scholarly journals The role of vocabulary knowledge on inference generation: A meta-analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-193
Author(s):  
Lucas Federico Sterpin ◽  
Sofía Soledad Ortiz ◽  
Jésica Formoso ◽  
Juan Pablo Barreyro
Keyword(s):  
Text Comprehension ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Developmental Trajectory ◽  
Inference Making ◽  
Inference Generation ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Moderate Effect ◽  
Significant Moderator

Abstract Successful text comprehension results in a coherent mental model of the situation being described. To achieve this, the reader has to infer certain information by connecting parts of the text to their prior knowledge. An important construct involved in this process is vocabulary knowledge, usually divided into breadth and depth. We conducted a meta-analysis on 23 studies, and explored the fit of five different models to establish an effect size of both dimensions of vocabulary on inference making, as well as its developmental trajectory in children aged 3-12. We found a significant and moderate effect of vocabulary knowledge of both modalities. Vocabulary type was not a significant moderator, but age was, meaning that there was a similar effect for both breadth and depth and that the strength of the correlations decreased with age. Heterogeneity was high overall, meaning that more moderators should be assessed in future studies.

scholarly journals Effects of Yoga Interventions on Fatigue: A Meta-Analysis

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Boehm ◽  
Thomas Ostermann ◽  
Stefania Milazzo ◽  
Arndt Büssing
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Studies ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Jadad Score ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Moderate Effect ◽  
Cancer Multiple ◽  
Positive Effect ◽  
Small Positive Effect

Background. Researchers aimed at systematically reviewing and meta-analyzing the effectiveness of yoga interventions for fatigue.Methods. PubMed/Medline was searched until January 2012 for controlled clinical studies. Two reviewers independently extracted the data. The methodological quality of the studies was assessed. A meta-analysis was performed.Results. Nineteen clinical studies (total ) were included in this review. Investigated yoga styles included Hatha, Iyengar, Asanas, Patanjali, Sahaja, and Tibetan yoga. Participants were suffering from cancer, multiple sclerosis, dialysis, chronic pancreatitis, fibromyalgia, asthma, or were healthy. Yoga had a small positive effect on fatigue (SMD = 0.27, 59% CI = 0.23–0.31). Seven studies received 4 points on the Jadad score. There were baseline differences in at least 5 studies.Conclusion. Overall, the effects of yoga interventions on fatigue were only small, particularly in cancer patients. Although yoga is generally a safe therapeutic intervention and effective to attenuate other health-related symptoms, this meta-analysis was not able to define the powerful effect of yoga on patients suffering from fatigue. Treatment effects of yoga could be improved in well-designed future studies. According to the GRADE recommendations assessing the overall quality of evidence, there is a moderate effect of the confidence placed in the estimates of the effects discussed here.

Pre-Eclamptic Pregnancies: An Opportunity to Identify Women at Risk for Future Cardiovascular Disease

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iasmina M Craici ◽  
Steven J Wagner ◽  
Suzanne R Hayman ◽  
Vesna D Garovic
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Cardiovascular Disease ◽  
Risk Factor ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Increased Risk ◽  
All Cause Mortality ◽  
History Of

Evaluation of: Bellamy L, Casas JP, Hingorani AD, Williams DJ: Pre-eclampsia and risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer in later life: systematic review and meta-analysis. Br. Med. J. 335(7627), 974 (2007). Evidence has emerged over the years suggesting that women who develop hypertensive pregnancy disorders, most notably pre-eclampsia, are at an increased risk for cardiovascular disease later in life. In this study, a systematic review and meta-analysis were performed, assessing the future risks of cardiovascular disease, cancer and all-cause mortality in women with a history of pre-eclampsia and eclampsia. Women with a history of pre-eclampsia or eclampsia, compared with women without such a history, had an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, including a fourfold increased risk for hypertension, a twofold increased risk for ischemic heart disease, stroke and deep venous thrombosis, and a 1.5-times higher all-cause mortality. The study suggests that affected women may be eligible for preventive therapies at an earlier age, especially if future studies establish the role of pre-eclampsia as an independent cardiovascular risk factor.

scholarly journals Unconscious Visual Working Memory: a critical review and Bayesian meta-analysis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filippo Gambarota ◽  
Naotsugu Tsuchiya ◽  
Massimiliano Pastore ◽  
Nicola Di Polito ◽  
Paola Sessa
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Effect Size ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Meta Regression ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between consciousness and working memory (WM) has been recently debated both at the theoretical and methodological levels (Persuh et al., 2018; Velichkovsky, 2017). While there is behavioral and neural evidence that argues for the existence of unconscious WM, several methodological concerns have been raised, rendering this issue highly controversial. To address the robustness of the previous findings, here we adopt a meta-analytic approach to estimate the effect size and heterogeneity of the previously reported unconscious WM results, also including unpublished results. We used meta-regression to isolate relevant experimental variables, in particular, consciousness manipulation and WM paradigm to identify the source of the heterogeneity in the reported effect size of the unconscious WM. Our meta-analysis supports the existence of the unconscious WM effect and critically reveals several experimental variables that contribute to relevant heterogeneity. Our analysis clarifies several theoretical and methodological issues. We recommend that future studies explicitly operationalize the definition of consciousness, standardize the methodology and systematically explore the role of critical variables for the unconscious WM effect.

Culture's Consequences for Leadership: The Role of Context in Affecting Leadership Perceptions and Performance

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
William S. Kramer ◽  
Marissa L. Shuffler
Keyword(s):  
Contextual Factors ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
Leadership Perceptions ◽  
Team Diversity ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Significant Moderator

As acknowledged by Lord and Dinh (2014) in their focal article, across a plethora of organizational literatures and topics of interest, there often seems to be a common theme: context matters. Although this is not a very surprising statement and may seem obvious, the surprising reality is that within a number of topics in our field, context is either superficially taken into consideration or not examined at all. This oversight has the potential to skew our understanding of important concepts. Indeed, Joshi and Roh (2009) revealed in their meta-analysis exploring team diversity that context served as a significant moderator of performance, illustrating the criticality of understanding how contextual factors may predict outcomes above and beyond individual inputs.

scholarly journals Inference generation and text comprehension in bilingual children: A case study

Literator ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Agness Hara ◽  
Heike Tappe
Keyword(s):  
Private School ◽  
Text Comprehension ◽  
Stimulus Presentation ◽  
Knowledge Bases ◽  
Medium Of Instruction ◽  
Inference Making ◽  
Inference Generation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Story Content ◽  
Verbal Content

The current study explores inference-making processes in 10–12-year-old bilingual Malawian children who either listened to stories in their primary language, or L1 (Chichewa), as compared to their secondary language (L2) (English), or viewed cartoon films containing no verbal content. The 127 children who participated in the study were divided into six groups characterised by different conditions of stimulus presentation – stimuli varied with respect to their modality (non-verbal film versus pre-recorded stories) or the language of stimulus presentation (English or Chichewa). The results indicate that the pre-recorded audio recordings seem to have supported inference-making more than the corresponding wordless films. This finding illustrates the significance of linguistically presented content. The linguistically presented content elicited even more inferences when it was presented in the children’s L1 (Chichewa) rather than in their medium of academic instruction (English). However, the results also indicate that the children from the private school (with English as a medium of instruction) drew more inferences than the children from the public school (where Chichewa is the medium of instruction). Furthermore, the results reveal that while the children were able to use knowledge transfer from a variety of knowledge bases to draw inferences, the inferencing process was impeded when the story content deviated too much from their own experiences. Lastly we found indications of variations in inferencing patterns that seemed to correlate to the language in which the stimulus material was presented and responded to.

scholarly journals Chondroitinase ABC Administration in Locomotion Recovery After Spinal Cord Injury: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Yousefifard ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Primary Therapy ◽  
Severity Of Injury ◽  
Cord Injury ◽  
Moderate Effect ◽  
Mean Differences ◽  
Rats And Mice

Objective: The present systematic review and meta-analysis intends to conduct a comprehensive and complete search in electronic resources to investigate the role of administrating ChABC in improving complications following SCI. Methods: Medline, Embase, Scopus and Web of sciences were searched until the end of 2019. Two independent reviewers assessed the studies conducted on rats and mice and summarized the data. Using STATA 14.0 program, the findings were reported as pooled standardized mean differences (SMD) with 95% confidence intervals (CI). Results: 34 pre-clinical studies were included. ChABC administration generally improves locomotion recovery after SCI (SMD = 0.90; 95% CI: 0.61 to 1.20; p <0.001). Subgroup analysis showed that differences in SCI model (p = 0.732), severity of injury (p = 0.821), number of ChABC administration (p = 0.092), blinding status (p = 0.294), use of different locomotor score (p = 0.567) and follow up duration (p = 0.750) have no effect on the efficacy of ChABC treatment. Conclusion: The findings of the present study showed that prescribing ChABC has a moderate effect in the improvement of locomotion after SCI in mice and rats. However, this moderate effect introduces ChABC as an adjuvant therapy and not as a primary therapy.

The relationship between vocabulary knowledge and L2 reading/listening comprehension: A meta-analysis

2020 ◽  
pp. 136216882091399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Songshan Zhang ◽  
Xian Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Text Comprehension ◽  
Listening Comprehension ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
L2 Reading ◽  
Vocabulary Depth ◽  
L2 Listening ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
L2 Reading Comprehension

This study set out to investigate the relationship between L2 vocabulary knowledge (VK) and second-language (L2) reading/listening comprehension. More than 100 individual studies were included in this meta-analysis, which generated 276 effect sizes from a sample of almost 21,000 learners. The current meta-analysis had several major findings. First, the overall correlation between VK and L2 reading comprehension was .57 ( p < .01) and that between VK and L2 listening was .56 ( p < .01). If the attenuation effect due to reliability of measures was taken into consideration, the ‘true’ correlation between VK and L2 reading/listening comprehension may likely fall within the range of .56–.67, accounting for 31%–45% variance in L2 comprehension. Second, all three mastery levels of form–meaning knowledge (meaning recognition, meaning recall, form recall) had moderate to high correlations with L2 reading and L2 listening. However, meaning recall knowledge had the strongest correlation with L2 reading comprehension and form recall had the strongest correlation with L2 listening comprehension, suggesting that different mastery levels of VK may contribute differently to L2 comprehension in different modalities. Third, both word association knowledge and morphological awareness (two aspects of vocabulary depth knowledge) had significant correlations with L2 reading and L2 listening. Fourth, the modality of VK measure was found to have a significant moderating effect on the correlation between VK and L2 text comprehension: orthographical VK measures had stronger correlations with L2 reading comprehension as compared to auditory VK measures. Auditory VK measures, however, were better predictors of L2 listening comprehension. Fifth, studies with a shorter script distance between L1 and L2 yielded higher correlations between VK and L2 reading. Sixth, the number of items in vocabulary depth measures had a positive predictive power on the correlation between VK and L2 comprehension. Finally, correlations between VK and L2 reading/listening comprehension was found to be associated with two types of publication factors: year-of-publication and publication type. Implications of the findings were discussed.

Mesophyll conductance: the leaf corridors for photosynthesis

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 429-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Gago ◽  
Danilo M. Daloso ◽  
Marc Carriquí ◽  
Miquel Nadal ◽  
Melanie Morales ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Molecular Mechanisms ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Main Role ◽  
Mesophyll Conductance ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Cell Structures ◽  
Leaf Tissues ◽  
Change Framework ◽  
Chloroplast Stroma

Besides stomata, the photosynthetic CO2 pathway also involves the transport of CO2 from the sub-stomatal air spaces inside to the carboxylation sites in the chloroplast stroma, where Rubisco is located. This pathway is far to be a simple and direct way, formed by series of consecutive barriers that the CO2 should cross to be finally assimilated in photosynthesis, known as the mesophyll conductance (gm). Therefore, the gm reflects the pathway through different air, water and biophysical barriers within the leaf tissues and cell structures. Currently, it is known that gm can impose the same level of limitation (or even higher depending of the conditions) to photosynthesis than the wider known stomata or biochemistry. In this mini-review, we are focused on each of the gm determinants to summarize the current knowledge on the mechanisms driving gm from anatomical to metabolic and biochemical perspectives. Special attention deserve the latest studies demonstrating the importance of the molecular mechanisms driving anatomical traits as cell wall and the chloroplast surface exposed to the mesophyll airspaces (Sc/S) that significantly constrain gm. However, even considering these recent discoveries, still is poorly understood the mechanisms about signaling pathways linking the environment a/biotic stressors with gm responses. Thus, considering the main role of gm as a major driver of the CO2 availability at the carboxylation sites, future studies into these aspects will help us to understand photosynthesis responses in a global change framework.

The Effect of Vocabulary Intervention on Text Comprehension: Who Benefits?

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 562-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawna Duff
Keyword(s):  
Middle School ◽  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Text Comprehension ◽  
Classroom Instruction ◽  
Vocabulary Instruction ◽  
Clinical Intervention ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Vocabulary Intervention ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Difference

Purpose Vocabulary intervention can improve comprehension of texts containing taught words, but it is unclear if all middle school readers get this benefit. This study tests 2 hypotheses about variables that predict response to vocabulary treatment on text comprehension: gains in vocabulary knowledge due to treatment and pretreatment reading comprehension scores. Method Students in Grade 6 ( N = 23) completed a 5-session intervention based on robust vocabulary instruction (RVI). Knowledge of the semantics of taught words was measured pre- and posttreatment. Participants then read 2 matched texts, 1 containing taught words (treated) and 1 not (untreated). Treated texts and taught word lists were counterbalanced across participants. The difference between text comprehension scores in treated and untreated conditions was taken as a measure of the effect of RVI on text comprehension. Results RVI resulted in significant gains in knowledge of taught words ( d RM = 2.26) and text comprehension ( d RM = 0.31). The extent of gains in vocabulary knowledge after vocabulary treatment did not predict the effect of RVI on comprehension of texts. However, untreated reading comprehension scores moderated the effect of the vocabulary treatment on text comprehension: Lower reading comprehension was associated with greater gains in text comprehension. Readers with comprehension scores below the mean experienced large gains in comprehension, but those with average/above average reading comprehension scores did not. Conclusion Vocabulary instruction had a larger effect on text comprehension for readers in Grade 6 who had lower untreated reading comprehension scores. In contrast, the amount that children learned about taught vocabulary did not predict the effect of vocabulary instruction on text comprehension. This has implications for the identification of 6th-grade students who would benefit from classroom instruction or clinical intervention targeting vocabulary knowledge.

Chronic Pain: Fundamental Scientific Considerations, Specifically for Legal Claims

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Barth
Keyword(s):  
Health Outcomes ◽  
Pain Perception ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Psychological Treatment ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
General Medicine ◽  
Pain Syndrome ◽  
Problematic Relationship

Abstract Scientific findings have indicated that psychological and social factors are the driving forces behind most chronic benign pain presentations, especially in a claim context, and are relevant to at least three of the AMA Guides publications: AMA Guides to Evaluation of Disease and Injury Causation, AMA Guides to Work Ability and Return to Work, and AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment. The author reviews and summarizes studies that have identified the dominant role of financial, psychological, and other non–general medicine factors in patients who report low back pain. For example, one meta-analysis found that compensation results in an increase in pain perception and a reduction in the ability to benefit from medical and psychological treatment. Other studies have found a correlation between the level of compensation and health outcomes (greater compensation is associated with worse outcomes), and legal systems that discourage compensation for pain produce better health outcomes. One study found that, among persons with carpal tunnel syndrome, claimants had worse outcomes than nonclaimants despite receiving more treatment; another examined the problematic relationship between complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) and compensation and found that cases of CRPS are dominated by legal claims, a disparity that highlights the dominant role of compensation. Workers’ compensation claimants are almost never evaluated for personality disorders or mental illness. The article concludes with recommendations that evaluators can consider in individual cases.

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