdquo; by Margaret Atwood, the paper conducts a textual analysis of narratives in terms of subjectivity theory of communication, reflecting the mechanisms of reader&rsquo;s manipulation with information as a dynamic semiotic process of interpretation, limited by habit (final interpretant). Results: of the research of the mental operations employed by the reader while processing textual information proved a strong interrelation of reading with writing, and mental sub-processes and operations. As the empirical research shows, the process of conceptualization demands a higher level of cognitive maturity on the part of the reader/writer, as it presupposes &ldquo;knowledge transforming&rdquo; operations as opposed to &ldquo;knowledge telling&rdquo; strategy (Paltridge et. al. 2009: 20). To represent this process schematically, scholars assign the reader/interpretant the central role in the process of triadic sign interpretation, as he makes the further interpretation possible by a reference to the environment (Scheibmayer 2004: 305). The interpretant (I) and Representamen (R1) refer to the same object (O); as Representamen (R2) stands in the same relation to object, represented by Representamen (R1) and to the system (O2), where it acquires the functions of the observer (Sonnenhauser, 2008: 331). Conclusions: The conclusions coming from this research lead to the recognition of the second-level (or third level) observer as a source of subjectivity. And subjectivity, in its turn, arises from the difference in interpretation of signs recognized and established by the observer (Maturana &amp; Varela, 1980). Thus, the process of differentiation by the observer is expected to fix the possible existence of other meanings, produced by the relations of the interpretant to the environment. This is the notion of thirdness. And, therefore, &ldquo;sign situation&rdquo;, plays the role of marking the pairs of differentiation in semiotic interpretation of signs. And it is this differential potential of indexical components of signs, and not their relatedness of meaning, which makes communication dynamic.